Where do you try to focus a players attention

Attention, Courtside Conversations, Practice, Teaching Methods

How deliberate should you be when coaching

Focusing attention can increase the effectiveness of development

How would you do it - discuss this with a friend

Do you deliberately try to focus a player’s attention when coaching?

If so, What to, Where to and When?

Where to focus attention

Make your selection

Maybe you have never thought about directing a player’s attention in your coaching actions, or the impact of it.

Even if you don’t realise it, you will always be directing a player’s attention towards something.

Your specific instructions, the aim/goal of the practice, and even your casual comments can all draw a person’s attention to something. It’s very difficult not to!

The way your coach (deliberate methods or not) can also aim to direct attention to or away from something.

Coach and act in a deliberate way

I recommend that you act deliberately in your actions, although (importantly) the performer doesn’t have to know this.

Build this deliberateness into your planning, your observations, your selection of language, your interventions and yet seem to act ‘normally’. Could you do this?!

Become an expert at understanding where, when, why and how you draw a player’s attention to something. By various means, you encourage them to ‘focus’ on something that you have selected.

Something that you believe will aid them in their learning and development.

There are benefits to be had when focusing attention

But they could also be ‘harmful’

Watch a friend coach and then have a discussion

It’s great to observe some coaching, especially if you know them

I recommend that instead of looking at the practices they set, concentrate on what they say, the words and phrases they use, and when they speak or don’t speak.

Listen actively (it may be harder than you think) with the intention of considering the effect of their words.

What do you hear and what do you not hear?

How much of their communication is directing a player’s attention towards something, and what is that ‘something’? Something that you believe will aid them in their learning and development.

Could you categorise the different themes – I’ve suggested 6 below.

The discussion afterwards

We chatted for 15 mins, which somehow became 45 mins, and coffee was needed!

I asked them if they deliberately set out to draw attention to different aspects during the lesson.

It helped when they asked me, “what did you hear, and what was I doing?”

I’d written down many of the instructions, words of encouragement and small phrases they used.

The coach recognised many of them, but not all. They explained the purposes behind what they’d done and the effect (positive or negative) each had in terms of helping the player.

Coaches could deliberately draw attention to

A player’s own body part

(during movement)

asking players to move a specific part in a specific way often during a movement: “Have you elbow here in the hitting action”, “Ensure that your hip turns when you do …”

A player’s own body part

(at the start or end)

placing a body part or racket in a specific starting or ending position and only that, no other instructions. “Start like this”, “finish like this”

An internal feeling

asking players to focus on a feeling, “push more when …..”, “pull your elbow down and backwards during …”, “land softly”, “explode upwards”

A thought created by a coaching cue

imagine that “…… “, or asking them to create a scenario “pretend that you ……“

A previous similar technique

something that transfers or assists in the new learning, “remember when you learnt this….” or “this is very similar to .. xxx .. that we know you do well“, “its just like …xxx… that we did last week”