Monthly Archive for May, 2021

4 key points of coach profession

Coach education at any level is an ever green topic. The risk we run is that we lose the awareness of the essential elements of this profession, making this type of work more and more complex in order to achieve increasingly effective levels of leadership. In my opinion, however, from Pep Guardiola to the youngest coach, there are at least 4 dimensions that must be showed by coaches.

Environment - The training environment must be task oriented, the coach accordingly provides feedback on commitment and intensity as well as technical/tactical aspects.

Rules - Sharing and respecting the rules is an essential factor in group management.

Technical-tactical instruction - The coach must teach the athletes by providing continuous information on the typical aspects of the sport practiced.

Encouragement - While the coach tends to be directive in teaching content, at the same time the athletes must feel that they are being supported in an equally obvious way.

The genius children who play chess

The success of Netflix’s popular series The Queen’s Gambit has stoked new interest in chess, and a fascination with children who show early genius for the cerebral game. The Fifth Estate looks at examples of parents who attempted to foster genius in chess, with dramatically different outcomes.

Recipe for genius: How child chess prodigies master the game - YouTube

Observing is one of the keys skills of a coach

For Alex Ferguson, one of the keys was closely observing his players.

“What you can pick up by watching is incredibly valuable… Seeing a change in a player’s habits or a sudden dip in his enthusiasm allowed me to go further with him: Is it family problems? Is he struggling financially? Is he tired? What kind of mood is he in? Sometimes I could even tell that a player was injured when he thought he was fine. I don’t think many people fully understand the value of observing. I came to see observation as a critical part of my management skills. The ability to see things is key — or, more specifically, the ability to see things you don’t expect to see.”

How soccer’s elite coaches cope with the precariousness of their job

How coaches of elite soccer experience being fired, victories, new benches is a little known topic and not at all investigated given the difficulty and confidentiality of this issue.

Although the media talk about it all the time, there is no in-depth analysis, often not going beyond the analysis of the most trivial aspects (he failed, he lacked the support of management, he did not have the experience, the club did not have a project to improve the team).

Athletes are studied from a psychological point of view but not elite coaches. We do not have answers that go beyond the anecdotal evidence of how Max Allegri has lived these two years without a job, how Sarri has interpreted his departure due to misunderstandings about his way of conceiving soccer, how Antonio Conte gives up to lead Inter after winning the championship driven by the desire to have a more competitive team to lead, how De Zerbi is preparing to be the leader of Shachtar, how Andrea Pirlo will prepare to train a new team after being rejected by Juventus.

They certainly don’t have economic problems and, therefore, the question is about the perception they have of themselves and how this awareness interacts with and is influenced by the situations and environment in which they live.

I have described several times the characteristics of winning coaches but how do they vary over time in relation to their professional experiences? How do they manage the stress resulting from these changes, often not chosen by them but decided by others?

The only answer that seems important to me is to emphasize the importance of their psychological training, and therefore the idea of continuous personal and professional improvement that is usually the basis of the results of the most successful coaches.

What does it mean “mistake” in sport

Have you ever defined sports or what you play as a function of mistakes?

If we try, we have sports in which:

  1. the error can always be recovered: tennis, table tennis, jumps and throws in athletics
  2. the error cannot be recovered, unless the opponent makes a mistake: archery, shooting sports, golf, biathlon
  3. the error is catastrophic: precision sports, artistic gymnastics, diving, synchronized swimming, downhill skiing
  4. the error can put life itself at risk: motor sports, mountaineering, extreme skiing, apnea
  5. the error is determined by the inability to keep up with the pace of the winners: running, road cycling, walking, canoeing, rowing, cross-country skiing, swimming
  6. the error can be compensated by the mates: team sports

Each of these categories requires a different focus, which in turn necessitates a specific program of psychological preparation.

The chunking could explain the longevity in sports

When we review the results of international competitions of many sports we often observe the exceptional longevity and continued success of athletes who are no longer young for their sport and who continue to be serial winners. Novak Djokovic in tennis, Federica Pellegrini in swimming, Tom Brady in American football or Gigi Buffon in soccer are just some of the many champions who seem not to age. Their talent is beyond question as is their desire to continue to be winners.

How can we explain this ability?

One reason for the continued success of these athletes could be related to their enhanced ability to mentally integrate large amounts of information related to their performance: chunking. Chunking involves taking single units of information and grouping them into a smaller number of meaningful sets for the athlete.
In this way, the information thus grouped becomes easier to retain, recall, and implement in competition. Chunking is an important feature of performance. An example of chunking in team sports and in individual games with a prevalence of tactics is represented by the play schemes, if each of these were not stored in a specific file, this type of information could not be recalled by the player during a game in less than a second.

It is therefore realistic to hypothesize that these athletes have developed a chunking system so effective that it gives them a competitive advantage over athletes who are equally good but have less playing experience.

Tennis: what do do when you are down

Serie A: What we learned

Serie A soccer championship has just ended. In my opinion the characteristic that has distinguished it is represented, compared to past years, by the presence of a greater number of competitive teams. At least 5 teams have played for the most important places, those to enter the Champions League. Beyond their mistakes, so for example Juventus could not be in this position at the last day of the championship, if it had not lost too many points with teams certainly less strong, but in any case thanks to the listlessness of the Juventus have won important games.

The lesson to be learned is that anyone can beat you if you don’t enter the field determined to win. If this approach is realistic, then the league is competitive and requires that the strongest teams always play with the necessary intensity.

If this way of living the game becomes the usual approach to league games, it is very likely that even those played in the European cups would be approached with greater awareness and better emotional balance.

Open Day Online: Master for Coaches

Atalanta-Juventus: what I learned

What I learned from the Coppa Italia final Atalanta-Juventus.

Pretension - Juventus has finally demanded of itself to play with the attitude that has been its own in past years of a winning and tough team. Until now, this was expected to happen but it hadn’t, except in a few rare matches. The self-esteem of a group depends on the level of success achieved, in turn this depends on how much a team expects from itself. The demands must be matched by behaviors on the pitch. When this does not happen, the behaviors are insufficient, the expectations become limited or unrealistic as in the case of Juve where it was expected to win, without showing the appropriate behaviors. The effect over time, is evident in few successes and a reduction in collective self-esteem. Yesterday’s Juve welded together the expectation and “who does what at the right time”. This union determines the standard of play of the team.

Habit - Atalanta plays very well and this is decisive in the league because they play against many lower level teams and the result of the single match is not decisive for the final result. In the cups instead, the single matches are decisive and the defeat determines the elimination. Matches like these require a different mental approach compared to those in the league, as the opponents are often at least of the same level and winning these matches is a must if you want to move forward. It’s not enough to be good, you also need to acquire the habit of playing these matches, and in any case quickly develop the attitude of someone who plays to win. There is no advantage in playing well if you lose, the emphasis must be on playing with intensity and concentration. The phrase that best illustrates this concept was expressed by Alex Ferguson when he said that he could not wait for the 75th minute to arrive, because he knew that his team would certainly score at least one goal or when talking about the quarter of an hour of the Grande Torino, when Valentino Mazzola pulled up the sleeves of the shirt. in my opinion Atalanta must acquire this habit.