Last week I was invited up to Wilmslow High School by Matt Bebbington to carry out some CPD for their rugby coaches. Therefore, I thought I would share with you a few of the things that I asked the coaches… which would challenge their thinking and reflect on their coaching philosophy’s…

To get things up and running and in line with the theme of the presentation… “Thinking differently…” the first question I asked was… and we discussed the various ways you could do this…

I then showed a few videos of different coaching scenarios to have a discussion about “What is coaching…?”

Then we moved into people sharing their Coaching Philosophy…

And then I asked them “What are the key areas to develop…?” and “What are the key skills in Rugby Union…?”

“Does your Philosophy match up to what the key areas and key skills are and then what you actually deliver on the field…?”

I then covered the reasons WHY you would use a ‘Games for Understanding’ approach…

One of the key aspects we discussed was… “What can you change…?” in respect to your Practice Design to enable the players to “figure it out” through Guided Discovery…

After the presentation and discussions we then went outside… where I then showed snippets of Nick Hill Coaching… which again would challenge their thoughts and get them to reflect on their own coaching… I did a variety of 5 minute sets of different ‘Conditioned Games’ to give them a flavour how I would put into practice some of the things that we discussed in my presentation.

In the 1st set I would create some basic rules to get the game up and running and then just let the players “play” to see how many tries they would score…

One of the key things I do is only referee the rules that are put in place on the games and let the players “figure it out”…

Then for the final 5 minute set I would then do the same game as the 1st set to see how many tries they would score…

So the $1,000,000 question is what enabled the players to go from 0-0 in the 1st set to 10-10 in the last set 30 minutes later…?! (i.e 0 tries in 5 minutes to 4 tries in 5 minutes)

A key part of my Coaching Process is asking questions…

What’s more intriguing is that this is a random group of different aged players of mixed ability that I have never met before let alone coached before.

If you would like Nick Hill Coaching to come to your school or club please do get in touch…

FaceTime/WhatsApp call: +44 (0)7500 068729

Skype: nick.hill.2012

Email: nickhill@nickhillcoaching.com