How do you measure success successfully?

In the context of the Football Association’s England Football Learning Uefa C course, we discuss a model that considers the interchangeability between coaching behaviours, player engagement and learning intentions.

 

This article will focus on learning intentions, at its core, but will inevitably consider the other elements as influential factors to whether learning is taking place.

 

Initially, we ask ourselves: What do we mean by learning intentions? 

 

Quite simply, it is what you are going after in your session – what topic? What are you players going to be improving on from the session that you have designed?

 

We can look at this in a broader sense (for example, finishing) or we can be specific (such as in possession, finishing in the 18-yard box on first contact).

 

Whatever you’re going after, you need to consider:

1. Why are you focusing on that topic? Are you firefighting from a matchday observation? Or have you planned a meaningful and progressive block of work relating to a specific topic or principle of play?
2. What are you looking for? This is the detail – what do you want to see? This is where your knowledge comes in. Do you know what you want to see or what success looks like to you in finer detail – such as focusing on the technique of finishing, rather than focusing on the outcomes of finishing being scoring goals?
3. How do you know that your players are improving? Here, we could discuss how we manage players both striving ahead and stretching to keep up – how do we ensure our topic is inclusive for all so everyone learns something?

Consider your approaches – how do you coach? What are your delivery methods? Do you coach to all, or do you consider individual interventions? Do you have an assistant that contributes to these methods and are you delivering consistent messages?

 

Largely, we must consider the relationship between what are looking for in our sessions and how we know our players are achieving success with it.

 

Here are some considerations when developing this into your own practice...

• Use of cones: If ’success’ in your session is scoring goals, use two stacks of cones – red for one team, blue for the other. When a team scores, they have to come and collect a cone from the stack. This gives you a visual of the score and allows you to note when scoring is happening. You could also use a tactics board and magnets for this.
  You could play around with this idea by tracking different quarters of a small-sided game, which can then inform your coaching points at different stages of the session. You can also assess the impact and track improvement from a visual method, informing your coaching interventions – is there any need for one-to-one ’drive-bys’, or is it appropriate for a re-group and re-focus on topic.
  
  
• Have you given the players a chance to have success?: The Uefa C recommends small-sided games, with a smaller ratio of players (3v3, 4v4, 5v5).
  Setting up like this – which could include two parallel pitches managed via ability or purposefully grouped – allows players to have more time on the ball and a greater chance of experiencing and practising the main coaching points you are presenting.
  
  
• Observations: This is one of the most common ways I see coaches evaluate ’success’. Observations are one’s own judgement of particular scenarios – if how they feel the session went matches how ’successful’ the players were.
  I challenge you to think: Why do you feel that way? What did you see? Who did you see it from? What caused that ’success’ to happen and did every player experience it?
  
  
• Q&A: When used well, this can be an efficient, effective and valuable tool to understand player engagement and knowledge with the topic (cognition), how they feel in relation to confidence (emotional), which may or may not be seen from a playing perspective (physical), especially when a topic is first introduced.
  Use open questions, as these will better inform your judgements of the above, giving players opportunities to provide open answers. Using closed questions doesn’t do this. Instead, it usually ends up providing the coach with possibly misplaced confidence that isn’t actually related to the topic, or how successful it was from a player learning perspective.

The bigger picture of all this is that, although we want all players to learn all the time in every session, some sessions might be more focused on specific positions that revolve around ‘how you play’.

 

If this is a perspective you hold as a coach, consider how that success happens: Is it build-up play that starts with the goalkeeper? Is it the combination play within midfield that aims to penetrate though, and in behind, defenders? Is it getting the ball wide to then deliver effectively in goalscoring areas?

 

Each player has a role; so, in every practice, aim to build that picture and make players feel valued. The session might not revolve around them, but they contribute to the success (i.e., build-up play to scoring a goal). 

On the Uefa B, sessions are focused on a primary, secondary and tertiary player in relation to a particular focus – acknowledging the role that all players have to achieve an end goal.

 

This article is aimed at giving you some thoughts and ideas, but with challenging perspectives and current approaches to coaching to ensure we are planning, delivering and reflecting upon the learning of our players. 

If you would like to discuss this article, email me: bethany.smith@hartpury.ac.uk.