Professor Keith Davids and Fabian Otte: how each player has their own individual needs
Player | Journey | Keith Davids | Fabian Otte | 04.06.2021
Coaches should tweak their coaching activities and approach to the needs of the players in their group – especially those going through change.
Learning:
• Recognising growth and change during adolescence
• How each individual will respond to your coaching in their own way
• Adapting your practice to meet individual needs
Understanding that each child in a coaching session is experiencing their own process of change and may respond differently to the demands placed upon them is key to good coaching, says Professor Keith Davids, expert in skill acquisition at Sheffield Hallam university.
“Take children who are heading into adolescence – the period a young person develops from a child into an adult,” explains Davids.
“As we know, adolescence is a really a major time of perturbation [change] to a child: psychological perturbation, emotional perturbation, physical perturbation.”
“There’s going to be a lot of variation and fluctuations in the way that some children will perform at certain times because the system itself is growing, developing, changing.”
Adapt your practice to individual needs
Appreciating that children are growing and changing – particularly between the ages of 10-19 - is key to how a coach responds to individuals and also how activities are tweaked and changed to meet player needs, explains Davids.
“You might design a wonderful session, which requires a lot of conditioning and a lot of effort. But if they've had a tough day at school and they're in adolescence, they may not respond in the same way every time.
“During adolescence the child’s system is being perturbed by hormones. The child might need sleep or find that they're tired.”
