Practice planning is – or at least should be – a major part of any coach’s efforts. Generally speaking, the wisdom goes that you should spend about as much time developing a training plan as executing it. That said, the question still remains what elements you should include. This is the subject of a question I once saw posted. In particular, it was with respect to early season plans.
How do you generate an effective practice plan? I struggle in the beginning of the season when I see new faces, different levels of talent, a need to work on fundamental basics for some girls but not others, pressure to throw a lineup together for an active preseason, and it’s just me.
Generally, I start a season by evaluating where we’re at in all the major facets of the game. I want an idea of where both individual players and the team are relatively to where they need to be. Having that information lets me develop my training priorities – both short and long term.
That being the case, I like to develop initial session practice plans which incorporate a bit of everything. That’s serving accuracy and consistency, serve reception, offense, and defense. Of course I try to do that in as game-like a fashion as possible. I don’t mind stepping back, though, if there’s something I feel like I need to look at more directly. You need to see enough repetition for each player to have a sufficient basis for analysis. That may require more of a “blocked” than “random” focus in some respects. I don’t want to go too far toward blocked, however.
The key thing to keep in mind here is that the top priority is assessment. Training is a secondary priority, of course. For these initial sessions, though, it’s not the most important thing to be thinking about. Once I’m done with the assessment process, training takes over as top priority.
Let me offer an example from when I started at Svedala in Sweden.
That was my first time working with those players, and in almost all cases the first I saw of them on-court in person. Before I could figure out what to prioritize for training I needed to know where the players and the team were from a number of different perspectives. My plan was to have them spend the first practice basically just playing a number of different games to get a general overview. Then, in the subsequent sessions, I’d narrow the focus down to look at certain things more closely based on what I saw in that first session.
Here’s the plan I went with for that first session.
Having said all this, chances are there are certain things that you know you’re going to need to work on in training. For younger and developing players, serving and passing are usually right at the top of the list, as an example. You can easily incorporate training of the things you know will be priorities right from the start, and build in opportunities to assess other areas around that.
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