A senior coach in an online group proposed the following test:
Time yourself (or have an assistant time you) for the amount of practice/court time you spend addressing the entire team.
I would add, if you don’t want to do the timing in practice itself, record the session. Then go back and take the timing. This has the added benefit that watching yourself coach is always a worthwhile exercise.
Way back in the early days of this blog I wrote a post title The more you talk, the less they train. I wrote it after I watched a young coach spend too much time talking in a session. Definitely not the first or last time I’ve seen that sort of thing, of course.
Anyway, the poster’s point in posing the above challenge was two-fold. First, how much court time are you taking away from the players? Second, can you do the talking you need to do to a smaller group so the rest can carry on working?
Give it a try.
