The buzzword buster

Buzzwords or jargon aren’t bad or unhelpful in and of themselves - but they can easily be misunderstood.

Let’s look at three buzzwords, in particular - creativity, decision-making and off-the-ball - and unpick their real meaning.

’Creativity’

It is a buzzword we all use and a concept we all crave when coaching. But what do we mean by the term?

Are we asking players to invent new approaches, ideas or movement patterns to existing scenarios? Or are we asking players to explore their own individual boundaries and challenge their skillset? 

As with all these things, it depends. The context you coach in will shape what creativity means to you and looks like in your environment. I’m curious about how we can best coach it – explicitly or implicitly. 

To coach it explicitly, we tell players to be creative. To coach it implicitly, we can set up environments where they need to be creative.

This is where two of the fundamental components of high-quality coaching come into practice - our coaching behaviours and our practice design.

Coaching behaviours: If we want to support creative thinking, approaches and methods, we need to create a safe environment for failure.

As a coach, our behaviours will contradict the environment we want to create if a player or team are criticised for faults or issues that may arise. They need to know it is safe for them to explore, fail, refine and grow.

Practice design: Our practice design can create technical, tactical or psycho-social problems for the players to solve. 

We can build practices (anything from isolated to games-based) where players will get feedback from the practice itself. They will not need to be told or led towards a typical solution from our own predisposed mental models of how things can and, in some cases, should be done.

’Decision-making’

When a player makes a decision, they often instinctively know whether it is right or wrong.

In many cases, there are right decisions, some of which are better than others. Some decisions are right but the execution lets them down. Some decisions are errors.

The more the player is aware of the consequences of their decisions, the better they will reflect on what they might change or keep for next time. 

Also, no situation is the same. The right decision might work for a similar scenario but if the circumstances are subtly changed, then the player should understand how to change in the moment.

"When a player makes a decision, they often instinctively know if it is right or wrong..."

For example, the right decision on one occasion might be to compete for the ball. If they are closer to the line next time, it might be better to bounce out of the tackle and get back into the line.

We need to choose when to intervene with individuals or groups to check for understanding and then positively challenge their thinking or point out different options.

’Off-the-ball’

Too often, I hear people talking about ‘work’ off-the-ball or ’work rate’ - but, a lot of the time, we don’t explain why their movement, positioning or timing off-the-ball will have influence on the game.

For example, let’s say I position myself out wide in attack, as opposed to following the ball. My positioning may encourage the defence to spread so the opportunity for our attack might be to go through.

On the flip side, if the defence doesn’t spread, my influence is that I create an opportunity for us to go around the opposition.

It isn’t purely an ‘effort’ thing – we should coach players to understand why their movement, positioning or timing off the ball will unlock an individual’s ability to explore how and where they can influence games.
Tied to this, I like to use the word ‘build’ when using verbal cues for players off the ball. 

This ‘nudges’ them to consider what they can start building, in attack or defence, so that they can have a higher level of impact and involvement in a game.

For example, I would say to an off-the-ball player on the attacking team to ‘build’ as the ball moves away from them – perhaps towards the other side of the pitch. 

This would encourage the player to start looking for what opportunities might be about to present themselves and from which they can then start to build into a position early so that they can take advantage of this opportunity.

Don’t just ‘work’ off-the-ball - build to have influence.