Coaches Corner

There has been a lot of media in the last day or two about the Australian Cricket team cheating in a test match in South Africa. The specific cheating was something called 'ball tampering', which is to illegally affect the surface of the ball in order to create an advantage when bowling. I don't know for a fact, but I'm sure that the justification for doing this would have been: "We are sure our opponent is doing the same, so we are only doing it in order to create a fair competition." Now, this is not completely unreasonable. In fact, one of their opponents has been twice suspended for doing exactly the same thing. What's more, there were suspicions  Australia were tampering with the ball in their recent series against England , but surely this is just evening things up from the series in 2005 where England tampered with the the ball . Right? And then there were the complaints by the Australians earlier in the series that the on-ground micro

I recently had a conversation with someone a coach who challenged a drill I was running, saying that, in their opinion, an athlete needs to do X, so why wasn't I doing that? At first I struggled with a response, and then eventually I understood. The coach I was talking to was discussing an advanced skill for a senior player, and didn't know anything about coaching the level of athletes I was coaching. What he was suggesting was the equivalent of practicing sprint starts from blocks, when the athlete didn't yet know how to tie up their shoelaces. I heard a great story related to this the other day. There was a parent who watched the last 15 minutes of their child's school practice. Afterwards they went up to the coach and told them about a drill: 'I've seen the All-Blacks do this drill, perhaps you should be doing it?', they said. 'Perhaps we should be doing what the All Blacks did when they were 11 years old?' replied the coach. Apart from