Bring back Drum
Mundy4Hundy
- Jul 8, 2019
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I think calling junior coaches ‘appalling’ is not really understanding the role of a junior coach. Junior coaches are taught/encouraged to ensure the game is an enjoyable experience. A successful junior coach is marked on how many kids come to training & come back the next year.Where was I saying training skills is a waste of time.
Just questioning the belief held by some on here that Ross doesn't care about skill development.
He probably hopes that most players have the fundamental skills when they get to the AFL.
Unfortunately with the appalling junior coaching in grassroots football most draftees need much more work in this area.
Yes of course skills are taught & I hope the basics of good systems in defence, offence & contested ball.
The talent pathway coaches in today’s era are responsible for fine tuning those basic skills. Kids are identified at the age of 10 & 11, mainly because of their skill level & in a lot of cases size.
A lot of pathway coaches will disregard those who have poor skills at a young age in any case because at that age there are 100’s of kids who can win the ball, but those development coaches don’t want to particularly work on basic skills, mainly because they don’t have the timeframe to do so.
When RTB talks about skills, he’s talking about it in it basic form, being able to hit a target 20m away without pressure, no one works on that at any senior level, it’s expected.
Today’s training is all about match simulation practice, where hitting those targets 20-30m away is done constantly under match style conditions. Training is a different beast because there is no consequence of error, where gameday there is between 30000-100000 people watching along with a tv audience & then more watching the replay later & of course the result.
That pressure cannot be simulated, so young teams will make errors in games that they don’t at training & so do the experienced from time to time. The more games, along with training, then less errors. With this comes better decision making under pressure, which is just as important.
I don’t go to Freos training, but I’d be very surprised if they are not doing a lot of match simulation training.