"I want to make myself unnecessary" - a conversation with Peter Prickett

Peter Prickett is a coach that is passionate about the role that games can play in the child's sports experience. So much so that he has written a book that is dedicated to playing games. But not just any games...specifically 3 v 3 games as he believes that they offer the most representative football experience and provide the richest opportunities for learning.

In this super interesting conversation we cover...

• How 40 different 3 v 3 games could become 140

• His views on the development of creativity in players

• How his club has turned the tables and ask the coaches to do trials and get the kids to select them if they are suitable

• Why paying coaches is the model that they have adopted

There is a lot of interesting stuff in here. I hope you enjoy.

Peter's book can be pre ordered at a discounted price by clicking here

Book tickets for the 'Future of Coaching' event I will be hosting with John O'Sullivan and Mark Bennett here

A repost to the drills killing creativity argument

This week I am featuring a guest blogger in the shape of the genuinely awesome Bob Wood. Bob is a physical development specialist who can be found ranting about the world of sport and in particular how people move on his website http://www.physical-solutions.co.uk. I would highly recommend this super sarcastic and hilarious poke at the sports shoe world

I worked with Bob several years ago to development a series of movement games to help young golfers develop the physical capabilities to be able to play the game at the highest level. He has a sharp mind, a cutting wit and a genuine passion for what he does and i think this comes through in this repost he wrote in reply to my recent article on 'Why coaches like drills and why they are killing creativity'.

I really enjoyed this article and wanted to share it with you all. Bob comes at the discussion from a different perspective and I think it adds some interesting balance to the discussion.

I will let you read and then throw up some thoughts about this at the bottom

A word of advice if you ever meet him or work with him...

Never play him at Table Tennis!

Enjoy the post

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Stuart Armstrong’s excellent blog article “why coaches like drills and how they are killing creativity” can be found here. It is bang on the money. A message that needs to be heard, and you could opt to read it before this. My favourite line is:

“Imagine a world where trying new things was applauded rather then met by side of the mouth whispers by arm folded tracksuits on the sideline.” I’ve seen a lot of that.

Now I know Stuart and he sees the bigger picture, but he likes poking people with thinking sticks, which is a good thing. In this blog he is playing advocate for “Creativity”. It’s like an episode of courtroom drama Suits and Stuart has slicked back his hair, pulled on something sharp, and is taking on the giant corporate coaching mantra of “repeatable predictable automaticity”, or in short the drill. So it’s quite a brave move and rattled my cage enough to write this repost.

In the blog, Prof Kaufman describes these incidents of creativity as being “original, meaningful and surprising”. He’s giving the loose and unpredictable nature of creativity some structure. He describes the creative incident as going beyond the standard repertoire and transcending expertise. And the very appearance of the creative incident is a surprise “not only to oneself but to everyone”. A surprise! It’s not often you hear the profs talk about those… they generally don’t like or take to surprises… it’s not what we pay them for. The problem is that you do get a lot of surprises in sport. Thankfully. I tend to ask my students to steer clear of too much logic and cold reasoning when it comes to thinking about sport. In fact I encourage them to apply and accept some “messy thinking”. That way they might find some sense.

So in the lawsuit we have “freewheeling creativity” on one side, and “predictable automaticity” on the other. Could be a sticky and long case. I thinks it’s best we settle out of court. Here’s why...

Let’s present some messy thinking arguments. Here’s one you will all be familiar with. It’s anecdotal. Anyone who knows me knows that I rate myself as a table tennis player. Anyone who’s played me may find otherwise. Anyway down the village club during the knock up I often find myself attempting and sometimes achieving creative incidents. I have a good knock up mentality… I just loosen my goose and let it happen. Wild slamming looping forehands off the wrong stance whilst pinned up against the wall are pulled off. I honestly don’t know how I do it (which is a good title for a sports psychology book). It is certainly a surprise to me and by the swear words a surprise to my opponents. And then the dreaded phrase is uttered; “are you ready?”. The match proper commences and I play in earnest… far too earnestly to allow the goose out. Safe backhands, chop returns, keep it in play, trust what I know works and what I feel I am reliably capable of. If its enough I may scrape a win, but infrequently. The messy thinking phrase here is “reliably capable off”. What I am capable of is knock up magnificence, but it is shackled by my current level and perception of competitive competence. Messy.

Lets try a contribution from an expert in the field of creativity… Michael Jordan. He was outstanding and undeniably creative in his approach to his sport and the basket. I remember a press interview during his peak when a reporter asked a simple question… “how come you are so much better than the other guys”. Jordan took quite a long moment and gave an equally simple answer… “its because I do the basics better than anyone else”. I don’t know whether he came up with it, but I’ve heard it used an awful lot since. It’s a different kind of a surprise when a mercurial creativity merchant such as Jordan credits his mastery of the basics as his cornerstone. Messy.

We could look at a move. Let’s take the Cruyff Turn. Surely one of the most recognisable creative incidents within sporting history… an I was there moment of genius. I found it described in the book “Sports Around the World: History, Culture and Practice”:

“He pioneered a move which has been dubbed the Cruyff Turn in which he looked as if he was moving to pass the ball but instead dragged the ball behind his planted foot leaving the defender off balance.” Perfect, I can see it, and anything pioneering must be scoring very high on the creativity scale. But then there’s the next sentence: “This move is commonly taught to young soccer players around the world”. That’s gone and messed me up. The most famous incident of football creativity has become a drill. So is the creative incident only creative once, and then it becomes common practice via deliberate technical practice… reduced to a drill skill?

I’m getting proper messy now. Is the creativity expressed as an incident or is it really an attitude. Is the creativity a skill itself, or the willingness to attempt to use that skill. Are there actually any new skills, or are there new ways to use established ones. The latter would really mess the court case up.

Stuart’s blog lists some of his own favourite sporting “new moves” and describes them as “techniques created by these great players as solutions to problems that are presented by changes to the rules, changes to equipment or changes to the nature of the way the game is played in order to find a technical advantage.” He goes on to describe this as “creative endeavour”. I like that… he’s straightened up my mess a good deal.

So how do they do that? Quite clearly it’s because they can… but that isn’t an acceptable answer. I can pull off occasional ping pong miracles, but never genuinely appropriately, when it matters, reliably, accurately, under pressure, or as successfully as these great players and their moves. The astute will have just noticed I used the word “reliably” whilst describing creativity. Council for the defence would be objecting. But I think it’s appropriate. I’m a movement man. I want my athletes to be creative, but I need them to be reliable. They need to stay athletes for a long time, not just have moments. But they will be playing other athletes who may be equally well prepared. So they need to be more reliable and have more moments.

Jordan was probably right. What underpinned his proliferation of creative moments was his own homage to his foundation of basic reliable skills. We could argue that these are fundamental movement patterns, acquired technical competency or rehearsed higher level game specifics… it doesn’t matter, they are basics. Somehow they were honed. Freestyle or guided. Definitely repeated. Always revisited. The basics are the foundations that allow him to express his creativity… and his basics were better than yours. Even if they weren’t he believed they were and he was gonna get creative on your arse anyway. See how this works… it’s messy.

So if this is a repost then do I think that the drills are killing creativity? They are if coaches let them. However I don’t think we should pitch the drills against creativity. We need to keep them out of the divorce court and they need to learn to live together. The drills are the strength in this relationship, the creativity is the spark. And you simply won’t get one without the other. If the relationship gets stale then it’s easier to just press on with over familiar unimaginative drills… you get my analogy. It’s a shame but sport will never be about the glorious chaos of unbridled creativity. But pushing the boundaries of performance and technique means that you do have to unbridle the young athletes regularly. Every training session should have it’s “licence to thrill” moments. But we shouldn’t throw all the drills out. It’s just that if a “surprise” pops up during a drill coaches should sometimes go with it, encourage it, learn to expect and even facilitate it… whether it’s a success or not. You never know it could be the next Fosbury Flop, or you could be watching the next Messi.

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Boom! There you have it...I guess we should have expected a bit of balance from a movement specialist!

Principally I agree with the theme of Bob's post...I do think that there is a need to attend to certain activities and provide the opportunity to rehearse them to ensure that they have the level of repeatability that is required for them to perform effectively and also (in his case) be resilient enough to avoid injury.

I guess where I would challenge would be in the use of the drill as the method of achieving this level of movement repeatability. In my mind a drill has no context and without context it lacks realism and variability. I would question whether the drill actually prepares the player for the movement in the game and as such whether it has the desired effect at all.

After all we all thought that static stretches in a warm up prevented injury in games but now we have realised that this doesn't have the effect at all and now everybody is doing for functionally representative movements before sports.

I just think that the drill is lazy coaching, it is coaches reducing sport to its constituent parts and then trying to reassemble the parts and expecting that this with translate to the game. Just, whack a load of cones down, get kids to move from one to the next, do something, move to the next. It looks good (to the uninitiated), it has order and parents will think that the coach knows what they are doing. But anyone can do that! There is very little skill in that! It is the coaching equivalent of painting by numbers. As Bob says, "...it’s easier to just press on with over familiar, unimaginative drills…".

There are always better ways than that. There are always ways to make any isolated movement more representative and therefore more open to variability and crucially...adaptability.

It strikes me that while Bob wants reliability (and I totally agree that kids should learn to move better) he also wants adaptability. Movers or players that can't adapt are too one dimensional and eventually something will happen that will mean that they break.

I know that Bob believes this because I have seen his workshops and he is passionate about getting kids moving through movement challenges and games. He is genius at creating them and helping coaches understand their application. Bob's skill is in looking at the whole mover through something he refers to as "the kinetic chain".

Bob works with a lot of golfers and he laments the S&C world which has golfers doing isolated exercises in order to help them develop more power, he always wants the movements to be more representative of the whole golf swing movement and he would prefer that activities that are chosen are much more representative of the full movement. He likes to train players using the equipment that they use to play with, he likes to do it in the environment that they play in and he likes to do it from the perspective of as full as movement as possible.

All of this made me think about this video I saw with another movement specialist called Ido Portal. He believes firmly in the concept of functionally representative movement and uses a variety of methods to achieve this that I think readers of this blog will find interesting.

This approach to movement using constraints presented by the environment is very aligned to the way that so much of the coaching and expertise literature is directing us. The model for the acquisition of skill is one of learning through experience and this learning can be expedited greatly by a coach with the skill to design and manipulate tasks and environments in a way that will turbo charge the development of athletes.

"I agree that drills live on the learning continuum but in the ecology of coaching methods they are the evolutionary equivalent of pond spawn..."

I agree that drills live on the learning continuum but in the ecology of coaching methods they are the evolutionary equivalent of pond spawn and I exhort coaches to stretch themselves to go beyond the drill and design practices that are much more engaging and also much richer with learning possibility.

And here's the kicker...

If we do this then the kids have more fun. They also learn more and get better faster.

More fun and get better faster...what's not to like about that?

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In the video with Ido, he talks about a concept called 'Kinetic Coans' which is a kind of movement challenge that he sets for his athletes and gets them to work towards it.

This has prompted me to start writing a post about how coaches can create 'Perceptual Puzzles' to challenge player learning. I am not sure when it is going to land but when it does I will beam it direct to your inbox if you sign up for my email alerts here.

Also as an extra bonus I am writing a book and I have asked my subcribers to help me with the editing and the feedback. I will be writing a chapter every month for the next 6 months so if you want to get each chapter sent to you as I write them then sign up for the email list and I will send them through as they get written.

Want to be a great kids coach? Think like a video game designer...

I was reading this great article from Ash Smith over at www.superhumanperformance.org which was all about how kids developing amazing abilities by challenging each other and trying to outdo the last trick or skill they have performed.

It took me back to my childhood when I used to invent games with my brother and freinds to play in the park or the garden and I recognise now that this helped me to develop my abilities in a big way and also were the first steps on my coaching journey.

Essentially, I was using a constraints based model for game design without knowing it!

For example one of the games was a garden cricket game played with a golf ball and a really thin bat we called 'Golf Ball Nightmare'!

Golf Ball Nightmare (GBN) was so called for a couple of reasons..

1. It was a golf ball and if it hit you in the shin or on the knuckle then it hurt which was a nightmare. There was a healthy element of fear involved!

2. We played towards the house and if you caught one with the bat then it could hurtle towards the patio window. The bowler had to be brave and stop the ball from smashing the window so as to stop us from being grounded for the rest of our lives!

The game was intense but it was one of the best games we played, we would play for hours and took great pleasure whenever we smashed each oher on the shins and laughed as the other person hopped around holding their lower leg!

The reason the game worked was because it was brilliantly designed!

We started with the player experience...what did we want from the game?

• We wanted to all have a go at batting regularly so the game had to be hard so that people got out a lot.

• It had to have fear so that we could show our bravery or laugh at each other when we got a bit hurt but it couldn't be too dangerous or we wouldn't want to play.

• You had to show skill to stay in bat.

• Everyone needed to be involved, fielding is boring so we needed to make sure that fielders had some skin in the game. They really had to be on their toes to stop the windows getting smashed and us all getting into really deep trouble.

• The golf ball bounced more realistically than a tennis ball.

Most of this design happened by accident and we made up most of the rules as we went along, modifying and tweaking the way it was played in order to make it harder or easier, more dangerous or less dangerous.

A big part of the fun was making up the rules and coming up with the game formats.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer and she talks pasiionately about the role that games and play can have to enrich our lives. I can definitely align with that!

I am left thinking how much the youth sports experience is like this.

The vast majority of kids aren't playing garden games like this anymore as they are so hooked into video games that are designed by very smart people who spend their lives working out ways to make their games more fun and more addictive so that the kids want to play again and again.

So our challenge is to think like these super smart game designers and try and beat them at their own game. We have to create really 'sticky' activities that they are going to want to do again and again.

So here are some questions to ask yourself when you are designing your activity?

Is everyone engaged?

Is there a challenge that makes them strive to go beyond their abilities?

Do players get loads of goes or do they need to stand around and wait?

Does the activity require them to solve a problem?

Do they have to think about solutions themselves and work it out or do they get given the answers?

Do they get feedack that encourages the effort in trying rather than just praise which encourages not failing?

Does it simulate the game effectively, is it realistic to what they will confront when they play in matches?

For some of us, thinking through these activities and coming up with games or activities that answer these questions is a really challenge...

So I will give you a couple of secrets...

1. Just use trial and error.

The first go at anything is rarely the best version so be prepared to flex and improve as you go. Some of my best activities have come from me having to solve a problem in the session because something wasnt working and making a tweak that made the whole activity loads better.

2. Get the kids to design with/for you.

Kids are really creative and they love designing games. They will come out with some crazy ideas that you won't even think of, you can then distill these down into something that will be really good. I often ask the question "how can we make this even better" or "how can we make it harder". The answers are usually genius.

Some people are fearful of this because they think that they will look like they don't know what they are doing?

I would answer like this...

Do we want to look good...or do we want to get better? Do we have a Growth Mindset as coaches or do we have a Fixed Mindset?

I will leave Trev Ragan from www.trainugly.com to reinforce the point.

Get out there and coach ugly!