Starting the FA Level 1 course

BACA is one of those places that you either do not know at all or are very familiar with: a modern, large building on the outskirts of Brighton, in the shadow of the Amex stadium (home of Brighton & Hove Albion FC), whose main use is as a local college.

It also happens to be where I attended the FA’s Level 1 coaching course over 4 weekends last November. Over the first 2 weeks, what surprised me first was the range of topics we covered. Our tutor, Henry, quickly showed his great experience and introduced us to the modern approach to coaching, best summarised as ‘player-focused’. Coaching should indeed all be about the boys and girls playing and learning football, their needs and their enjoyment - and not the parents’ or the coaches’.

As a side note, this is an area our team’s coach, Paul (that I have the pleasure to be an assistant for) especially focused on at the start of our second year. And with great success: a few encouraging words and positive sentences can have such an impact on children, it was great to hear from the kids themselves how much more they enjoyed their football as a result.

Following on from the introduction, we went through workshops dedicated to First Aid and Child Safety, topics which are so important to coaching that it’s reassuring to see them addressed early on in the course.

Finally, most of the second day was dedicated to the first phase of training sessions. The approach we were taught was to split sessions into Build (warm-up), Develop (skill) and Extend (game) parts. Here we focused on the Build (warm-up) and covered how to run this in a more purposeful way, linking nicely to the following phase (Develop).

Looking back at my notes, I wrote down 20+ items of learning, on top of the practical session we did on a 3G pitch. But here’s a few worth highlighting:

• Between our Level 1 group, and a Level 2 group we practiced next to, I counted 35 trainee coaches. All of them were men
  Coming from a technical background, I am well aware of the (necessary) soul-searching that the software industry is doing to try and address its gender imbalance - but football coaching seems to be taking this to another level, sadly

• The impact that CPR and defibrillators can have is shocking
  Without them, survival rate for someone who stopped breathing is about 6%. With both of them used in a timely manner, this goes up to 80%. Marginal gains is a popular management approach to both sports and business. Imagine if as a coach or business manager you could achieve such an improvement (6% to 80%) in one aspect of your organisation? Makes you wonder why First Aid education is not compulsory in the UK (as it is in the US, I am told) and why there aren’t defibrillators in every school

• The difference between technique and skill
  These are commonly thought as synonyms, yet technique is the precise movements required to perform an action (eg pushing the tip of your foot slightly down to kick the ball with your laces) while skill is being able to perform the action at speed, under pressure, with precision

• Why playing with 3 defenders is not a good idea
  After several poor results last year, we toyed with the idea of switching from 2-3-1 to 3-2-1 (our team’s age group plays 7-a-side). I was pretty keen on this, and gave it a go in a summer tournament, which happened to be 6-a-side - I thus setup our team as 3-2 (rather than 2-3, 2-1-2 or 2-2-1), and the boys did very well, even winning a cup. But it didn’t go so well when we tried it again for a Sunday morning match, and we gave up on the idea, thinking it was just too confusing for the boys to switch formation, and too negative in the message it was sending them. Interestingly, our Level 1 tutor provided an even better reason not to play 3 at the back: two defenders is the right number as they will spend most of the match in 1v1, which is a core skill for them to work on. Sure the passing game is the key to modern football, but it benefits from overloads created by players winning 1v1s. So players need to practice this!

All of this learning was immensely valuable, and it still left plenty for me to figure out, as expected. For example:

• I didn’t know at that point if our club had an official ‘Code of conduct’ for players, parents and coaches, and a more general club ethos explaining our coaching and playing philosophy - something which looked useful to have

• I wish I had a mental catalogue of drills, exercises, tricks and recipes that I could use on the fly during training sessions. Sure there are plenty of websites with session plans, but having them in your head, so you can quickly switch the focus of a session around is something I’d like to be able to do, in due time

• How the Build phase will work out when we put it in practice with our team; theory is great, but practice will tell!