I‘m responsible for more than a dozen teams at Notre Dame High School. A lot of universities would be jealous with the facility we have, but no matter how large the space or fancy the equipment, the biggest constraint in session design is time. We typically get a group of 30+ athletes for just 45 minutes. The biggest question for us is: how can we accomplish the most in this time? It all comes down to organization.
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The expression ‘there is no I in team’ is often used in team sports to suggest that no individual’s needs, abilities or ideas should take precedence over the combined skills and efforts of the entire group. From a team culture perspective, I would tend to agree with this saying. However, the core principle of individualization also suggests that coaching and training should be based on the athlete’s actual state of training, experience, athletic potential, and characteristics. Research has clearly shown standardized training program will produce a wide range of adaptive responses, with the same training producing large, small or negative responses among different athletes. How is a coach to deal with these seemingly contradictory points?
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Last year in one of our first site themes we focused on periodization and understanding adaptation. In October we decided to revisit periodization as a site theme, but this time from a different perspective: looking in depth at the microcycle. In designing a training plan, the focus is normally placed on the individual session, or the larger mesocycles or macrocycles. The microcycle often gets lost in the middle. Read more
When becoming an athletic development coach there are many things you have to consider before developing a training plan for the athletes you are working with. These include the amount of athletes you are working with in each session, total number of teams you are working with, and how much time you have for each training session. There are so many things to think about, that it can often become overwhelming to start from scratch each time. This is where templates can come in handy. With useful templates, a coach help make sure they cover all the bases needed in a training session or week. Read more
