Written By Mike Antrobus, FA Skills Coach and reproduced from TheFA.Com
The great British weather provides us with every possible forecast throughout the football season. Providing the coaches and players with lots of different challenges; snow, rain, wind and heat waves all present different problems for all. Throughout this article we are going to focus on coaching in colder conditions, the first question we need to ask ourselves is: do we change our coaching for the time of the year and weather conditions?
So, what challenges are presented to us as coaches throughout the winter months? Snow, Rain, wind and plummeting temperatures are the most obvious. But as we explore further, the affects on our sessions more become apparent, such as: player behaviours, learning and the impracticalities of the session we planned on paper. Dealing with all of these issues become the biggest challenge, the safety of our players is our initial and most important concern. For example last year after cancelling one of our sessions due to the enormous amounts of snow I took a walk down to the local pitches and witnessed a team of young players, no older than ten attempting to kick a white football around whilst trying to keep their balance as their feet became buried in the snow up to their knees. My first concern were for the players safety, the next was what were they actually going to learn about football?
You may also, at times, notice that your player’s behaviour may become a problem. Have you often thought the motivation behind this behaviour was just to be a pain? I definitely have, but then I realised that actually it is because they are cold and are attempting to warm themselves up. In response to this, throughout the cold months I limited the amount of time we had in groups. I adopted a news bulletin style: beginning, middle and end. E.g. tonight we will learn, so far we have learned, we are now going to, to summarise. The result: players had more opportunity to try their ideas and if unsuccessful they are able to self-correct as similar situations will occur. Additionally it gives us coaches a chance to dip in and out individually with players, posing questions to challenges for the players to solve. However, for us to achieve these results the game/activity we expose to the players has to be relevant.
The one consistent factor throughout the changing weather conditions is players have to be put into environments where they are able to learn. Yet during the winter we have to ensure players are in activities which keep them active and moving to ensure they are warm and still able to learn. Small -sided games where the teams may be arranged in overloaded or equal teams would be ideal for this. To ensure learning takes place, identify a topic such as ‘when to dribble’ and only set challenges and questions related to this topic.
Returning to the original question: do we change our coaching style and content for the time of the year and weather conditions? Yes, would be the answer, however, we do not change it completely; the safety of our players is paramount, we then consider the cold and how it can affect players behaviour and finally consider is learning taking place? These three factors should be asked through all weather conditions, yet the means in which we achieve it alter. Try using small- sided overloaded games, such as 3v2 focusing on when to travel. Limit the amount of group discussions and work with players individually, see how this impacts your players over the next few weeks.
Mike Antrobus is an FA Tesco Skills coach in Dorset.
As a young player, Mike played for Crewe Alexandra’s Academy side, before turning to coaching – first with a BTEC in Sports Development and Fitness, and then completing his BSc in Sports Coaching.
After graduating, Michael moved to America where he oversaw the development of children aged 5 to 17 for MLS franchise Red Bull New York. Michael returned to England to join The FA Tesco Skills Programme in 2009.
Michael is a Level 3 qualified coach, and has also completed the FA Youth Award modules 1 and 2. As part of the Dorset FA Tesco Skills team, he works with schools and children in Poole.
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