“Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.”
― Donald A. Norman
When the power goes out in your house, the lights turn off. The energy no longer flows. Darkness enters.
When the Power goes out at your practice, the deception and creativity don’t flow.
If you’re below 200 in energy, constantly pursuing overload (faster, harder, overpower, more) and over-correct kids when they try and make a play that doesn’t come off… The Power is going to go out.
Get culture wrong, practice energy wrong, feedback wrong and the Power exits practice. And so does the chance to maximize their development through deception and creativity. 2 things that desync defenders and create advantages.
Coaches love to parrot that, ‘the game is not the teacher.’
But like, it quite literally can be.
And that’s uncomfortable if you identify as a ‘coach’. If you identify as a designer, a creator, a condition setter, or something with more intrinsic Power and less of a connotation that you need to be yelling, explicitly coaching, or filling the air with words all the time, you might find the peace you need to create space for something great to take place.
If we up play hours, we’ll have fluent players before we have ‘teach’ them anything. Through environmental design, they’ll discover:
Bonus points if you start a game in these aesthetic streets. The beautiful game inside a beautiful place. Vibes are immaculate.
You can simply reshape the space of the game, and new behavior will become more visible and attractive:
You can simply replace the nets you’re using and watch new behavior and increased finishing intention emerge; no coaching required, and hitching will show up before you open your mouth:
Play more. Play different ball, different surface. Play different sport.
Just play.
The game can teach.
The coach in you doesn’t want to admit that.
And that’s okay.
You’re financially incentivized to ‘be the answer’.
Play doesn’t care. It’s the answer, paradoxically, by creating space for problems to exist in millions of different forms.
As a coach at best you can be a great problem designer and at worst, you can be in the way of greatness.
Play like good design, moves in silence, it just needs the opportunity to do so. To move through your kid, to evolve him without anyone knowing. Play can’t do its thing if your ‘coaching’ is in the way of the adaptations that could take place:
The question becomes, are you as the ‘coach’ giving your kids the best chance to adapt?
To what degree are you currently in the way? Nobody is willingly going to admit to being a hindrance to their players’ development… But sit with that for 20 minutes… Explore it deeply.
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.” ― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
