AGC #001 - Stop wasting your greatest coaching resource

Today, I’m going to teach you about the art of timing in a session plan.

Timing is a much-overlooked skill in coaching. You can find plenty of suggestions online for what to coach in your sport - the best exercises to use, the best order to do them in, the drills vs games argument - but little guidance on how to put it all together cohesively.

This is all the more surprising, given the importance of timing in other areas of a team sports ecosystem. Strength coaches make guides with reps and rest planned to a tee. Substitution charts and shift clocks to ensure maximal rest and recovery are commonplace in sports with rolling replacements. Warmups are meticulously planned to align with game clocks and ensure everything gets covered before the first whistle.

And yet, coaches still run so far over time at practice that they have to rush to get everything done, scrap a part of a session altogether, or - in the worst cases - keep everyone late to “squeeze in a few more reps”.

Time is the greatest resource we have, but most coaches don’t use it properly.

Below are a set of ideas you can immediately begin implementing in your practices to allow you to:

• Maximize both playing and coaching opportunities

• Avoid talking too much

• Can smoothly move from one exercise to the next

Let’s dive in:

Tip 1: Find out how much you talk

An excellent jumping-off point is to take inventory of your current practices to figure out where you’re losing time, starting with your own interventions.

Before your next practice, estimate how many times you stop practice to address the group in a given session, and the average length of time you spend talking, then multiply the numbers. Six interventions at an average of three minutes each would give you 18 minutes of talking time.

Then, record your interventions during the session itself. The voice note app on your phone and any earphones with a built-in microphone will get the job done.

Almost every coach talks for longer than they think. The first time I did this years ago, I had estimated 3-4 minutes for my interventions, but they were more like 5-6 minutes! No wonder I was rushing at the end of every session.

After that, I started putting a three-minute countdown timer on my watch for each intervention, which has since been shortened to two minutes. Thousands of reps later, I can now get my message across - or ask better questions that get the players to a potential solution - in that time.

But the chatting time isn’t the only aspect of practice you can plan out in advance.

Tip 2: Think in reps instead of chunks

Let’s say you ordinarily leave a 25-minute window for that small-sided game you love, and stop for breaks when you need to do some coaching or when the players look tired. Try this formula instead:

Time + Rest x Reps = Total

Time represents the number of minutes spent playing, rest shows the number of minutes spent recovering/talking, and reps is the number of times you do this. That 25-minute chunk could instead be broken down like this:

4 + 2 (6) x 4 = 24 mins

This has numerous advantages. Knowing exactly how long each rep will be and how many there are allows players can allocate their energy and effort better, as well as substitute themselves. The prescribed rest/intervention time keeps coaching points and discussions short, sharp, and to the point.

Tip 3: Use setup and transition hacks

Plenty of precious minutes get lost or are unaccounted for here as water bottles are refilled, goals are moved, cones are picked up and put down and exercises need to be explained.

The first step here is to include time for explaining exercises as well as doing them - too often we will all the time with playing, forgetting we’ll have to outline teams, rules, constraints, etc to the players first.

Most coaches who have the luxury of getting on their field ahead of practice will attempt to set up as many of their exercises as possible ahead of time so the players can ‘flow’ from one to the next.

• If space is limited…

  • Set up just the first and second exercises - then build the third one where the first one was, while the second one is going on.

• If one exercise is going to be smaller than one that comes later…

  • Overlay it “inside” the other so you can pick it up when you’re done, and the larger one is good to go.

• If you’re by yourself…

  • Plan additional chunks of transition/building time between exercises to stay on track

Tip 4: Less is more

The final tip is the simplest one - plan as if you expect to run over the allotted time, and leave yourself a little short. There’s no golden rule, but 10% would be the minimum for me; so 6 minutes of 60, 9 minutes of 90 etc.

This gives you flexibility in case anything does run over, or if you need to spend longer on a certain part of your session before moving on.

If everything’s gone smoothly and on track, you can use the spare time for some extra reflection and analysis at the end, or just add some old-school “next goal wins” fun to finish things off.

Either way, most people like their time being respected, and you deserve to respect your own too.