Excellent coaching starts with the relentless pursuit of excellence. There is nowhere that this is more important that your own development as a coach. The world of coaching changes all the time. Theories come and go, some stick because they work. New drills are developed. Old methods are re-examined: the discussion is never ending. That’s why "Coaching to Win" exists. It’s a place for you to learn about ideas and methods that I have tried and know to work. It's also a place for you to contribute and discuss your own experiences with coaches around the world. We are still putting the finishing touches on the place so I recommend you put your name down for updates because we will be regularly adding new content. Here’s to striving for excellence! |
Good Cricketers are Good at Failing: Here's How to Emulate Them
How good are you at failing?
As a player and a coach, I have endured my fair share of failure. We all do. Failure is central to cricket's core. A bowler fails, a batter succeeds. The batter fails and the fielding side is happy. A duck is the ultimate batting failure. One team succeeds and one team fails.
The best batters in the world succeed once every three to four innings.
That's a 75% failure rate.
With these numbers and experiences in mind, how good are you at failing?
Coaching to Win: An Emotional Time
The first week of July is always a week of mixed emotions for me at Millfield.
The Shoebox Approach to Spectacular Off Side Hitting
When a player moves slightly legside and eases the ball over extra cover for four or six it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It looks great.
But it's often messed up through ignorance. So let's put that right.
Use Twenty20 Shots to Compare Quality and Quantity of Practice
It's Twenty20 time. Brendan McCullum, Dwayne Bravo, Chris Gayle: entertaining crowds with some colossal hitting.
Naturally, all the club and youth cricketers want to copy their heroes. It's been great to see people try to move around the crease and open up space on either side of the ground.
Four Ways to Connect With Your Cricketers During Reviews
I have become increasingly aware of different learning styles and preferences within teams over the years and have been trying to find different review methods that connect with those different styles.
Work with Players, Not Techniques to Grow Your Cricketers
What do you see when watching a batter in a net or out in the middle?
What do you notice?
These are the key questions that I ask of myself when working with any player for the first time.
Use Geometry to Deal with the Silver Fox Conundrum
I received a cry for help on Facebook the other night from a dear friend of mine who plays village cricket in the heart of Somerset.
10,000 Toughness: What Alistair Cook and Steve Waugh Teach Us About Mental Strength
Back in 2006, England coach at the time Duncan Fletcher asked me if we should select the 21 year old, Alistair Cook to open the batting in the first Test Match. I had worked with Cooky with England U15s and despite not being able to hit the ball particularly hard in those days, myself and another coach at the time pushed for his selection amongst physically stronger players who could beat the field with power.
The 15 year old Cook had something that was different. As coaches, we wanted to give that talent the opportunity as it may grow into something special. So, My response to Fletcher in 2006 went a little bit like this,
The Brutal Reality of Becoming a Cricketer
Who here has the ambition to become a successful professional cricketer?
Every year at Millfield I ask each of our A Team squads this same question. In each team, I see a minimum of eight to 10 hands shoot up in the air.
Solve Batting Problems with Downswing and Follow-Through
What is the purpose of the follow-through?
I ask it a lot, particularly from a batting perspective. Some of the answers are brilliantly inaccurate but tell me that we, as coaches, have done a poor job of explaining the follow through despite the frequency of use in coaching dialogue.
So let’s put this into a front foot drive context. What explanations do I hear on a day to day basis?
