Welcome to this three part series on developing leadership in your sports team! I’ll be talking about this subject from the perspective of a roller derby coach, but many of the principles and ideas are transferable across teaching subjects.
Being a coach or member of a training team means that you have been selected by a group pf people to be a decision a maker, and decision makers have power. The most important question any coach or decision maker has is: what is the best, most constructive way, to give this power away.
It’s in answering this question that we coach leadership.
Macro Pace v Micro Pace
When we talk about giving power away, we need to think about pace. We’ve talked about pace before in keeping the pot on the boil. In that instance we were talking about a micro pace – that is the changes of pace that happen inside a single a session. When we talk about the pace of leadership, we’re also going to think about macro pace – or the pace of learning that happens across multiple sessions. Building leaders intentionally takes time, and it’s important to think about how we pace that growth.
If we pace it too quickly, and give too much power out too fast to too many people, the pot might boil over. Players can feel stressed and chaotic when they have to take charge and are not not used to leading. On the other hand, if we don’t give power away fast enough, then the team will be lacking in leadership when we need it.
We need to coach leadership at a sustainable, consistent pace, with a level of challenge that grows steadily over time.
The Warm Up
I recently used LessonStack to take a look at which activities I coach the most – and can you guess which activity I use more than any other? That’s right! Warm up. That means I know as a coach it’s important for me to get the warm up right, because I’m going to spend a great deal of time coaching it.
Warm up is also a great place to start coaching leadership – it’s a regular, familiar activity, that everyone knows.
For a long time I’ve used Where’s the Pack?! as my go-to warm up. Recently a question was asked on Facebook about drills that could be used to training leadership, so I’ve taken some time to reflect on the drill and tweak it to embed leadership skills.
In Where’s the Pack?! players form a tight pack and then have instructions fired at them by the coach. To begin with the micro pace is important – we want that pot boiling. That means firing instructions at a rate where the team can keep up – but they have to work at it. It’s also important that they’re not just physically warm – they need to be mentally warm. To that end, we’ll add game scenarios like recycling and bridging as well as novel instructions that I’ll come up with on the fly, or made a note of the night before.
Adding Leadership
This is a great drill to begin developing leadership with as it requires clear communication, decisiveness and just a little creativity.
When you’re delivering this drill for the first few sessions, we’re very concerned with the micro pace – that is keeping the players busy in the moment – but in the back of our minds we’re also thinking about the macro pace – and giving that power away to the players.
Once the players are familiar with the drill, begin to select players to take over the drill for short amounts of time. A great way to introduce this is with a novel suggestion – that is, half way thru performing the warm up use the command: Shorty You’re in Charge!
This should be greeted with a moment that looks like confusion where the players process the instruction that has just been given. Do not be tempted to step in and solve it for them – give them a few beats to work out what the instruction meant. The player you have selected should then take charge of the warm up and begin to give the pack instructions.
Once players know that ‘Take Charge’ is a command, you can begin to regularly select players at random and put them in charge for of warm up for a short time. As a coach, and especially a roller derby coach, it’s important to embed leadership training across everyone in the team, not just the ‘locker room leaders’.
Eventually you should be able to call on players to take command of that situation very quickly during warm up, and have a first foot on the rung of leadership.
Coaching Leadership
It’s important to remember at this point that you are still coach when delivering this activity – we’re not just palming the activity off onto a player.
Except now you’re coaching leadership. That means you still need to give feedback and make corrections where needed. The two places they are most likely to need correcting is on the clarity and pace – make sure their instructions are clear, and the pot is kept on the boil. If you make a correction for example – “Louder!”, make sure you don’t return them to the pack until you are satisfied they have demonstrated clear leadership.
You can find Where’s the Pack?! on LessonStack
Happy Coaching!
Rex T x