Pre-Season & In-Season Session Planning
I wanted to give you a little insight into my own preseason and in-season practice ideas, and how I view session design and season planning at this point in my coaching career. First, I don’t plan out pre-season, and I don’t have any sort of strict timeline that requires me to cover this topic in this order or that order. There is no week-by-week linear path I use to get the team to a certain performance level. Of course, there are specific realities in terms of preparing a team for the start of the season, but I don’t meticulously stick to a rigid plan to accomplish this. The identity of how I want the team to play is reflected in everything we do on a daily basis, but that identity still comes with flexibility and room for players to create their own solutions. Rigid game models are not something we use, it would go against my very core beliefs. A typical week during the season does include game model tactical ideas intended to prepare the team for the weekends specific match, but even those environments can be experienced in a variety of ways. We also take into account the general workload and player specific workload for the day and week in terms of sessions.
Throughout the year I look at and create many practice environments. If I see something I like, I draw it up, change it if I want, and add it to an ongoing document of training environments. The document is around 250 pages and contains hundreds of environments that I think the players will benefit from; all the environments connect to the teams playing identity in a game-representative way, but the environments do not always need to be experienced in a game model way. The season’s document is by no means the holy grail, it is simply a starting point, I can still go any direction that I want to go in at any moment in terms of session design. Think of environments like this, “it is not what’s in your head but what’s around your head that matters”. Great environments are what are around your head.
For day one of pre-season, I have a single day of practice loosely planned out. There is no one week or four week plan that needs to be stuck to. Myself and my staff literally live in the moment, attempting to use direct perception as our guide. Pre-season and the regular season unfolds day after day in this fashion. In the beginning, the staff had to adapt to this way of working, because it requires a different skill set and awareness. This way of working might sound a bit nuts, as it goes against all formal coaching education, periodization, tactical periodization, or whatever else has been put out there. The reality is, what we see from day one of practice leads us into loosely planning the environments for day two. That process continues all season long, but It is very important to understand that this is not a process of looking for what is broken, and then prescribing a fix. The process is about viewing the game as a whole, not dissecting it into little unrecognizable pieces or drills, rather it is about realizing that player and team development is something that will naturally occur inside high quality game representative environments. If the environment is high quality, every player will be able to get what they need from each session. I stay away from sessions that have a narrow focus, which don’t allow all players to develop to their fullest. My personal methodology is meant to be viewed as a framework that helps teach the game in a progressive manner through the age groups, using a variety of positional, possession, and constrained game representative environments.