FeedForward

With every training session, you as the coach get a certain amount of opportunities for feedback. Sometimes, if your athletes or students are playing, you want to curb what you have to say. And when we are teaching them skills or ideas, we want to give them the cues and information they need.

A few ideas have come up recently about feedback that are important to share. They are not ground breaking but at a recent clinic in which the coaches were also in learning modes, feedback became an issue.

First, as the saying goes, if you try to catch five rabbits you won't catch any. This couldn't be more true. Often we give too much feedback on different things. For middle blockers in our sport, they are inundated with 20 things to think about every play: block, don't block, get out of the setters way, read that hitter, push your hands over the net, faster feet, cover your hitter, make yourself available, etc.... It's a wonder more middles don't need therapy sessions when they retire. 

Keep your feedback  to ONE thing. Of course there are 20 different things that you, as the coach, see the players are doing wrong, but just focus on that ONE thing for the time of the game or drill. You have time to go to the other 19 at other games and drills.

Another thought was from the book "The Coaches Guide to Teaching" by the brilliant Doug Lemov. It's a wonderful book with so much great information, but one thing that might catch your attention is Doug's question about how important your athletes will feel your feedback is.

His point is if you are hammering home a cue or a point over and over again, the players can feel from you how important that is. However, as soon as play begins, the coach begins talking about 20 other things and soon the athlete realizes that the cue or point they were hammering home before isn't as important as they thought because the coach is talking about all these other things.

That is our mistake as coaches. If we want that specific point or cue to hit home, we have to treat it like it is of major importance and not interfere with the message by talking about other things. Keep your point relevant and important to your athletes.

The last point to make is how much feedback. Twenty five or 30 years ago, it was thought that every rep needed some coaching feedback. But science has shown us that the brain is easily overloaded and too much feedback is actually detrimental to the learning process.

Pick your spots. Watching an athlete take one rep and giving feedback isn't a very representative sampling. Give the athlete several reps, see if an overlying problem exists that you can give feedback on...ONE problem at a time.

Too much feedback is worse than none at all. Remember your student athletes have a very low threshold for attention: don't waste it. Find that piece of information that the player can use directly to make them better. There is no reason to talk about other things.

For the sake of practicing what we preach, we'll end on these cues about feedback to your athletes.

Specific, succinct, selective.