Understanding your opponents

Player-centred coaching harnesses the team’s collective intelligence in order to share information and experiences of opponents.

There’s no question that as a coach you need to understand opponents/competitors. In a coach-centred approach, the coach’s attitude would be: ‘I’ve studied them, let me tell you about them’.

Conversely, a coach taking a player-centred approach would ask: ‘What’s your understanding of the opposition? What do you know about them?’

The coach would let players exhaust their understanding before adding any additional information. During a match, as far as possible, the intelligence needs to come from on the field – allowing for quick decisions, which is often the difference between winning and losing.

It’s not only the players’ skill that results in winning, it’s also players’ capacity for decision-making (representative of the top- and bottom-left quadrants).

Your task

Watch the video in which I discuss the different ways of gathering information on your opponents in the planning phase.

Identify whether you use a coach-centred or player-centred approach in your own practice. Evaluate your approach and, in the comments, explain what strategies you could incorporate to empower players to share information about their opponents.