Proper preparation prevents poor performance


Training session is about to begin. Assistant coaches and players are still waiting for the head coach who comes running in. It’s been a busy day at work and he hasn’t had much time to prepare. The head coach has an idea and a mental picture about the practice, but no one else has. Now the coach needs to quickly brief the assistant coaches and present the agenda and drills to the players. Everything happens in a hurry and the plan is far from crystal clear. The training session starts and in the first 15 minutes the hasty preparation shows: a lot is seemingly happening, but there is no mutual understanding why, what and how things should be done.

The level of preparation has a direct correlation to the training session's success. We all know a situation, where we introduce a new drill: If the coach hasn’t had the time to prepare and go through how to present the drill to the players, frankly said, it’s going to be a mess. It takes 15-20 minutes before the training starts to flow as it should. 15-20 minutes is a lot of idle time and the team isn’t taking a full advantage of their time together.

Proper preparation prevents poor performance. As we all know, if you want to have a great training session or a game, you need to be prepared for it. It’s not enough that the coach knows what is going to happen today: the head coach, assistant coaches, and players all need to be informed and be ready when it’s time to rock! But it’s not that easy: people are busy with work or school and often it feels like there isn’t enough time to prepare.

We at CoPlays know this is a real problem. Before now there were no tools for the whole team to get ready for training sessions. We wanted to create something that the coach could use when having a lunch at work: CoPlays is easy to use, intuitive and most importantly timesaving. It’s a joint platform for the team and for the club.

With CoPlays, coaches can in a matter of seconds create their own drills or choose from a library of  ready-made drills. Drills are automatically shared with the players: now everyone can see in advance what is going to happen at today’s practice. It’s faster and easier to start performing effectively. When it is time to start training, everyone is ready.

Sharing what the team is going to do at practice has other advantages as well. Kids have just come out of school and their concentration is at a minimum. Their minds are occupied with other things and they are far from a training mindset. Research shows that being mentally prepared for a practice is as important as preparing for a game. Being in a right mindset increases performance level during the session and leads to improved results.  Now, if during the bus ride to practice, players can watch what the team is going to do today, their focus starts subconsciously shift to a training mode. When they arrive at the practice they already have a “let's train” -mentality. This leads to a better session and better results!

Markus Kauppinen
Captain of CoPlays

Markus is a former professional volleyball player from the Finnish main national league. He is passionate about coaching and making good coaching easier.

Today he is working with CoPlays coaching solution. At this stage CoPlays supports coaching and drills for four team sports: ice hockey, soccer, floorball and basketball.

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