Complex Carbs – Major Breakthrough

An article by Stephen Pritchard    No Comments

Complex Carbohydrates provide us with sustained energy.  In Learning Nutrition terms we suggest that offering praise for positive behaviours has this effect upon our performers.  By combining this praise with a shift in control (Minerals) I’ve had a breakthrough with a challenging player.

The challenge is not aggressive, but in a cheeky trying to catch me out type way.  Has been coming to me for several years, and has recently started playing at other clubs too.  His standard has reached a plateau due to a major technical flaw of which he is aware yet he has been incredibly resistant to change.  My “Professional nagger” approach not has not so far worked.

In the session plenary, he challenged my ideas re: importance of this technical aspect when linked to the skill being introduced.  A second session follows straight on, one which he stays for so I threw down the challenge and went on court against him to prove the point.  This could have gone wrong, but given that no progress had been made for about a season and a half I decided to risk it.  I beat him heavily through exposing the weakness I’d suggested and which he denied existed.  The skill, and the breakthrough, came in discussing this as soon as we walked off court.

I explained how I beat him, and then looked at what he would need to do to address this.  I gave nothing new technically, but I did change the way in which I presented it.  I emphasised it would take time and a lot of effort on his part.  Key bit:  If you want to do it, it will make you a better player.  If you don’t, that’s fine I’ll leave you alone and not mention it anymore.   I thanked him for the game and he went and had a break before I set some further matches into action.

Each time he came off court for the next hour, he sought me out, said he’d lost but that he was trying the changed technique.  I was amazed, and excited and made sure to praise him for this effort individually and also made a point of praising him in such a way that his mates heard, which made him visibly grow!  He stuck with it for the rest of the session and I will continue with specific effort based praise linked to this.

Funnily I had recently chatted to coaches who run the other sessions the player attends and they had shared the view that he was not really engaged, and was resistant to change.  My action since was to email these coaches, explain the breakthrough and ask them to work similarly so that we might really help him progress.

Watch this space…