A team of great players don’t need to be coached

By John Hughes

I find myself in the odd position of managing a dynamite group of players. I’ve managed developing sides, good sides and the odd excellent side, but this is the first group of players I’ve had who are different league stuff.

It brings with it a range of challenges that I am not accustomed to, and I don’t know if I’m dealing particularly well with it.

It’s an underage girls team and there’s 27 first class girls on the panel. They play a variety of sports, basketball, swimming, surfing, etc. There’s also a number of them who play up a level in football. I recognise I’m the beneficiary of a lot of good work being done in other codes and within our own club.

In truth there isn’t a single player you would put on the pitch who you wouldn’t be expecting to do a bloody good job.

I had approached the first few games as been a case of seeing which players worked well where, but right now it looks like it doesn’t matter where you put these girls, they are always on top.

Our first three games have been one-sided wins, which, as someone who was on the wrong side of his own fair share of those when he was playing, I find strangely difficult to deal with.

I’m running subs to try and even things as much as possible, but it makes no difference, because what you are putting on is as good as what you’re taking off.

We had our subs cheering during one of the demolitions and I told them to quieten down. I know how much that kind of thing can hurt when you’re taking a tanking. I find it difficult shaking hands with the opposition manager after, almost apologising for the quality of my team and the gulf on the score board.

Ostensibly from a managerial perspective, right now they don’t seem to require any management what so ever.

Previously I’ve tried to bring up skill levels and build belief in weaker players in order to raise the general standard in a team, get match ups right, get smart positioning on the pitch, probably no different from what most managers do.

With this team there are no weak players, and all the rest of the ‘managerial’ stuff seems to happen as if by some collective intelligence.

I feel a bit like bog standard secondary school teacher dropped into a school for gifted children.

Obviously I shouldn’t be standing back and just admiring them play.

What I should be doing now is challenging these players and getting them to push on and develop further, but that’s not something I’ve huge experience of doing.

That’s the lesson here. Coaching isn’t something where you reach a point where you know it all. There’s a dual role in coaching.

The primary role is to develop players and help them be the best they can be. However underlying that is an onus to always be developing yourself and working on your own weaknesses.

It turns out I have a fairly major blind spot here, and now it’s a case of getting to work on it.

Fortunately, there is a world of resources out there and I’ll be getting stuck into those over the next while. This is one situation where it looks like it will be the players who are doing the coaching.

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