Floorball – Build them up

As the season progresses, keep after your floorball players. Build them up, compliment their improvement, reward them for it! If your floorball team is competitive, don’t forget what got you there! Continue to speak of floorball team cohesion and learning opportunities. The worst thing you can do is to forget your plan and start focusing on the title, all you are doing is setting your players up for an even greater disappointment. You’ll make them tight, nervous, and in the end… will they still be having fun then?

Floorball youth skill drills and practices

Remember, even if you’re not feeling particularly positive during some point in the floorball game, your attitude and your face, your posture, your entire being  must reflect that you are positive and believe in your floorball team, and each individual. You have all the faith in the world in your teammates. They can do this and your positive attitude shows them that.

Floorball – Wanted position

I will talk about two ways of setting goals, or how to look at the goal setting process. The first one is about looking back on your performance and setting the goal little bit higher than the history shows.

If you are thinking about goal for the league position, you might look at your previous seasons 10 pos. 8 pos. 9 pos. and therefore you think a realistic goal should be 6 or 7 position, but you might to choose to raise it a little bit to position 5.

The second way to set goals is to take a step into the future and to think where you would want to be in the future or were you must be in order to achieve something. Let’s say your floorball team is in the next highest division. Maybe you have described in your vision that you want to be in the premier league (highest division), therefore you automatically must be top 2 or 3 in your division in order to be able to take the next step. This could create a conflict, if you have team members that are “stuck” in the history, they won’t think this is a realistic goal, and it might not be, it’s your wanted position in order to take the next step.

Floorball thanks for the game

If you are setting goals by taking a step into the future and pointing out a wanted position, you will create an information gap that needs to be explained for your floorball players. So the discussion should rather be about, if they want to be there, than if it’s realistic. After you have cleared out that, you can start to take small steps back from the future, if we want to be here, top 2 and advance a division. What changes do we need to do in order to achieve that? You need to slice the big block to small steps (We need to increase the amount of practices. We need to think about what and how we eat. We need to improve our defense.) When you have this discussion about many small improvements with your floorball players, you get a buy in on the goal and suddenly it starts to be realistic at least in every ones heads.

You can think about José Mourinhos challenge when setting a goal, that was to win the Champions League, when Inter had won it, last time in 1965, maybe it was more realistic if you look at other aspects than the historical performance, like the team members and Mourinho himself.

In short term goal setting you can use the same methodology, in order to support your long term goal and vision.

Floorball practice shooting drill

The last level defining a focus area will support you in achieving your short term goal (and long term goal and vision). What do we need to focus on as the first steps on our way towards our wanted position? This should of course be transferred to concrete actions and an action plan.

As a summary you can say that you can work with setting the direction on different levels, Vision – Long term goals – Short term goals – Focused areas – Actions/Action plan.

Floorball off-season jumping practice

Salibandy oheisharjoittelu ja harjoitukset, hyppyharjoite

Off-season practice to floorball. The floorball off season jumping drill is started in a low position with one foot in front of the other, then a jump up and you switch the position of your feets, but land as in the starting position.

Floorball – Focus on the positive and improvement

At the beginning of the floorball season every coach meets his or her new floorball players and analyzes their skill-set and knowledge of the game. Lets face facts, most floorball coaches know from the first day whether or not their team is going to be competitive or not, and it just as true that many coaches get frustrated on that very first day. A good floorball coach never lets his team see this frustration.

Floorball game running and focusing on defense

Focus on the positive! Speak to your floorball players about improvement. From the very first floorball practice, speak of learning skills and working hard. We’ve all seen the comedy routines about the impossibly naïve coach who keeps talking about having fun while his players are getting killed, but in the long run, aren’t sports supposed to be about having a good time while simultaneously building character?

Floorball – Creativity within the frames

Give your floorball team members goals, not instructions on how to reach them. Ask for their input and point of view. Give your floorball players room to act and therefore also space for creativity, within the frames. You don’t need to have all the answer, guide your players to answers inside themselves (e.g. Player: How should we do this?  Coach: Do you have a good suggestion how to do it? Or, how would you like to solve it? Or, someone else, who has a good answer?)  After starting the fire (why and what), avoid putting your fingers in to the fire (how), create the framework for the fire and trust your players.

Floorball drills for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 year old, skills passing, running and shooting

José Mourinho

“I use a global method, I use direct methods when preparing our organization, but I also use guided discovery where I create the practice, dictate the aim, and the players come up with different solutions” /José Mourinho