Keep your players fit during the floorball season

Proper rest is vital to continued good health, we all know this. So how come so many floorball coaches put their star player into the game and then keep him or her there throughout the entire game, and then into any overtime that might be required? Pace your players, substitute them liberally and tactically, especially in early season floorball games.  Giving everyone a chance to play doesn’t just have to be a touchy-feely idea, smart floorball coaches preserve their forces for later battles!

Floorball youth practices and drills

Good off-season practices will keep your players fit during the floorball season

Floorball – Unbeatable at home stadium

Good team spirit creates a winning climate, good team moral and believe in the success of the floorball team, and the floorball players will make more sacrifices for the team and work harder for the success.

Floorball Team size

Research shows, that depending on sport, the size of ideal amount of team members vary between sports, a common rule is that you should be able to play on your practice (two teams) with limited amount or no substitutes. In all sports the participants felt that the team was too big or too small if the member amount was increased or decreased with 25%, compared to the first “rule”.

The size of the team will also affect your and your team ability to build up the team spirit. It’s easier to focus on the task in small teams but the social co-operation will be greater in bigger teams, but reducing the task focus and also allowing greater amount of social loafing (more of this later).

Your team size will also affect the communication, it’s harder to recognize and give feedback to everyone, which will also affect the team spirit. And as an effect of this, in bigger teams the leadership from the coach tends to be less democratic.

Floorball training drills practices and excercices

The larger the dream, the more important the team. A leader will never get greater results than the team will deliver.

Home and away games

Other aspects that might affect the part, team spirit is “home and away” games. You can talk about three different levels of territories, primary, secondary and public.

In the primary area the team has full control and other people are not allowed (or only very limited access) in this zone, it can be the teams own locker room and other facilities. This zone is often designed, coloured and “decorated” with important symbols or pictures to strengthen the team and also club spirit. The greater control the team has in their primary territory the more they are willing to “protect” it.

In the secondary territory the team has some control, but the facilities can be used by others as well, training facilities can be shared with other teams within the club etc.

In the third territory or the public territory, you can count public training facilities and also away games, your team will be placed in a non-personal or non-team related locker room.

Internazionale vs AC Milan locker room

Internazionale locker roomAC Milan locker room

To the left you have the locker room of FC Internazionale and below it, the AC Milan locker room. It’s quite obvious who has spent more money on “decoration”. In AC Milan locker room each player has a Recaro skin seat and a LCD screen above their seat, in the middle you have two huge AC Milan logos. Inter has a long curved one piece wooden seat and one LCD and the team logo on the wall. Maybe it’s the strategy of Internazionale or José Mourinho to make the moving between the territories easier. In other words the step from a home game to an away game will not be that big for Inter, the locker room in an away game will look almost the same except for 18 missing championship plates and will therefore affect the team spirit either. While moving from luxury to a normal level could create some complaints among the players?

Unbeaten for nine years at home stadium

José Mourinhos teams have been unbeaten for eight consecutive years when playing at home and this season Real Madrid hasn’t been beaten at Santiago Bernabeu, so José Mourinho is heading for his 9th season without a loss in the home games. That makes at least a huge impression on me, what about you?

Hockey coaching training – transferred to Floorball Coaching

I attended the World Championship Hockey Coaching Symposium in Ericsson Globe Arena, during the IIHF World Championships in Ice Hockey. I will try to translate/transfer the latest knowledge from hockey to floorball in coming posts, so keep visiting this floorball blog 😉

Game Tickets, IIHF Hockey World ChampionshipsEricsson Globe Arena

 

Floorball – Off-season training and Injuries

“We were sailing into the floorball playoffs when our star player sprained his ankle, and then BOOM, we were eliminated in the first round”. Sound familiar? If you’ve been around the sports/floorball world for any length of time, you have seen it happen, probably more than once. What can you do to prevent this, and how can you overcome this when it does happen to your floorball team?

First off all, conditioning and well prepared players, that’s what it’s about. If you want to prevent most of your floorball player’s injuries, then make sure that they are well conditioned, good pre-season practicing. Devote most of your early season to get your floorball players in good physical shape. Figure out your players during the early part of the pre-season. Do not just assign the entire floorball team to run x-number of laps or km/miles and then attend to other things while they run. Make sure that out of condition floorball players, work gradually themselves up to game shape. Assign well conditioned players even more work to improve their fitness to an even greater level.

Floorball practices and drills 2 vs 2

Never ever scrimp on warm-up time (can and should be done before the floorball practice, in my eyes!) Make sure that late arriving players go through a full warm-up period before allowing them to join in the activities. Many floorball players are injured each year when they get to floorball practice late and then jump right into high stress movements.  Do not injure your players with over-enthusiasm.

Floorball – Assistant coach or coaches

It is important to find assistants that are skilled in areas that the floorball head coach has little experience in, or little joy in doing. If the head coach hates fund-raising, or dealing with the officials, or even going to floorball league meetings, then the head coach should look for assistants who enjoy these tasks around the floorball team. Do not find yourself in the situation where there are four floorball coaches on the team who all want to be in charge of the same area this is worse than having no help what so ever.

Floorball passing drills and practices

Divide your efforts and make sure to delegate responsibility for certain coaching tasks.  Make sure that each floorball assistant coach has a say in the decision making, yet still be willing to defer to the head coach in case of disputes. That said, don’t be afraid to allow your assistants to operate independently at times as well. Always remember that the old saying, two heads are better than one.  And in the world of floorball coaching, four or five heads are usually MUCH better than one!