Floorball – Celebrate with the team or with me?

If you listen to some interviews depending of the outcome you most likely will hear a difference. Many times a negative floorball result or performance is explained with external factors (referee, unlucky, away game etc), or wage internal factors, we tried, but today we did not manage to live up fully to our capability. Success on the other hand is most likely described with own successful performance and skills or a team members successful performance and is most likely quite precis. Do you recognize it?

“The linesman scored the goal. No-one knows if that shot went over the line and you must be 100% sure” /José Mourinho

Giving Feedback

Giving feedback or in explaining your floorball teams performance, the following aspects should be consired.

Cause
Internal or external factors? Internal could be your own effort and skills. External can be referee, floor, surface weather, unlucky and so on.

Stability
Stable over time or just “one timer”

Control
Control over the situation, who was in charge.

Floorball Teams/players that are explaining their failures or success with external causes, as “one timers”, that where out of control for the team/player, will most likely end up in a really bad negative trend.

On the other hand floorball teams/players explaining their success with internal cause (their own effort, skills etc.), stability over time (we/I can and will be able to do it again) and we did it because we acted according to the game plan or as we have practiced (control), will have better chances to perform well next time as well.

Youth Floorball tactics and feedback

Here you as floorball coach have an important role, because how you explain the results (cause, stability and control), will also affect the degree of how much your floorball team members will explain the results in this way, and also how they act during the game. The same principle can be applied on feedback during a floorball match.

Feedback during the floorball match

 Your feedback during a floorball match can mostly be divided in three categories,
– Positive/negative reinforcement
– Technical instructions
– General encouragement

How are you acting in your coach role during a match?

-In the half-time Mourinho told me that “I want more intensity from your side, you are not the Milito I know, you are just walking around” – After that I scored two goals. /Diego Milito

How to celebrate a floorball goal?

Floorball victory

What about the feedback between the players during a match? If you look at celebrations after a goal, how is the goal scorer acting? Running away from the team, or to the team members?  Was the goal his or the teams, how is his/her reactions, ME or WE?

Feedback to the team or individuals?

There can also be difference if you are talking about team or individuals when you are explaining or giving feedback on the performance. Will you strengthen the floorball team or individuals in the team? In floorball teams with low team spirit or in a losing team, it tends to be more individual aspect in explaining the results and in teams with good team spirit and communication within the team, the team approach is more common, for both victories as losses, we win as a team, we lose as a team.

Mistake

Finally a sentence about the most common reason for feedback from the coach or the team members, mistakes. “Everyone makes mistakes, but to get upset and also show it, makes the mistake complete” (Look, it was me who did it…)

Floorball – Hard days will always come, but never last?

What other people think of you is none of your business (I think Mourinho could have said that), Leadership is about having an unshakeable faith in your goals, vision and in your power to make positive things to happen together with your floorball team, these are also the things, good leaders are able to feed back to the team, to give more energy and keep a clear direction.
Just remember that hard days will always come, but never last, but strong people always do. Hard times are just opportunities to learn for the future!
Hard times build great leaders and floorball players. During the hard times and pressure, your leadership ability and skills are tested. Are you, or can you always be in control of things?

Floorball deke ball control

“If everything is under control, you are going too slow” /Mario Andretti, race driver

“The only thing that we cannot control is our supporters” / José Mourinho

“Pain is temporary. Quitting last forever”. /Lance Armstrong

Great leaders and teams create castles of the stones others throw at them, but it’s impossible to build a castle of success on a foundation of excuses.

Floorball – Mourinho – Everything can be controlled

Mourinho believe in control and his coaching methods focus on what is in his direct control, his opinion is that the only factor he can not control are the supporters.

One of his priorities is keeping things simple and therefore try to remove the complexity or simplify it. Focus or concentration is an another important area for Mourinhos’ players, the message is that the opponents are not stupid and can potentially have the same methods… In terms of weakness of the opponents Mourinho will try to and practice taking advantage of the individual player weaknesses, such as height of players or weak foot.

Floorball youth game

Other aspects of his leadership and coaching include a “brutal honesty”, with strict eye to eye contact and he does not censor his word no matter who the player, that you can read in the newspapers and in this book.

Mourinho believes in hard work ethics and a balanced game system, so it’s not about attacking or defending, it’s about balance between these two factors.

Norway Structured Development and Clear Vision

The most impressive presentation during the coach training, was the Norwegian one. So good content and fantastic presentation by Roy Johansen (National team coach) and his colleague from Olympic coaching team.

Roy Johansen Norway Hockey
Roy Johansen to the left

Norway started their development by thinking of, what are the best teams / nations doing? What does the best hockey (floorball) player do, what skills do they have, and what skills are they masters of?

Then they continued with working with their own team identity, who are we? What can we be best in? What can we control? Can we chase the other team all over the rink?

As an output from this, Team Norway could get some answers and identify areas to focus on. The key area was the answer to the questions, What can we be best in? What can we control? We can be physically prepared.
Therefore they
– Created a physical training development stair, with defined levels of, what is world class.
– Started an “Ironman” competition for all players and teams, that is run before the season starts.
– Defined their way of playing hockey (floorball)
– Defined team values, or valuing words to describe wanted behavior within the team.
– Set goals short and long term

Team Norway Hockey, Victory over Latvia during World Championships 2012

“Extreme goals – Requires extreme process”
/Team Norway

To be continued…

Floorball Running, Stick Handling and Decission Making

I continue with some valuable things from Dave Smiths lecture, from the international coaching seminarium.

He talked about the complexity in hockey, you need to skate, do stick handling and take decissions, which is not possible if you haven’t automized some of the skills or moves. If your skating isn’t automized, you need to focus on that and loose stick handling and good decissions.

Floorball running with ball practices and drills

Same principles can be applied on floorball, if you don’t have good and fast feets moving automatically, you will have problems with the game.
1. Quick and fast feets (coordination skills)
2. Good stick handling skills
will automatically give you more time on focusing on the game itself and to make good decissions during the game.

Test the footwork and coordination skills

You can test these coordination skills by a simple practice. Let your players run standing on the same spot, add stick handling and start to ask them questions. Do they drop in speed or have problems performing these two things together, then you know you need to work extra either on footwork or stick handling. Below an example from the stick handling and ball control eBook found on this page >>

Stick handling floorball or ball control with foot work