Making Every Minute Matter
When coaching time is taken for granted way too often. Time is a coaches most precious resource when working with players. Time is like water in a desert scarce and needed. But often time is wasted for small moments in practice which add up to lost instructional time. If you waste even one minute a day over the course of 3 months you have lost potentially an hour and a half of time. But the reality is that we lose far greater than 1 minute per day when coaching.
Phrases like “That is good enough for today.” or “We don’t have time to start anything new” are often spoken when there are a 3–5 minutes remaining. Which could be used to incorporate something small that will add to a players engaged time.
Examples of these “lost moments” include but obviously aren’t limited to. Player standing around in between rounds of batting practice, standing around the batting cages waiting for their turn, in between ground balls for fielders. These moments are times when players could be engaged in something also. Having film of the rounds they just took during bp available for them to watch would be one example of how players can stay active during this “down time”. Or having someone there to talk about the advanced report on a pitcher for the current day might be another.
Players could be asked to reflect on their rounds of batting practice, or to watch film on the pitcher that they will face today. These down moments could be times where hitters put on a virtual reality headset and play with timing. The options here are limit less. But creating these back pocket activities takes planning and a lot of preparation on the coaches part. These moments are worth investing in as stated above with the large amount of time that could be harvested from these moments. By having players engage in an activity while they wait, or having something quick for them to do is a good idea to keep players mentally engaged.
Often times the best coaches are the ones who are most effective in their use of time. If you are able to squeeze in more reps, or more time for players to practice you are speeding up the development process of players slowly but more effectively.
Implementing changes like this goes to two things: Planning, and Changing your mindset around time.
Lets look at planning first. Coaches need to examine where they might be losing time. Where they can tighten things up when it comes to the organization of players and how they use the resources that they have. Also it is a good idea to have a few back pocket activities that players can engage in for when you have down time that needs to be filled.
Second when it comes to changing your mindset around time we need to change from “We have plenty of time!” to “Time is running out.”
5 minutes per day saved for 9 months = Gives you around 50 hours of additional practice time. So I ask you, how can we more effectively use our time when coaching?
