Gameplan in a Mindmap

How to build and develop your Team Attack? Why not use mindmapping?
I am a great fan of mindmapping, there are always a lot of thoughts in my head and when I take notes during presentations it always took a lot of time to make sense of them afterwards. When I started using mindmapping and typed away I found that after the meeting I could easily move around the different “knots” and create a readable document/map.

The original Team Attack mindmap was set up in 2011 when I was in New Zealand for the RWC and was invited to join the IRANZ Academy program in Wellington where then Junior All Black coach Chris Boyd presented the Team Attack. I made the first version of the team attack mindmap then.

Next, when I started to present to my National Under 18 team using the mindmap instead of Powerpoint I learned that players loved the overview and the ability to zoom in quickly. I used the map also as a sort of agenda to show what we would do the weeks ahead and colored what we did orange. It was a very special moment when two weeks before the European Championships I opened all “knots” and said “We colored everything Orange, now we can go to the Championships”. Great visualisation of all the work we had done!

Back to the Team Attack mindmap: during the IRANZ Course Chris Boyd took us through these topics:

  • Philosophy, your approach to playing rugby, (our your country’s approach);
  • Strategy, how does that translate to your style of play;
  • Tactics, make the strategy work in practical plans;

You now can determine what the team needs to do, both in set play and open play. For example Chris Boyd talked about the speed of the recycle ball and introduced me to the concept of Ruck Efficiency.

Using the mindmap you can detail the attack by describing the Where, How and When.

After I used the mindmapping technique for the National Under 18 I continued to built the Team Attack mindmap for different teams and clubs and now it is a powerful instrument in the dialogue with team coaches and helps to create a sound overview of what is needed.

Of course I have a version of the mindmap to translate the plan to SuperCoach Online “Training Elements”. When the Team Attack has been defined, the trainingsplan can be built very quickly.

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