With all the different phases in development to organise, you will need a Clubco!
Organising Player Development
I get a lot of questions about how to organise the development of the players. Good idea to step away from thinking about exercises and consider the different aspects of this big task. The model used by many sports and also Rugby Nederland is:
- The player’s development is central to everything;
- The Long Term Player Development model is the guideline;
- The coaches / trainers steer the development of the player;
- The clubcoordinator steers and oversees the work of all the youth coaches;
- The technical committee facilitates;
SuperCoach Online
Paul Metz set-up the tool SuperCoach Online to support his approach. The datamodel behind SuperCoach Online is the direct translation of the Long Term Player Development (LTPD) model.
Within SuperCoach Online you have the roles and privileges reflecting the mentioned model.The Clubcoordinator knows about LTPD and the development stages of the different teams of the club. He develops the trainingstemplates that SuperCoach Online uses to search the database for the appropriate exercises. The Trainers simply log in on their laptops of get the trainingsessions and clip pushed to their smartphone. He can tweak a bit, but not much. He can: 1. select from pre-defined templates and 2. tweak individual training programs by changing individual exercises with one in that same group of training elements.
Of course it is the dialog between coaches and the clubcoordinator that will result in the appropriate templates. I believe this dialog is key.
Clubcoordinator role
My experience the last couple of years is that for rugbyclubs it is difficult to fill-in that clubcoordinator role. I have set-up a support plan for development of clubcoaches. But it seems we are all struggling to set this up. Some observations…
- Dutch Hockey has worked hard to develop the Coordinators and have set up specialised courses for them.
- The Clubcoordinator role is somewhere in the IRB Level 3 coaching course, but I never see these Level 3 coaches perform in this role….
- The Dutch National Olympic Committee has obviously had the similar experience and they have set-up a whole program to develop and support Clubcoordinators called Sportplezier.nl. Their Educators help clubcoordinators develop their youth coaches and their didactic skills. I have teamed up with one of their Educators: Joost Kuppens who is an Elite rugby coach himself and we will assist the first clubs with a SuperCoach Online license this season.
Related information
- Some implementations of LTPD models in the Download section (feel free to contact me if you want more – I have a vast collection);
- More on SuperCoach Online;
- The Sportplezier.nl website (in Dutch…):
- More on the hockey role of the Clubcoordinator (in Dutch…);
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