Insightful Young Women

Tonight I had a wonderful conversation with two insightful young women who were frustrated at the lack of performance from their "teams" at practice today. I put the word teams in quotations because we never have the ideal set up where we can put a full squad together in a training environment and test it's cohesion, confidence and execution. This is because to field a first line Cadet team we must move up Bantams, to field a first line Youth team we need to move up many Cadets. This leaves no squad to challenge the "first line" team we are testing.

So, why the frustration from Shae and Breda? Because they see very capable players not executing, not using their abundant skills, in drills that review and reinforce tactical instruction from weeks gone by. They wanted to know why that was so we talked for a few minutes about that. There was question about improving their execution if we did more drills and less swimming and skills. Well, if they have been taught the tactics and been given 30 minutes to work on them will it make a difference to increase that to 60 minutes or to 90 minutes? Yes, to some extent, and that is why we have entered the Competitive training phase right now, to determine what has been learned and been added to their repertoire.

Then, as we talked about this and I asked questions of them, ie "how would we increase the learning rate or boost the confidence level?". Breda didn't even hesitate to answer "by playing more games" and she is so correct. Smarter at 17 then any of the people who are making decisions for Water Polo Canada about domestic competition. More games during a season under a system that is understood by the whole team and the whole club. For Bantam and Cadet players a meaningful game in this sense is one that they can repeat tactical systems; scores and standings are irrelevant. Youth teams would need a certain standard of opponent for a game to be meaningful but close scores are not even required as long as they get these games more than 2 or 3 weekends per season.

I'm really glad they figured that out so quickly by themselves since that is the direction I am headed with changes that I have proposed for Manitoba Water Polo next season. It is also what I am currently discussing with Cyril, the Provincial Coach from Saskatchewan, who sees the same basic problems on the prairies that I do.

The good news for the girls tonight is that we get to accurately judge team and player performance in Calgary in a week after a few more days of increased focus on tactics. Then we go into a short 7-8 week cycle of recover, rebuild, re-peak before Nationals and that cycle will have a decent competition phase that teaches nothing, just tweeks what is already known. That process of working toward an end point is hard to visualize for players in their teens that are ahead of the group in confidence and/or skill.