Team Dynamics

In general, as a coach, learn who works well with who and get them together. However be warned, often if two people play together too much, they will either get stuck in roles (one only feeds to the other’s shot for example), or they may not play so well with the other two division members.

As mentioned before, you’ll learn who can and needs to be treated in what way. Some people will step up incredibly to a challenge, or will need constant encouragement. Some will need a joke, and some might not take kindly to it. Knowing your players well is, to me, one of the best aspects of coaching, and it leads to fun sessions, full of good chat, but also with people working hard to improve.

If it’s useful, and you reckon the team is up for it, you can get them to create a set of rules which they agree to train by. Things like turning up on time, or not being negative etc. This way, if they’ve signed up to it, they can’t grumble at doing any sort of forfeit.

You can’t really impose too many of your own rules on people in University Korfball. It’s not fun. And if it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.

One final thing. Most teams seem to perform better when they’re not under pressure. Makes sense. However, as the Gazelle (see “Coaching Theories: Focus (Internal Vs. External)”) demonstrated, you can’t really go about telling people ‘not to get stressed out’ or ‘not to worry’. Find a different way to achieve it. Jokes, Silly warm-ups, Stories. All good.