AFL Training - Thursday Session

Just a quick post about the follow session. Of interest was the 15 years players who came over and wanted to join the session with my team. I am very lucky that their coach is very tolerant of me imposing my ideas on his sessions. We followed up Tuesday's session with a repeat tonight with all really keen that they could play for an hour. The quality of play was much better as the players understood the functionality of the game's rules and could really understand how to operate in the restrictions (self imposed and set by the rules that we added to create the circumstances that we want to develop). What is occurring is that the players are gradually developing more of a sense of responsibility for their own play. They are quite keen to take the time to set up their plays and gradually realising that they are responsible for plays that need to be made off the stoppages and the movement within the zones.

Again, a couple of points about the play.

• By far the most difficult concept to develop is the movement in the opposite direction to which the team is running to receive a pass. Both teams move the ball forward through the lines really well (between backs, mids and forwards) but having a player move backwards to receive the ball and then transfer it forward is quite difficult as it seems to go against their instinct
• The younger team did try to go back and switched play a number of times. They were much more successful when they switched off a moving play but seemed to freeze when kicking from a stoppage and their execution was not as good. It was if they saw the player open on the switch but their hesitation led to the error
• Players (irrespective of ability but often those who are very good) are still drawn to the ball when defending. We will work on the last player in the line of defence withdrawing to allow the team mates to chase the player with the ball (like the point guard in basketball retreating to the key on a fast break). It became obvious that we have to teach the verbal communication that goes with this
• We had some development with the 'read' of the play', especially off a poor pass to a receiver (in this case, a kick). The team in possession generally waited to see what would happen after a poor pass even though they demonstrated a clear understanding (made obvious through questioning) that the poor pass would result in the receiver being placed under extreme pressure. The teams began to develop 'just in case' by the end of the session
• The practice of the forward coming back to replace the player on the mark to free up an extra player began to become a regular occurrence and the related verbal communication was developing and modelled
• 'Player to player' defence began to develop but the swapping of players if someone is caught out of position seems to be against what they believe player to player is. It seems that they think 'If I am on a player, then I stay on that player, regardless of the position they are in'. I will look at a rule change to develop this
• Some of the verbal communication was not necessarily helpful. The well meant comment of 'work harder' was not necessarily helpful as the receiver of the comment was unsure what they had to work harder in
• The movement to create a pass is not yet valued by the teams or they are yet to work out how to do this from a stoppage without direct instruction of very clear hints

Overall, some real development. I'll have to put my thinking cap on to develop some rule changes to develop these components but we will focus on work without possession next training session. It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the games.

I'll keep you posted.

Greg