Making the most of scarce training numbers

"Because we have players living away from home, we usually have only about 14 players at our training sessions. I'm finding it hard to come up with drills and games to keep it interesting. Any thoughts?" – senior club hurling manager.

Dr Eugene Young of the Sports Institute for Northern Ireland has written extensively on the art of coaching.

Physical fitness, and the pursuit thereof, maintains Dr Young, has tended to eclipse the need to develop skills.

"Too often I am asked by coaches for drills to run with their team. Drills are fine but players need to know the reason for the activity," he writes on Hill16.ie.

"Technical proficiency, tactical awareness and team play have slowly been eroded in the manuals of some coaches as fitness, fitness and more fitness takes over," says Dr Young.

"The modern game does demand a high level of personal and team fitness but as a coach we need to establish the balance between fitness levels and technical and tactical astuteness.

"The coach needs to highlight the problem with players or team and then through drills and small-sided games break the problem down, and help the players refine technique and adapt more competently to the situation."

For such drills you could do a lot worse than visit Hill16.ie, Dublin's official website which has an excellent section on coaching. You should also look to: www.dublingaagamesdevelopment.ie/ resources/drills.php.

Having 14 players at a session need not be a barrier to coaching skills – if anything it gives the coach more time to look at individual players.

Another coach tells us that "the key to any session is planning – and putting fallback plans in place."

He explains: "If you plan a session for, say, 25 players, you should also have an idea what you'll do if only 15 turn up, for one reason or another. Have some idea of what you can scale back to – sometimes it's just a matter of making a pitch smaller, but you have to bear in mind that players still need to get as many breathers along the way as they get if there are 25 players present.

"At least the senior coach in this question has a fair idea he's going to have about 14 players, so he can plan accordingly."

The Coach is compiled by Liam Horan. Questions to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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