Football
The Pad will be mightier than the pen
Last week was certainly an exciting week in the life of iDrills. The work that has been done on the app up to now behind the scenes has been well worth the wait to witness on screen. To see a functioning app in action certainly adds to the excitement of the whole project.
While i-Drills as a concept has been in my head for 15 months getting it into a working, functional app has taken a long, long time. From conceptual drawings to design and development it has taken hours and hours of work from many people.
While the pace of design and development can be somewhat frustrating, it would seem that time spent ruminating over little pieces of design will result in a far better user experience.
Born out of watching many coaches spend many hours creating training sessions and drills on pen and paper only for them to be tossed in the bin at the end of the day frustrated me. Good ideas are valuable resources were lost to the landfill every year. And this was often the case due to either a coach’s lack of confidence in relation to the computers or because of the lack of resources readily available to coaches. That is why from the outside I insisted on a user interface that was faster and more accurate than using a pencil or pen.
The user experience itself while not exactly unique will in the hands of an experience coach saved them so much time and you give them a much better resource than anything else currently available. The ability to create and consume content will be unique in this niche; most other applications either allow you to only create or only assume the content within.
While being given a video demonstration over Skype from Devon the UI certainly seems very slick and fast. It behaves exactly as I imagine it. And with those last few weeks of design and development to go, I am confident that iDrills will be a successful and addition to the coach’s armoury.
Slash and Burn – the new method of manager management.
Surprisingly in the time of season normally dominated by talk of player transfers, the paddy few weeks have seen a focus on a glut of transfers or managers to and from the dole queue, but there’s little shortage of people willing to jump right back into the frying pan.
There seems, at times, little justification in the reasons given by owners or chairmen as to why they choose to get rid of a manager. In days of yore, a manager’s position was rock solid; a time spent in the trenches as a coach, career defining chats in the boot room (or pub) and a guiding light in the form of a mentor all helped shape the style of a future boss. When the time was right the club would come calling and often promoted from within.
Those days are long gone.
Nowadays, players frantically look to complete their coaching qualifications towards the end of their careers when it dawns upon them that life could either get a) boring or b) hard work if they choose not to work in football. What job? Any job as long as I can remain in the environs on the football world. Many players become physios, fitness coaches or analysts – some take the traditional root as youth team coaches and then progress up through the ranks. However, for many, the eye is still on the big prize as Manager of the Football Club.
There are few careers, if any, where without any formal training or experience, the keys to the company’s safe are thrown to an amateur – however well intentioned he is. With a budget of millions, possibly, to spend and management of an often, highly qualified group of staff to manage, is it little wonder that so many first time managers fail. Over 50% never return to the hotseat.
Liverpool have this week bucked the trend by appointing from within, a man who embodies the ethos of the club a a whole. Kenny Dalglish has been there and done that in football and was brought up through the management methods of old. Now older and wiser, he has been charged with enlivening the Liverbird. A club which is on it’s knees has turned to it’s greatest son.
Will it work? Time, as they say, will tell. Ah time! The resource which,unfortunately, most managers today don’t get!
Give me a break? No chance!
One; One solitary match is all that we (Colchester United)
played in the whole of December 2010! The weather did for most of
sport in the UK and Ireland as well as large parts of the rest of
Western Europe. It has therefore reignited the debate over the
mid-season break for sport. There are many sides to this debate but
overwhelmingly there is agreement that it’s just too difficult to
decide when any such break should occur. Take for example the last
two years where there has been significant snowfall just prior to
Christmas. This would point to a mid-season break being ideally in
December. Five months done since pre-season and with five months of
the season to go, the changing of surface conditions during
training, as well as a chance for a little reconditioning as the
demands of the season become increasingly hard. Christmas
celebrated with everyone else. Not on your life the business men
would say – Christmas brings in bumper crowds, and a rare chance to
sell all that additional merchandise. It’s also a great time, if it
happens to your team, to get some real momentum running as the
games come thick and fast. So managers too would be only too keen
to get the games on. For players, I’m not too sure… On to
January; traditionally a month with the most disruptive weather. FA
Cup time in football! Preparations for the Six Nations in Rugby.
Major phases in the season then. Yes a match free weekend would be
great to give everyone a break after the hectic Christmas schedule.
However, I would suspect, the everyone would ramp up training for a
few days ( some topping up if you like) and then send everyone away
for a long weekend. But now the transfer window is in January,
deals need to be done. And that means getting the new boys to
quickly gel with the old ones and build some team spirit. The
business men won’t want it and neither would the managers who are
busy either reinforcing a successful or a struggling team. In fact
many teams, in the top levels of sport use January for warm weather
training camps in Spain, Portugal and Dubai. They create their own
mini-breaks and they can afford it but that isn’t a possibility for
the other clubs, who because of their less than premier facilities,
may already be adding games into an already crowded fixture
schedule. it is worth remembering that a lower end Premier League
Team may play up to 10less matches in the season than some of the
more successful Championship or League 1/2 teams. A winter break is
fine in theory – in practice it’s too difficult to manage. We could
all have a break, the weather would be fine and when we return from
it, a nicely timed cold front could mean we are back to square one
with regards to fixture congestion. Which is exactly where we are
now! Best we live things as they are.
Weather, or not, here we don’t go!
Well, yet another weather affected cancellation of sport that is affecting both players and fans, not to mention the management team. The weather not only causes problems logistically in terms of games having to be rescheduled, but also in the day-to-day planning of training and in making sure the players are in top condition when it comes to matchday!
As frustrating as it is the fans not to see their teams play, it is perhaps more frustrating for the players and the management who spend so much time preparing a team for these matches, the tapering of training (periodisation if you like) means that we’re constantly trying to ensure the players are physical prepared for each match. Not easy when you consider the disparity of facilities available to teams at different levels of the game. Even all-weather pitches are struggling to be available in this bad weather period. It sometimes requires thinking outside the box to keep training fresh and interesting, perhaps thinking of alternative training methods to prevent staleness! Again, not exactly easy at a time of year when other facilities are booked out!!
And with the severity of the weather we’ve experienced even getting to a training ground can cause major problems for players and staff; even getting out of the house can be a major obstacle for most people.
In effect this weather induced break could be a major momentum changer for teams participating in various leagues! Teams that had momentum may lose it, and a team that had none could suddenly gain it! Hardly a great state of affairs if you’ve invested much time creating momentum, team spirit and a great level of physical preparedness! It will require a great art of management to ensure that momentum is maintained, or changed if that’s appropriate, through what has been really difficult period of planning.
Even the possibility of warm weather training camps has been lost, not only because of the schedule of games during December, but because the airports are closed too! However, one benefit of the enforced break is that it does give a fantastic opportunity for injured players to complete their rehab and get back in contention.
So what does all this mean for the rest of the season; a multitude of games to be played in an extraordinarily short period of time placing great demands on the resources of clubs and the roster of players. This plays into the hands of those teams with greater resources able to hold the largest squad, with rotation of their players a possibility in order to maintain freshness.
Extending the length of the season is not a viable option with the end of the season traditionally tied to the play-offs at Wembley; this increases the pressure to shoe-horn games in. So all we can do is prepare the players as best we can and strap ourselves in for a hectic schedules of matches and travelling!
The Dave Carolan Blog 