10 A Young Teacher's Guide To School Sport

It is important that you become an enthusiastic coach and mentor to your team and that you enjoy your involvement.

1.Encourage the players to enjoy practice and the games.

2.Analyse each game and aim to correct problems at training and work on them in the next game.

3.Use praise during your team talks before, during and after the game.

4.Point out areas where the team needs to improve. Use your team runner to let players know during the game how to improve their performances. Acknowledge any success they have and continue to give advice as required.

5.Set team goals for each game and give the team an assessment of how well they accomplished those goals.

6.Always look for positives in all games especially in losses.

7.Record results; write a game report and record votes in your awards system, e.g. best and fairest, most improved and so on.

8.In games where a scoring system is more complicated, e.g. baseball, cricket, train your scorer to a high degree of efficiency for the score book can tell you much about the team performance and is necessary for use in deciding team awards.

9.Teams must practise at least once a week.

10.Have a team meeting early on the day of the game to check on sickness, injury and absentees. Announce your starting team for the day and any special duties, game time, transport arrangements and perhaps game tactics.

Be aware there may be slow developers in your team or students new to your game. Give them the same attention as you give the more experienced/talented. You'll be surprised in the long term of the contribution they will make to your team if you persevere with them. These are often players who love the game and will always give their best. When they leave school, these players will often become the organizational strength behind their local sporting club or association.