End of Season: Reflections on Coaching

This year, I was an assistant coach for a high school girls rugby team. I've done a previous post comparing coaching to teaching, and my view on that hasn't changed much. If anything, I agree with it more. My goal is to be a middle school math teacher, and I am well aware that many most middle school students don't like math. They think it's hard, they don't want to do it, and they don't try. As a teacher, a large part of my job isn't teaching math, but getting students interested in math and trying their best. I never thought I would have that problem with my rugby girls. As the season went on, we had problems with getting girls to commit to attending practice. If you don't practice together, you sure as heck aren't going to play well together. It was frustrating not only to the coaches, but to the 9 or so girls that did come prepared every day. As a teacher, I can understand that I will have to convince students it is worth their time and effort to participate in math class. As a coach, it's hard to understand that I need to convince players to put time and effort into a sport they volunteered to play. How do you encourage players when your team is so small that we can't sit out players who don't come to practice? If I can figure out how to inspire my rugby players, then it seems like I'll sure know how to translate that into the classroom.

The first thing I turn to in times like this is reflection. As a teacher, I constantly reflect on what is going on in the classroom, and how to improve it. I also try to regularly ask my students for feedback. As a coach, I tried to do the same (heck, this post is just a long reflection). The coaches regularly talked with our captains about what the team should work on, and how to best improve those skills. Sometimes we would give the team a choice of what they wanted to do next. The girls wanted to do full-tackle scrimmages to prepare for games. However, it's hard to do 15 vs. 15 scrimmages when you only have 10 people at practice (can you tell I'm still a little frustrated?).

One thing I know we could have improved on was planning practices. I would neverrr walk into my classroom without a lesson plan (even if it's a little vague sometimes), but we ended up starting rugby practice without a plan regularly. Yes, it's hard to get 4-6 adults together on a regular basis to plan. But maybe we could have rotated planning, or stayed an extra ten minutes after practice in order to plan the next practice. There were times when we would plan out practice, and it would go really well. There were also times when we would plan out practice and we couldn't follow it because we didn't have enough players to do what we had planned.

While I enjoyed getting to know the girls and teaching them an awesome sport, I'm relieved that the season is over. The best I can do for next season is remain positive and try to support the players that do come. And recruit like crazy before next season!

[Source]