This week, Steve led on the youngest session while I was able to take payments and engage with parents. Gavin arrived for the second session, with Chris available for the first 10 minutes to take payments in order to save from the hassle of doing it at the end.
Unfortunately, at the end of the second session we did receive our first complaint from a parent. He felt that standards had slipped in the previous couple of weeks and that his son was not engaging in as much as he should do. Despite being completely unqualified, he listed a number of things that he would like to see in future, largely involving static line drills which would make it “less crazy” and mean we could “look at them more individually”.
Everything I have ever been taught in coaching has been to keep away from line drills. After all, I am still waiting for the first time a cone is going to move to force a player to make a decision! Whilst I have confidence in my ability to coach and Gavin to do so as well, receiving comments like this don’t help your ability to run the session in the right mindset. Gavin and I agreed that in future we would be louder and more vocal to see if this made a difference to what he thought.