Team Debrief

Optimizing Learning Through Your Team Debrief

At Beyond Pulse we care about how you can optimize the use of our technology to positively influence your team. Our commitment is to the continued education of coaches and to support in helping to identify and understand the ‘best practices’ while using the Beyond Pulse app. This short article presents an opportunity for coaches to maximize the “Sync” time between the app and your team’s Smart Belts at the end of a practice or game.

Scenario

You have just finished your training session. You planned your session to maximize its impact on your team’s performance. You set up the activities before the session began and the transitions were effective and fluid. Additionally, you connected all of your player’s smart belts at the beginning of the session so you can study the effect of the session on your team afterwards. At the end of the session, your players have picked up all of the balls, bibs, and cones and returned these items to you (all while being timed to make it as quick as possible!). Now, the team huddles around you as you sync the smart belts to the app. Even though the total sync time to capture every player’s data is less than 60 seconds, we still think this is a great opportunity to promote good post practice interactions with your team and enhance the opportunity for increased learning!

The Research

The sync time at the end of your session coincides with the most overlooked portion of practice – the team debrief.

When we take a look at the research, one of the most important skills for a coach is effective communication (if you really want to up your game with this, we recommend checking out this book – Understanding Sports Coaching, 2^nd Edition by Cassidy, Potrac & Jones (2009)). Specifically, we stress the importance of communications between the coach and their players. Quality communication with your team should resemble more of a conversation rather than a lecture, especially when seeking to create an inclusive environment! Preferably, it is well understood that the use of questioning is an effective way to engage your players in a conversation about the training session.

While it is important for coaches to be able to concisely convey messages to their team, communication is not a one-way street. Coaches must be open to receiving messages, meaning listening intently to player feedback. Well, there is no better time to listen to player feedback than in the team debrief!

This form of interpersonal feedback, if delivered effectively, can enhance the self-efficacy of your players (Saville et al, 2014 – click here for full article). If you can shape your team debrief to engage your players in a conversation, then your team talks can greatly impact and influence the direction of your team. So let’s see what this might look like…

Potential Team Debrief

Your team is huddled around you (within range for the sync!) and ready for the team debrief. How can we shape the debrief so that the players are engaged and provide feedback?

• Provide a quick 15 second session summary:
  • In order to frame the questions to get the desired feedback, a quick recap is necessary to provide the foundations for the following questions.
• Ask questions to the players to get feedback about the training session:
  • What did you like about training? Why?
  • What did you like less about training? Why?
  • Would you change anything about training?
  • What were the three coaching points?
  • Why do you think the blue team won the final game?
• Self-Reflection
  • Rate your performance at practice (1-5).
  • Having every player rate their performance provides coaches a platform to reach out to individual players, as well as identify the collective perceived performance of the group.

You, the coach, can positively influence the team through engaging players individually in the team debrief. Syncing the smart belts at the end of a session provides you with the opportunity to enhance your communication with your team. Through an effective team debrief, you have the potential to build your relationship with your players, and reaffirm all you will have achieved together in this particular episode out on the field!