Enjoying Football in Kirkwall on a Saturday Morning: A Coaching Session for Adults
Key Highlights :
It’s Saturday morning in Kirkwall, Scotland and the sun isn’t quite shining, the birds seem to be having a morning off, as I make my way up the hill to the high school. But I’m not here to visit any classrooms – instead, I’m headed for the astroturf outside, where a small group is already gathered for a Scottish Football Association (SFA) coaching session. The attendees are not children but rather parents, who are here to learn how to coach the beautiful game.
The event is being run by Michael Mackenzie and Graeme Sutherland who have travelled here from their respective bases in Inverness and Forres. It might seem to some like a long way to come for a relatively brief event, but this is the first face-to-face session they’ve been able to put on here since the Covid pandemic. The programme actually started with online learning sessions, but while getting out on the grass - or the stuff standing in for grass - obviously matters for a football coach, these ones also see the value in meeting people where they are instead of always expecting them to travel elsewhere.
“We get better buy in because we’re willing to put the miles in,” Michael says.
The attendees are here to learn how to coach in a way that encourages young people – all young people – to play. “This is all about activity that facilitates practice,” Graeme tells me as the first drills get going. “It’s about participation and making football accessible.” That certainly fits the overall SFA philosophy, which aims to keep football “trophy free” until children reach secondary school age.
The drills are intended to get people laughing and smiling more than sweating. There’s a 1-on-1 game where the object is to touch your opponent’s knee; after that, teams of four link hands and then have to keep rotating left and right to prevent a fifth participant from tagging a targeted member of their circle. Gradually, things become a bit more recognisable as football training, with ‘chest and pass’ drills following by a comparatively complex ‘call and response’ type task where a coach gives quick and constantly changing instructions (“header, chest, header”; “left volley, chest, right volley”) to the individual they’re working with.
The conversations that are happening throughout are also a world away from the old-fashioned approach of motivating people with little more than volume. People are talking about failing not just being OK but necessary, and it’s the first time I’ve heard someone use properly the word ‘differentiation’ (a teaching approach in which different tasks can be provided for students with different levels of ability, or which builds allowances for different levels into expected outcomes) outside of a classroom.
Michael believes that if training had looked and felt like this when he was a boy, he would have been much more active through his adolescence and much healthier today. He was, he accepts, one of the kids for whom the old approach seemed to work just fine, but doesn’t subscribe to the “it didn’t do me any harm” school of thought. “I was always competitive,” he laughs. “Always wanted to win. So it suited me. But it doesn’t suit a lot of people.”
The SFA coaching session in Kirkwall is making football accessible and enjoyable for parents and children alike. It is creating an environment that encourages participation, and is teaching coaches how to motivate individuals with more than just volume. It is a valuable opportunity for people in rural communities to learn how to bring something valuable to their community.
So if you’re ever in Kirkwall on a Saturday morning, don’t be surprised to see a group of adults learning how to coach the beautiful game. It’s a sight that’s sure to bring a smile to your face.
