Women in Coaching European Indoor Diary

One of our Aberdeen Asset Management Women in Coaching programme participants Nicola Whiteford wrote a diary of her experience when the ladies went to Prague for the women’s Euro Indoor Hockey Championships.

There was lots of top international hockey being displayed, where our coaching superstars observed and developed valuable coaching techniques and skills. Read about their trip below.

Day 1: On Thursday we had an early flight from Edinburgh to Prague and the group of us that had stayed overnight met up with Audrey Sime, leader of the trip, in the airport. We also met umpire Maggie Conacher who was on her way to Lithuania to umpire at the group II competition, where Scotland were playing. With an uneventful flight we arrived to a very cold Prague and made our way to the hotel. After arriving at the hotel we had a meeting to discuss what we would be looking at in the matches during the coming days and we also went over what we wanted to get out of the trip. Some of the things that the coaches wanted to improve were their knowledge of how to take stats, tactics for attacking and defending in indoor but also what we could take away for our team for the upcoming outdoor season. With free time in the afternoon we decided to go and see some of the tourist sights.

 

Day 2: The first game of the competition was Belarus v Austria at 10:30am so we decided to get up early so that we could go and see the warm up before the match. While at breakfast in the hotel we found out that the German, Czech and Dutch teams, and tournament officials and umpires were also staying at the hotel and during the weekend we got chatting to some of them and were able to ask how things were going.

During our briefing meeting, the night before, Audrey had split us in to pairs so that two of us were looking at each team and we decided what we were going to take stats on. So when it came to the match we took stats on different things and this helped us to discuss at half time how each team was playing and what they needed to improve on for the second half. The next game was Poland v France and again we had been given a country to look at and chose something else to take stats on. For the third game of Netherlands v England we took our own notes and had to decide what we were going to tell England for the half time and full time team talk. This was very helpful as we used our stats for the team talk and then we could see if the England coach had seen the same things as we had and what he had asked the team to change. The rest of the day continued like this with people taking stats and discussing what the teams were doing and how they could improve. We even tweeted @Eurohockey to say we were there and we were #learninglots which got us a tweet back with a picture of us in the stands for #proof.The end of the day finished with a de-brief in the hotel of what we had seen and how we could put this in to our own coaching and improve our own teams’ performance.

WIC abroad tweet

 

Day 3: Saturday started much the same as the day before with each of us taking different stats on the games and talking over the teams’ tactics; we also looked at player’s individual skills and anything we would like to take to use with our own teams. With a two hour lunch break before the next round of matches Audrey put us in to pairs again and each pair had to set up tactics and a team talk for the attacking or defensive play for the England team in their next game against France. This was very useful as we could see if the England coach had the same ideas for tactics as we had. He had used some the tactics we had put forward but he also used man to man marking which we hadn’t discussed and this actually worked well for the England team. The day ended with another de-brief on the day’s games and whether we had achieved the targets that we wanted to get out of the weekend. Everyone agreed that it had been a very helpful weekend with lots of discussion and ideas that we could take away to use when coaching our own teams.

We were also able to have a bit of a laugh on the last night as during our meeting there was a party going on in the bar area and a Czech girl came and asked where we were from and what we were doing in Prague. When we said we were there to watch hockey this got lost in translation and there was a lot of scratching of heads about how to describe “watching hockey”. Justine eventually came up with the solution by showing the girl a clip of a game that she had taken on her iPad. This caused great hilarity later on when we looked back on it.

 

Day 4: We hadn’t planned to go and watch any of the hockey on Sunday but as England were playing the first game against Belarus and they had to get a win to stay in the group we were really interested in going to see the game. It was a good game to watch with England playing well at times but the Belarus team were just a bit too strong for them and England could not get the win they needed.

Overall it was a very good weekend with a lot of discussion. Everyone went away with new ideas and we were already planning the next tournament we were going to go to as a group on the way home.

 

Find out more about the scheme and the women here. The next trip for the women in coaching will be at the Glasgow National Hockey Centre at the Champions Challenge I, if you want to learn more as a coach and learn from observing and discussing some top international hockey then check out our coaching courses here.

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