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Friday, September 9, 2011

Long Distance Coaching

As the summer quickly ended and the new school year began, the "regular" roles of our Cadet team coaching staff have also started. I think if we all had a preference we would move all our potential cadet team World Championship athletes to a localized area for the year and train together. Unfortunately the size of our country, and the fact that our coaching staff has full time jobs makes that is a little difficult (thankfully we are teachers and full time coaches of other teams - so we are able to escape and enjoy the privilege of coaching the cadet team).

My goal with this blog is to post relatively regularly on our happenings during our cadet team "off season"...hopefully about once a month, to provide some insight on how we try to keep the program and our athletes operating from a distance.

After the National Championships (held in Winnipeg) ended in August, where we were able to complete further player evaluation, we have been working on a plan to regularly communicate, monitor and have our athletes progress in preparation for the World Championships next summer. Not the easiest task when most of us are several miles apart.

Thankfully, technology these days will hopefully make this easier and help us to shrink the country a little bit. First, our coaching staff has been able to connect via - phone, email, text, bbm, conference call, skype, etc...and with the availability to share video and other content on several different internet sites and programs we hope to be able to provide athletes with video examples of what we would like them to be working on, as well as have them return video of them performing specific tasks. The only difficulty with this is getting the video recorded and set up (who, when and where will this be done). We also hope to regularly communicate with on site coaches who get to work with the athletes on a day to day basis, and provide the athletes with an appropriate physical training program to aid their development in areas other than just basketball skill.

If things work out as we hope, our next training camp leading up to the World's will be around Christmas time which should provide a great in person progress report on the athlete's development in addition to what we will receive .

As we continue to work I will keep you posted!