Coaches stop watching before the session ends

Attention fades on the touchline like anywhere else, and the last third of every session goes uncoached.

My own concentration goes at about the seventy minute mark. I keep talking, I keep moving the drills along, and if I am honest the corrections after that point are worse, later and more generic than the ones I made at twenty minutes. Coaches talk endlessly about athlete fatigue and almost never about their own.

It matters because the end of a session is where the interesting information is. Fatigue exposes technique, it exposes decision making, and it exposes the players who compensate in ways that will eventually cost them. That is the richest observational window of the week and it is watched by somebody who has been standing in the cold for an hour and a half, thinking about the meeting afterwards, and looking at their phone more than they would admit.

There are cheap fixes. Rotate which coach has observation duty, so somebody arrives fresh for the last block with a specific job. Give that job a narrow brief, because watching everything means seeing nothing. One player. One quality. Write it down during the session, not from memory in the car. A coach with a single question to answer will notice things that a coach watching the whole pitch will not.

The other trick is to move. Standing in the same spot for an entire session produces one camera angle, and coaches unconsciously form judgements from whatever they can see from the halfway line. Walk behind the play. Get low. Look at feet for ten minutes and nothing else.

Filming is the obvious answer and it is only half an answer, because footage that nobody reviews is worse than useless, it provides the comfortable feeling that the observation happened. If you are going to film the last third, book the twenty minutes to watch it before you film anything.

And be honest about numbers. One coach cannot meaningfully observe twenty four athletes doing a complex drill, no matter how experienced they are. That is not a failing of attention, it is arithmetic, and it should change how many athletes are in the drill rather than how hard the coach squints.

You cannot coach what you did not see. Most of us stopped seeing before the athletes stopped working.