There are many facets to coaching: the mental game, athlete development, team building, and game management. These areas should be handled differently. Academic learning is different than athletic development. Specificity as it relates to adaption is the most important principle of athlete development. https://www.sports-training-adviser.com/specificityprinciple.html This will probably not help the discussion, but it is an illustration. The military uses models, such as sand tables, to teach officers how to manage a battle from a command post behind the forward lines. They do essentially the same things during "command post exercises" as they do during an actual battle. The military doesn't use these models to teach solders on the dirty end how to fight and win battles. The military uses classrooms to teach some subjects but teaching how to fight is done in the field. We don't use the same method to teach a soldier how to do a fallout prediction or plot artillery fire as we do teaching how to react to an ambush. Likewise the coach's choice of teaching method should vary with the subject. Athletic skills won't improve from using models, digital or not. I stress cues because cues are critical if you are training decision making and speed of play. Those, along with technique, are what I consider the highest priority areas for a coach. These are the horse pulling the tactics cart.
@Peter Rival By the way your analysis of your son's keeper experience is mistaken. There are two attacking ends of the field and the keeper spends 100% of his time in one of them. Keepers sometimes make good coaches because to succeed they have to understand both attacking and defending. It acutally is common to have players enjoy playing both keeper and striker.
As a keeper I assure you it is not mistaken, but you seem quite assured of the correctness of your position regardless the objections by others so I'm just going to drop it.
This is the mistake I was referring to: "Despite only seeing the attacking third of the field from the far end...." Keepers spend the entire match in their opponent's attacking third. They watch the opponent's attack unfold, which provides their cues.
Renegade does both; you're not just watching a video, but also doing the work at the same time. I also like that the program has progress benchmarks baked in. When my kids saw how far they'd come, it helped keep them going.
Thanks for the input. Here is what I put together for both of my teams. Even if they just do a "little" more than they normally would - I expect to see an improvement. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nx5zZkRso8Ko_l8kjdsQM5ES8S7KLwuiXOimc_wc90w/edit?usp=sharing I have $200 in prize money as motivation. Not sure how I will divvy it up yet. If everyone participates - I'll make it even. If 2 or 3 players blow everyone out of the water - They'll get most of it. I put in a tab for "Suggested Things to Do" - Not a hard and fast list and they have freedom to do what they want. I have a tab for each week of the summer. They will enter the activity that they did and I'll assign the appropriate amount of points.
@Timbuck You are apparently encouraging unsupervised weight training by 12 and 13 year old girls. From a safety aspect, I think this is a mistake regardless of gender or age. From the spreadsheet, it appears to me that you don't know much about weight lifting so I am not going to suggest that you design and supervise the training sessions. Please, this is a safety issue. "Youth weight training programs should be supervised by well trained coaches or instructors with appropriate certification." https://exrx.net/WeightTraining/Weightlifting/Youth
I appreciate the comments. They have all been attending a gym with a trainer for about 8 weeks. I only recommend body weight or exercise bands at this stage.