David Becker is an authority in preparing athletes for performance. Since 1994, David Becker has worked with more than 2500 youth and professional athletes from all sporting codes. By 2008, David had accumulated more than 400 games as team physiotherapist of elite sporting teams. He has been instrumental in designing mental toughness programs for athletes as well as facilitating leadership programs with senior leadership groups in team environments. Being involved at this level has meant that he has been able to experience (sometimes at a deeply personal level) the realities that young athletes have to endure competing at such a level, as well as the difficulties and challenges that coaches and parents are faced with when coaching and guiding young athletes to be the best they can be.
His research exposed huge gaps between coaching methods and styles in order to unleash that hidden potential. His quest to find answers to the missing elements of a sports performance led him to write a international best seller books with another elite sportsman, Australian Rugby League player, Scott Hill, called Secrets of Winning Coaches Revealed and Secrets of Inspirational Captains Revealed. The books are invaluable to any sportsperson or coach who are serious about aspiring for their best.
Go Hockey News are pleased to acquire David’s writing expertise as he shares with readers player tips and coaching secrets. In this blog, David shares the game preparation strategies of sporting icons, Greg Chappell, Brad Fittler, Geoff Marsh and hockey’s own Rick Charlesworth.
Game Preparation Strategies
Australian hockey coach, Ric Charlesworth said this about game preparation: “You’ve got to prepare your players to play in the hot house.” It’s about preparing individuals well enough so when they get in the pressure cooker, they can deliver.
The more you read about champions, the more you learn about how they got there. They have mastered the process of self-awareness. They know how to use their strengths; they know their game, and they prepare for every occurrence so that when they’re under pressure, or in the hothouse, it automatically happens – they can consistently perform under any circumstances. ,
Here are a few steps you can take to help you prepare for a game:
- Feed your memory bank by playing and training in as many different environments and against as many different competitors as you can. (This will only apply in certain sports.) In doing so, you will learn about stress through playing in a competitive environment.
- Always practice and train the way you want to play. Always play at the highest level you can cope with and when you are ready to extend yourself further, look to the next level. You should use competition to facilitate higher learning. Initially play against players of the same level to help your developmental progress and use lower-level competition to introduce new ideas into your game but whenever possible stimulate a match environment in your training.
- Organise yourself for success. “Plan to succeed or prepare to fail” is the motto in this regard. Being organised is one of the most important skills great athletes possess.Organising yourself consists of:
• Setting goals and achieving them in a step-by-step process.
• Ensuring you are healthy and fit at all times.
• Reflecting on your performances.
• Creating systems that work for you.In your sport, you need to know how long it takes you to get organised and do all the preparation that needs to be done. Before any event you need to be in the right frame of mind and that will mean doing all the steps you need to do to get yourself ready for the start of a game or event. When preparing for a match, spend five minutes by yourself at the ground and think of all the things you need to do to perform.
- Focus your energies in the areas that will provide you the most upside. You can spend a lot of time practicing the things you are already good at. Practice the things that you are not so good at – the areas that will help you be a better player.
- Don’t put any pressure on yourself to win. In a team environment, you can’t do much about winning so you can only ensure you perform your role to the best of your ability. However, you can do your job and do it well and the team can still lose. The only thing that you can control is the work you put into your preparation and your actions on the field. If you do this, you can live with yourself regardless of the result. Pressure is very much self-imposed.
- Great players are one step ahead of the rest. They have the ability to perform and make decisions in the smallest amount of time. This ability is rehearsed over and over again in training so that when an individual has to deliver when it really counts, they can do so.
- Understand the process of self-awareness. This is the process of self-analysing and looking at one’s strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities for growth and development in one’s game. The questions young athletes should be asking themselves are, “Do I know my role” and if you do, the next question is “Do I know what is expected of me in my role.” Thereafter it’s a case of making sure you have the skills to ensure you can perform in the role you have been selected for. Only then can you critique your skills after every training session or game.
Use this series of questions in training or in a match:
• Who’s got the ball?
• Where am I?
• What’s my job?
• What should I be doing?
• What am I doing?
A key to game preparation is it needs to be consistently applied once the most ideal strategies are identified. How many times do you witness a winning hockey team lose a game they expected to win the week after a great game performance. Generally if skill levels and strategies are constant what is the difference? One answer may be found in game preparation. Let game preparation become an applied discipline.
These excerpts taken from “Secrets of Winning Coaches Revealed and “Secrets of Inspirational Captains Revealed”
More about David Becker
David was raised in the coastal town of Durban South Africa. He was an elite youth athlete excelling in swimming, rugby and waterpolo. This sports passion was the catalyst for his involvement in sports physiotherapy. In 1994, David was working on the international stage as Head Physiotherapist of the South African National Football Team. His tenure with the team over the next six years is still one of the most successful in the Country’s history culminating with Bafana Bafana winning the 1996 African Cup of Nations. David and the team were awarded Special State Awards by Mr Nelson Mandela for their contribution to the National Team.
For more information about these books
Secrets of Winning Coaches Revealed
Secrets of Inspirational Captains Revealed
Click on the Sports Wisdom banner on this page:
