PLAYER DEVELOPMENT
Ministry of Football believes in letting players set their own limits on what they want to achieve and how good they can become. We recognise that it may take many mistakes before a player achieves success, and we encourage all players to experiment with different solutions in order to find answers that they are comfortable with.
Many other coaching programmes teach players text-book packaged techniques, and restrict the players to using only these solutions to problems they face in games. On these programmes, coaches provide constant information to their players on what to do next (Push up! Pass! Shoot! etc). In doing this, they produce players who are dependant on the coach, and whose level of development cannot surpass that of the coach who is instructing them.
Ministry of Football does not believe in restricting players to a set of particular answers. We do not scream instructions at the players (they can’t hear us anyway because of the music!). And we do not tell players off for making mistakes, for taking risks, or for trying new things. We want to help to produce players who are better than we are, players who take the game beyond its current limits, we want to be amazed by what our players can do.
“It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching manual skills. For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special. Mostly it is time - unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practised to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organise and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create...The great player, having seen and done more things, has in his muscles the memory of more notes, more combinations and patterns of notes, played in more different ways. Faced with a situation, his body responds. Faced with something more, something new, it finds an answer he didn’t know was there. He invents the game.”
- from The Game by Ken Dryden, ex Canadian Ice Hockey Goalkeeper
