1-2-1 Hockey Coaching

It doesn't matter whether you coach at junior international level or you're a parent volunteer with very little hockey experience – having a great plan makes every session more effective, easier to run and more enjoyable to coach. Here are our top tips on session planning and why it's important. 1. Get your session off to a great start. Even five minutes of planning ensures you can come up with a fun and effective warm up that engages your players from the very start of training. Knowing that ev...

What do you do when a player asks you to help them to improve their technique? Whoever you coach and however you coach hockey will always involve hitting a ball with a stick...so how can we as coaches create an environment for players to practise this detail as well as developing each players ability to play the game? At 1-2-1 we love coaching players through gameplay and we love The Golden Thread, which is a brilliant checklist for coaches designing sessions. Great sessions do give players lots...

Having just started a 6-week indoor hockey academy with Guildford Hockey Club, I often wonder why so many outdoor players dismiss the indoor game. If we only trained for the exact sports we played, we wouldn't produce well-rounded athletes and the same applies within a sport, if we only train to play eleven aside hockey we miss the benefits of small sided, small pitch games. I am convinced that the crossover has enormous benefits, and having run the first few sessions, I saw as much development ...

Do you count out every ball, bib and cone at the start of each session?Do you always stack your cones in colour order?Do you have a piece of rope 16 yards long that you use to measure out a circle during training?Are you about to Google '16 yard rope'? Whether the answer to these questions is a yes or a no it is always good to know that other people think the same way...and more importantly to know why? As coaches we rely on our kit; balls, bibs and cones and let's face it we are going to spend ...

Scott McNeill is Great Britain Hockey's Performance Coach Developer and he's not going to tell you how to become a better coach. Scott's Coaching Journey: Scott grew up in the sort of Hockey-crazy-family that some of us will recognise. Scott's parents and brother played, coached and managed hockey teams. Scott's Dad Harry managed Ireland's indoor and outdoor sides in the 80s and 90s and Scott was 'that hockey guy' at a predominantly rugby playing school; the kid in class that had the 1988 Gold M...

Double Olympian and European Gold medallist Glenn Kirkham is a true great of British Hockey. But at 34 Glenn made the emotional decision to play his final match for East Grinstead, ending a ten-year club career that included seven National League indoor titles. But Glenn's plans to leave Premier League Hockey behind him ended when he accepted the role of Head Coach of East Grinstead. So how has Glenn adapted? How does one of Great Britain's most talented players approach coaching? Has it been ea...

Whether it is a cold Tuesday evening in January, the first session back after the summer break, or a Thursday evening where only eight players have turned up in the rain, we have all trained in sessions where the intensity is well below the standard that makes a team successful on a Saturday afternoon. It's even worse delivering those sessions as a coach.​ ​ So how can you generate intensity in training? In the first blog post for www.1-2-1HockeyCoaching.co.uk Dan Fox discusses ways to increase ...