Today’s article is a guest post from Darren Talbot; Professional coach, Managing Director of Darren Talbot Cricket Coaching and founder committee member of the Surrey ECB Coaches Association.

It’s a moment we have all faced, and dreaded, as a cricket coach.

Standing in front of you is a group of 25 kids, all itching to get going. All you have is your own knowledge and perhaps – if you are lucky – the help of an unqualified parent.

Having been one of those very coaches for 5 years myself I feel your pain.

I went on to coach professionally for 10-15 hours per week all year round subsequently. I can see an enormous difference in knowledge and experience which makes a vast difference to club coaching sessions and the overall development of club colts.

In an ideal world, once you have more than 16 you split the group into 2 with a coach looking after one group and one the other in the same general area of the ground.

1. Using unqualified helpers

An unqualified coach has insufficient knowledge of coaching to be able to run a session themselves, even with some guidance.

The best solution to this problem is to run a coach and coach “helper” training day at the start of each season to run through some games and ideas which will be used during the season. 

By this stage the season's coaching plan for all groups should be known and distributed so there's no reason why this can't be done. This sort of session need only take a couple of hours but will really help the coaches with their delivery during the season.

If the club doesn't have anyone internally who is confident to run a training session there are usually nearby coaching companies who could help. It's well worth it.

Once you have trained and organised coaches you then have to get the coaching right.

2. Sticking to the book

At many clubs I see excellent examples of what I call "coaching course coaching". Here coaches stick rigidly to the guideline coaching plans and methods without consideration of whether it's working.

You can self-test on this. Ask yourself these questions, and answer honestly.

• Is your warm up cricket specific and fun?
• Is it the right length relative to your overall session time, or does it maybe go on a little long?
• Are your skills sessions overly descriptive?
• When you are demonstrating skills what percentage of your group are watching intently and what percentage are talking/fighting, etc?
• How long is your group sitting around inactive in an average session?
• How many times do you stop the activity once it gets going to go over coaching points?
• If you asked your group each week what their favourite part of the session was, how many would say the game at the end?

3. Not playing games

For me, games and competition is how colts learn best.

If they are focusing on beating their peers in the other team, they will naturally be striving to play the game properly as that will be their best chance of winning.

There are a number of “games” that can be played during a coaching session which can be used to coach skills but in a competitive format and the beauty is the colts will pester you every week to play them again.

• Hand Hockey
• King of the Hill
• Number High Catch game
• Squares (or Boxes)
• Hit the Stumps
• Target Bowling
• Non-stop Continuous Cricket
• Diamond Cricket
• Three Tee Game

You can use and adapt all of those games for groups right up to and including under 11s - and potentially beyond - to help them learn the basic skills of cricket and enjoy playing the game.

As the groups start to play matches there will undoubtedly be match specific work to be done (for example Pairs Cricket, match scenarios), ideally on a square, but in terms of skills and techniques there is a game for everything!

4. Last minute preparation

Many coaches, due to the nature of the volunteer network which underpins them, organise their sessions at the last minute. If you’re lucky then sessions might be organised for the whole summer in advance. 

But how often are sessions organised for the summer bearing in mind the pathway these players are going on?

What young cricketers need is a programme for them all the way from under 8s through to under 13s and beyond to ensure that every aspect of the game is covered in their cricketing development. 

Individual group annual plans rarely consider this.

That’s why the Club Colts Training Programme was created – to use my experience of the pace of developing players to apply to your own club. Instantly download your own copy here.