Clearly, the more coaches you have on the field during practice, the smaller your groups can be and the more individual attention can be given each player. Greater individual focus usually leads to longer attention spans, more activity and less standing around wasting time. If you know ahead of time how many helpers you’ll have with you, you can quickly organize a practice that will be lively and fast-paced, as well as thorough. Many of the drills available in CoachDeck are designed with small groups or stations in mind. By rotating three players each through four 15-minute stations, you’ve used an hour of practice time while keeping all of your players active and working on four separate skills!

One thing to keep in mind is, there is a difference between teaching sports, and simply supervising an activity or drill. This is one of the reasons CoachDeck is so valuable to the volunteer coach. Now you can be confident that your assistant coaches are teaching the same things you teach, and your players are not getting conflicting messages. Simply asking three players to “go over there with Timmy’s dad and work on fielding” isn’t good enough unless you agree with what Timmy’s dad is doing. It is awkward when someone is nice enough to chip in and help at practice but then you hear him teaching something different than you. I recommend you delegate easy-to-understand drills to helpers who haven’t coached with you before so that you don’t end up having to stop what you’re doing and “coach” the coach. On the other hand, having moms and dads, (and siblings), who are willing to help in this way is tremendous and should be taken advantage of.