Petter Storaas (Coach)

Mats Hordvik (Norwegian School of Sport Sciences)

Monolitten Innebandy Club: Facebook

Hi and thank you for reading this blog post. I am Petter and I am the coach of a Floorball team for 11-year boys. Floorball is like an indoor version of hockey. There are 10 players on the team, and I am the father of one of the players. I have experience with coaching adults at the highest level, but no prior experience with children. My reason for engaging with the MiYS principles was because I initially found it difficult to engage the boys and keep their concentration during training and matches. After engaging with the MiYS principles and chatting with my critical friend Mats, I decided to start off by exploring two principles: ‘Principle 1: Knowing the individual’ and ‘Principle 5: Being a reflective coach’. Below I share my experience of engaging with the two principles.  

Principles as a guide

There are different ways of engaging with the principles and I believe it is important that you find your way of using them. I decided to use the principles as a starting point for guiding or focusing my practice on certain aspects. Instead of using a lot of time reading the principles and deciding on specific actions or making a detailed long-term plan for how to implement each one, I used the principle headlines to focus my attention. For example, with ‘Principle 1 Knowing the individual’ in mind, I aimed to get to know each individual even better, both as a child/person and a player. This made me more aware of individual differences and how the children preferred me to interact with them before, during, and after training and matches. For example, I have always believed in encouraging and praising all players during training and matches. But gradually I realized that one of the boys did not respond well to my praise. And when the two of us talked about it he told me that he would rather me tell him what to do before or after training sessions rather than give him praise that he felt was not warranted.  

Principle 5: being a reflective coach as the foundation

When starting to explore the principles, I interpreted them and felt that each was separate from the others. That is, as five single principles that could be used to facilitate my coaching. After having explored ‘Principle 1: Knowing the individual’ and ‘Principle 5: Being a reflective coach’, I came to recognize the principles as being connected and that ‘Principle 5 Being a reflective coach’ acted as a facilitator and the foundation for the other principles. For example, as a way to become a reflective coach, I have asked the players to provide feedback on my coaching while writing notes on each player based on chatting with and deliberately observing them.  

Developing miys communities

While having experienced it as meaningful to explore the list of principles, I have missed the opportunity to discuss the principles with, and learn about meaningful coaching from, other coaches. I have not had a coaching colleague to discuss these ideas with and Mats has not been able to come to training and discuss them with me as much as we had hoped for. I, therefore, argue that a MiYS community can provide meaningful learning experiences for coaches interested in exploring the principles. For example, collaboration and/or mentorship within or between sports clubs where coaches can share experiences and learn from each other.