ENGAGEMENT - Practical Development Workshops for Community AFL Clubs

NEWS: Upcoming learning opportunities in South East Queensland - by, Craig Gunn (Coach Gunny), in collaboration with Simon Black Academy

Recruiting and retaining junior and youth Australian football (AFL) players at community clubs is challenging....

For one thing, you have to accept that kids aren't as excited about kicking a ball around in this fast-paced, modern world.

You also have to find ways of engaging and maintaining volunteers to run 'grassroots' clubs, and when you do, you are just as well to find many lose motivation because of workload.

Plus, there’s the challenge of the 'churn and burn' of our volunteer coaches crucially supporting our young players' development. Importantly, they cry out for help in supporting our young people.

As a result, maintaining growth or survival of your community AFL club is harder than most stakeholders ever dreamed of.

Fortunately, there’s a better way...

Introducing the ENGAGEMENT series, a joint venture between Coach Gunny Grassroots Consulting and Simon Black Academy. ENGAGEMENT provides your AFL club with an all-inclusive Coach/ Adult/ Player development program...so you can relax, knowing you’ve left the teaching that supports the recruitment and retention of your young people to the experts.

With the ENGAGEMENT program, we’ll educate and tailor development services to your club's needs on the 'what', 'why' and the all-important 'how' of supporting your 'unique', individual young learners, so that your organisation is continuously sought-out by players and stakeholders. Indeed you can thrive as the 'go to' club around your locality of any sporting code.

And we’ll provide a digital copy of our learning activities delivered at your club, so you don’t have to worry about anything outside of enjoying, engaging and sharing in the session. This also makes coaching and supporting attendees easier, resulting in a neat scaffolding document, to support your existing, or, yet to be established coaching manual. Plus, because we want to engage deeply with a minority of clubs throughout South-East Queensland, we will allow you to film and distribute our teaching expertise among your coaches and volunteers. This way, you can easily establish a practically referable and easy to understand program that aligns with your club's development focus.

And because we believe so strongly in those that work with us, you’ll never have to worry about disengaged coaches throughout 2019, as we will help you establish and provide ongoing support toward a professional learning community that we will be active members of. This is a special interest of mine as can be seen in this group of worldwide and ‘grassroots’ experts and novices below that is free to join and is all about supporting our young learners:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/147501649318126/?ref=group_header

But perhaps the best thing of all is that we we offer a service that is heavily below market rate for our combined experience. We care about the future of football and will provide absolute 'bang for buck' so that your young people are your key focus.

To learn how the ENGAGEMENT collaboration can make club development paramount for your junior and youth players, speak to Craig Gunn (Coach Gunny) today by visiting www.craiggunn.org, or, by calling 0431311070.

The ‘official’ LAUNCH is less than a month away at Wilston Grange AFC, 26 February, 2019, 6pm sponsored by the club for Gorillas’ adult family. However, all are welcome (any club/sport) for a fee.

We are soon to announce club launch sites of Brisbane south, Moreton, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Darling Downs regions. Keep alert and submit your club’s eligibility for ENGAGEMENT opportunity by, Tuesday, February 5th.

Yours in learning,

Gunny (Craig Gunn, B.Ed. (PE); M.Ed. (Sports Coaching))

Brisbane Rugby League U/7s UproaR Because they CAN’T Practise Like This

Hello fellow adult learners and peers. I generally do not show footage of players I have not been given permission to share.  However, this has had 1 million plus views! AND was posted publicly (see below). 

Now, recently there has been angst from my fellow rugby league people. Most suggest: ‘kids must learn the correct technique first’ etc as justification on why the proposal to remove tackling at u/7s is wrong. I personally think this video shows that what most of the League fraternity is missing, is the need for education!

Can somebody watch the vision and please prove me wrong? 

I am a little surprised at the uproar to be honest. The highlights show a dominant player that other kids look at to score tries. That’s a problem but there are many others… Sure I counted 50 missed tackles but FAR more concerning was how I counted on one hand the amount of tackles with ‘good technique’ that is preached loudly!

Nowadays slinging etc are banned for good reason. But from the public backlash it appears most junior league coaches are not aware of the push to protect the head. I am not going to labour the point here but please check out my previous three part blogs on concussion in AFL which also is a real concern. There is new evidence out of Ireland (the Irish Rugby Board (IRB) paid for it) that now shows the green zone (nipple line to belly button. It goes against everything that senior rugby league coaches teach including my own current coaching, where I did a session on wrestling levers. In the end though, these junior players look to go chest on chest in the vision which is VERY, VERY unsafe. This is because the comprehensive IRB work showed that almost all players concussed were tacklers!

Now, I do not know many staff members from the NRL but I have seen jobs advertised recently around this education and ‘coach development’ for the U/7s program in 2019, Thus, I will not steal their thunder. Yet I will say, that having taught, coached for decades in all three Australian mainstream contact sports, throughout all contexts too, the missing ingredient that will retain and attract players is coach development.

For example, I have lectured at university around processes like ‘task simplification’. It is PE teaching ‘101’. As such, the NRL is to be applauded for simplifying the task of tackling. I believe they should go even further but will say no more on that… However, I must state, that unlike the awkward and unsafe examples of head positioning/awareness, body height, feet positioning, framing, shape and tracking on show in this above U/6 vision, I’m guessing that the NRL hopes that players and coaches will learn that tackling ‘technique’ will happen much more safely and naturally with ‘tags’.

Once again I am in full support of this no tackling movement as it will be a far better learning environment. Unfortunately you see, the research indicates that junior and youth sport is littered with sports losing out because they forget that LEARNERS learn but rarely/sometimes do coaches help (Chris Cushion, 2017, GAA Conference Accessed today in ‘Coach Logic’). Usually, the adults stick with how things have always been done.

For a contrast on what is always done against what players need, please see my AFL example below. Here (this year) when I was working with Queensland U/15 girls about 12 minutes in. They had never trained like this before and called it ‘Gunny Madness’. They train in line-up drills etc because that’s the way that it’s always been done! I would suggest that these girls were far more engaged in my activity.

Finally, for more depth of discussion and sharing, please feel free to join my Facebook learning group below featuring nearly 500 coaches and learners,

Yours in learning and happy to share,

Gunny (senior League coach with skills) - B.Ed. (PE); M. Ed. (Coaching)

0431311070 OR email: coachgunny@craiggunn.org

JOIN: ‘Grassroots Coaching and Consulting Group', featuring inspiring teachers from all around the world. Below is the link to the group which features practitioners and researchers from all sports!!! Feel free to join! But, we must remain curious...

https://www.facebook.com/groups/147501649318126/about/

There's Still Life Yet for 'The Greatest Game of All': Rugby League 2019

‘Grassroots Coaching and Consulting Group', features inspiring teachers from all around the world. Below is the link to the group which features practitioners and researchers from all sports!!! Feel free to join! But, we must remain curious...

https www.facebook.com/groups/147501649318126/about/

Whilst off-field dramatics and atrocities are sadly the mainstay of off-season rugby league reporting, two key movements have happened over the weekend that have me hopeful that there is a future for ‘The Greatest Game of All’.  Hopefully, the water bubbler conversation would have been dominated by Australian Rugby League’s Commissioner, Peter Beattie’s calls of life-time (and cross-code) bans for any players convicted of violence against women! 

However, for some diehard fans and educators like me, a well-considered second place was a ‘trial’ of rule changes coming for U/7 games.  Now, much like the video above, we must remind ourselves that sports like rugby league have been tinkering with the junior and youth game for years. For an interesting and advanced read, please see Paul Kent’s thought provoking rationale behind ‘no tackling’ and other changes at the very bottom of this piece. He starts with the fact that sports (not just NRL mind you) have been ‘cooking the books’ when it comes to participation rates!

From the outset, let me say that if Peter Beattie achieves his amazing aim of life bans for off-field violence sentencing, well over half of all Queenslanders will forgive him for past indiscretions like telling people to stay away from the Gold Coast ghost-town at the recent  Commonwealth Games.  In fact, the only people greatly effected by life-bans on evil humans will be Australia’s treasured comedians, Roy and HG, who have long proposed that there should be dedicated rugby league jails… (Sorry…) If I don’t laugh about how Australia’s ‘obsession’ with sport breeds what Margaret Heffernan (2011) calls ‘willful blindness’, then I’d give up any involvement in teaching physical pursuits.  Roy and HG have kept me sane for decades! SCROLL to the very bottom for example…

As such, the outpouring negative response to the NRL ‘trial’ recommendations of tweaks to the game like ‘no tackling’ for U/7s did not surprise me, nor what it have surprised Margaret Heffernen or the hosts of Triple M’s ‘The Sporting Probe’. Indeed, I am writing this now with the knowledge that some suburban teams are proposing a breakaway competition…

But back to Heffernan, her 2011 book describes absolutely tragic examples of ‘willful blindness’ from the Nazi Holocaust through to the US sub-prime crisis of the previous decade.  These wilfully blind situations are  caused because humans hang around people like them and avoid alternative, challenging beliefs.  It is well worth a read, but you can throw in Australian examples of the recent Aussie cricket ball tampering, or, the far more devastating patient safety breaches that occurred in Bundaberg Hospital (Cleary and Duke, 2017).  Yes, human beings collectively desire to blatantly ignore the negatives and seek positives mainly even if it means putting others at risk of harm. 

Thus, with the NRL now joining cricket and tennis, as major sports in this country saying that participation and retention numbers show things aren’t working anymore, I for one suggest this is brave example for other sports to follow.  In the end, most mainstream sports are dying through bleeding numbers that you can find in previous posts of mine (or, look at Tennis, AFL and Cricket for starters).  The ‘Ausplay’ figures from the government gave most of the loudest and dominant TV sports a massive kick in the behind when launched in 2016.  However, few have admitted this, like the NRL. Indeed through its actions of 18 months of research on those leaving the game it is being positively proactive.

Thus, I might take the time over the next few posts to highlight a few of my thoughts on this report: https://playnrl.com/framework/research/national-retention-study/…..  

As a PE trained educator/coach of many sports and contexts of a couple of decades including League, I am quick to ignore the ‘snowflake’ chorus from many caring adults who fail to realise what they don’t know.  However, I have also seen lengthy arguments about listening to those who remain in the game.  Well the NRL did in the massive research but certainly Heffernan could see the remaining tribe’s thinking as flawed and non-critical.

Now, I will say that I prefer the field to a research office but my anecdotal experiences over many years suggest that many people throughout ‘grassroots’ Aussie sport are being ‘willfuly blind’!  Why wouldn’t they when the sports’ administrators and government departments have had their heads in the sand?  In the end don’t we want players not viewers?  If so please open your eyes to what’s ‘real’…

Yours in learning,

Gunny

Email: coachgunny@craiggunn.org

PS. Thanks to my coaching peer who recommended Heffernan’s book – Cracker!!! As is another I’ve read, ‘The Bigger Prize’

PPS. Here is the Broncos NRLW team turning up to ‘play’ with kids! Plenty of strength in the GAME if we learn together!

Cleary, S., & Duke, M. (2017). Clinical governance breakdown: Australian cases of wilful blindness and whistleblowing. Nursing ethics, 0969733017731917.

Heffernan, M. (2011). Willful blindness: Why we ignore the obvious at our peril. New York, NY, US: Walker & Company/Bloomsbury Publishing.

Paul Kent article: Accessed 18/12/18 https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/nrl/opinion/nrl-aims-to-bring-kids-back-to-the-game-by-bringing-the-fun-back-to-grassroots-footy/news-story/835de34c97f657f7047b93cff865952e?fbclid=IwAR0NMZqdf_YWer6U80jiwvTQrUV52Bq1sjr1Qn0dScwQWrCNTdGudt7PiYQ

Revelling in the 'Street': A Grassroots Masterclass II for AFL Football Clubs with Joey Peters

'Grassroots Coaching and Consulting Group', features inspiring teachers from all around the world. Below is the link to the group which features practitioners and researchers from all sports!!! Feel free to join! But, we must remain curious...

https www.facebook.com/groups/147501649318126/about/

Joey taking on former Brazilian peers!

Can your community club remain relevant? Embrace 'old school' street and backyard learning environments and observe 'real' engagement!

PRACTICAL FIELD demonstration, December 8, 8:30am-10:30am

Wilston Grange Australian Football Club

Hickey Park, Babarra St, Stafford QLD 4053

Free for Wilston Grange Gorillas Family

All others welcome and tickets $25 (Eventbrite or pay at the door)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/revelling-in-the-street-a-grassroots-masterclass-for-afl-clubs-tickets-52928137484

Hello fellow learners,

Just in time for Christmas, Game Play Learn and Coach Gunny Grassroots Consulting, are providing important sharing and learning events to improve your coaching and organisational outcomes. All PE teachers, sports coaches, academics and parents are invited!

Event Brief:

Building long-term, grassroots club success and youth retention through effective / modern coaching practices, that rejoice in 'old school' street and backyard games

2 hours Field demonstration with Senior QWAFL women, as well as Q&A/Networking

Target Audience:

Coachers, educators, sporting parents and adults interested in learning modern coaching methods designed to facilitate ‘match like’ conditioning / skills, increase local participation and foster long term retention within local clubs and chosen sports

Cafe sales go to the development of the Club.

Presenters -Key Note:

Joanne ‘Joey’ Peters - ‘A’ licensed football coach and coach of ‘grassroots, through to national teams

Professional career spanning Australia, America (New York Power) & Brazil (Santos) paving the way for female soccer players on the international stage

One of Australia’s most capped female soccer players – 110 caps for the Matlidas (Female Australian soccer team)

Australia’s women’s footballer of the year – 2009

Founder of Game, Play, Learn www.gameplaylearn.net

Featured Presenter & Facilitator

Coach Gunny – Craig Gunn = Level Two AFL coach and coach of 100os and many sports, including, Australian football men, women and youth girls and boys representative teams

Internationally recognized thought leader in Grassroots coaching & development

Pioneering methods to engage the youth of today with coaching practices focused on building game / match skills, called ‘Gunny Madness’ in AFL circles…

Coach Gunny partners with likeminded / high profile coaching leaders to facilitate coaching clinics to help Clubs at the grassroots level to attract and retain players of all ages / gender and educate adult learners in and around the club about the ‘bigger picture’.

Founder Grassroots Coaching & Consulting www.craiggunn.org

Academic Support

Supported by esearchers focused on engaging coaching at the Grassroots level

Yours in learning,

Craig Gunn (Coach Gunny)

0431311070

Email: coachgunny@craiggunn.org

Passionate learner and leader!

The Grassroots are key to our World!!!

Revelling in the 'Street': A Grassroots Masterclass for Football Clubs with Joey Peters

'Grassroots Coaching and Consulting Group', features inspiring teachers from all around the world. Below is the link to the group which features practitioners and researchers from all sports!!! Feel free to join! But, we must remain curious...

https www.facebook.com/groups/147501649318126/about/

Joey Peters: Coach, learner and great human!!!

Can your community club remain relevant? Embrace 'old school' street and backyard learning environments and observe 'real' engagement!

Friday night, December 7, 7-9:30pm

Brighton District Football Club

Wakefield Park, Wickham St., , Brighton, QLD, 4017

Tickets $25 (Eventbrite or pay at the door)

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/revelling-in-the-street-a-grassroots-masterclass-for-football-clubs-tickets-52564240057

Hello fellow learners,

Just in time for Christmas, Game Play Learn and Coach Gunny Grassroots Consulting, are providing important sharing and learning events to improve your coaching and organisational outcomes. All PE teachers, sports coaches, academics and parents are invited!

Event Brief:

Building long-term, grassroots club success and youth retention through effective / modern coaching practices, that rejoice in 'old school' street and backyard games

2 hours = as well as Q&A/Networking

Target Audience:

Coachers, educators, sporting parents and adults interested in learning modern coaching methods designed to facilitate ‘match like’ conditioning / skills, increase local participation and foster long term retention within local clubs and chosen sports

Bar and Food sales go to the development of the Club.

Presenters -Key Note:

Joanne ‘Joey’ Peters - ‘A’ licensed coach and coach of ‘grassroots, through to national teams

Professional career spanning Australia, America (New York Power) & Brazil (Santos) paving the way for female soccer players on the international stage

One of Australia’s most capped female soccer players – 110 caps for the Matlidas (Female Australian soccer team)

Australia’s women’s footballer of the year – 2009

Founder of Game, Play, Learn www.gameplaylearn.net

Featured Presenter & Facilitator

Coach Gunny – Craig Gunn

Internationally recognized thought leader in Grassroots coaching & development

Pioneering methods to engage the youth of today with coaching practices focused on building game / match skills

Coach Gunny partners with likeminded / high profile coaching leaders to facilitate coaching clinics to help Clubs at the grassroots level to attract and retain players of all ages / gender and educate adult learners in and around the club about the ‘bigger picture’.

Founder Grassroots Coaching & Consulting www.craiggunn.org

Academic Support

Supported by esearchers focused on engaging coaching at the Grassroots level

Yours in learning,

Craig Gunn (Coach Gunny)

0431311070

Email: coachgunny@craiggunn.org

Joey in action!!!