“I describe the future of sport coaching in terms of sport preparatory engineering, in which tactical/technical preparation becomes substantially more quantified in terms of series, sets, repetitions, durations, intensities, and frequencies.”
This is the central argument from an article from James Smith, author of The Governing Dynamics of Coaching. He also says this applies to every sport at every level.
Does it really make sense in a cricket context?
There’s no doubt we compartmentalise too much in cricket, especially at club and school level. There is a huge focus on tactical awareness and technical skills. While we recognise the importance of general fitness and mental skill, these are under-trained and treated as separated parts of a whole. Smith is right to point out that all these factors are not separate from each other. They integrate to produce bowling, striking and fielding the ball. In more general terms: movement solutions to specific cricket problems.
If this is true, we can think of coaching as a holistic endeavour. Just like an architect can use different disciplines to create a building that stands firm, a coach can use all disciplines to build cricketers. It makes sense on that level.
However, where the analogy fails is also where there is a flaw in the argument: A player is not a building. They have thoughts and feelings. They react and adapt without intervention. They have motivations to work hard and excuses to slack off. They have relationships with their coach that can be helpful or not. They have others also trying to “build them” (parents, teachers, peers, other coaches, their boss...). They go off and do their own thing.
Anyone who has coached cricket to keen teenagers will quickly tell you how futile it is, for example, trying to get fast bowlers to stick to the guidelines for overs bowled in a week. One sunny week in the summer holidays with free access to nets puts paid to that idea.
Then we get into competition. Sport has opponents trying to stop you reaching your goal while you try to stop them reaching theirs. Architecture doesn’t. Engineering doesn’t.
These facts make “sport engineering” all but impossible.
There are too many factors out of control of the coach. Even if we could control it all, the opponent keeps adjusting their game to deal with your engineering efforts.
Welcome to the jungle
A better analogy is one I first heard from Stuart Armstrong; coaching is exploring a jungle. It’s wild and dangerous. No one has been here before. You are beset on all sides by living things trying to bring you down. You can’t engineer a way through.
You can build on existing knowledge and experience and every time you go deeper it’s different. As a result coaches are guides, not engineers. The players need to find the way through themselves.
The guiding role still involves planning and reviewing. Players and coaches still need to know where they are going (goals, objectives and missions). We need to be able to check in, check if we are still on track and stay focused. So there are still elements of engineering.
For example, before COVID stopped us training, my U16 performance group put a structure into place.
We planned out what we wanted to achieve over the winter. Partially this was guided by my analysis, partially by the players. I identified we needed to be better at batting under pressure when chasing by looking at past results. They identified key behaviours that would lead to improvement.
We would then alternate session between learning skills and testing those skills under pressure. The players got to choose which skills to work on while I defined the set/rep structure of the practices but the players defined what they were going to do in any given session. Under testing, we gave a lot of time for players to self- and peer-review. These reviews guided what we did at the next practice.
So although highly structured and engineered, it was meandering from the plan, designed to go where we wanted and needed together, rather than being pre-planned and inflexible.
This may be more chaotic an approach but it's also more reflective of the reality: You can't engineer your way through coaching no matter how appealing it seems.