Game Models, Style of Play & Session Planning | Shane Hassett Clare Senior Hurling

Like individual session, broader year or somewhere in between.

What's the first thing you're thinking of when you go to put your plans in place?

Yeah, so I've kind of jotted down just a couple of steps to this.

So I'll take it through step by step, I suppose, the thought process.

And hopefully what comes across is this really comes back to being quite simple.

The first thing I think with any game, whatever sport you're playing, is you have to know the game and what's the ultimate goal here.

So with any sport, obviously, you have to score more than your opposition to win the game.

And that has to be the first thing you think about.

So obviously in our game, and I just refer to Gaelic games here, Hurling especially, in our game, obviously to score you have to take shots.

And then to take shots, you need possession of the ball.

So to get possession of the ball in hurling, you have a few different ways of doing it.

You have puck outs, our puck out and the opposition puck out.

Restarts, which I categorise as throw-ins, line balls or frees that are unscorable.

And then turnovers, so basically taking the ball back off the opposition.

So even when it comes to statistics, I mean, we can look at so many things.

But first of all, look at the score of the game.

And then look at, are we getting shots away? And then what are we doing to get possession of the ball? Are we getting enough possession of the ball? Or, you know, how are we getting possession of the ball? Or maybe how the opposition are getting possession of the ball as well.

So...

Knowing the game is step number one.

What are the important, the first things you need to look at? Even if you're going into a new game as a coach that have never coached it or played it before, what are the most important things here to go after? Second thing is your own philosophy.

So my philosophy, again with coaching in general, is to make the players adaptable to play the game in front of them.

So like we can talk about tactics and we can talk about different setups and styles of play, but ultimately I want my players to be able to play all the styles of play, to be able to play against all the various tactics.

And I do feel the better teams are the ones that can adapt the best on the day.

So if a certain team throw a tactic at us, that we should be able to adapt and play against it.

Or obviously if we're playing a certain way, okay, this isn't working here, we need to adapt our game.