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New Year : Similar Goals : New Tactics?

So we’ve hit 2025 and most have had a bit of a break and hopefully family time over the holiday period. A lot are already back on pitch preparing for the months to come, be that second half of the season for some or just starting out for others.

With the New Year it provides us an opportunity to freshen things up a bit, keep ourselves as coaches entertained and engaged and also for our players to keep them sharp. So what will you do differently in 2025 and what will you leave behind in 2024, for my top 3 are:

1. New Drills : New Session Structure

For sure there is a lot to be said for predictability and repeatability it helps measure and get a flow in our sessions. It also allows a bit of self direction by the players and leadership group. However I love to change things around and introduce a totally new perspective at the start of the year… (of course you can substitute block, season, month for year here as I’m always in favour of keeping things fresh). Changing around the session structure is the starting point and then add in new drills and games that will keep thing keeping s fresh be they catch pass, tackle, breakdown or decision making, a new bank of drills will be a big step in getting closer to your goals.

2. Individualised Training Plans aka IDP

One of the biggest takeaways I have from coaching individual sports such as swimming and triathlon is the needs of the individual. All to often we get caught up in a one sized fits all training schedule for our team without focusing on the individuals. A quick SWOT analysis of each player will help identify their work on areas and tailor the next block of training for them. When you are considering your IDP make sure you give some thought to the players Mental Resilience and if any additional help is needed to this side of the athlete consider mindset coaching, meditation and sports psychology to help build a collection of winners both on and off the pitch.

3. Focused Performance Analysis

Can you identify the top 3 metrics that will help you win more games? For one of my current teams they are

1. Set Piece efficiency;

2. Line break to Score ratio and

3. Set Piece Defence efficiency.

The key to any metric is clarity, speed of calculation and communication of the metric. Of course I use RugbySmarts to help track and record these elements and communicate back to the squad but there are plenty of other methods from manual to spreadsheets to Hudl and Coach Logic… I will admit to being a little biased and believe RugbySmarts is a smarter choice 😉

So that is what’s new for me in 2025, what I am giving up?

1. Outdated Warm-ups

I actually gave these up a long time ago but one of the additions to our coaching group tried to bring them back in; static stretching and laps…. they were very quickly shut down. Being a magpie I’ve taken a leaf out of other sports and prefer a suite of dynamic movements that get the body ready for the upcoming sequence of activities.

2. Non-connected Drills

Again this is something I’ve tried to move away from for some time now. Bring purpose to your drills and games, ensure that the drill has real application to the next part of the session for example if you are doing a tackle drill make sure you play a game pretty quickly afterwards that allows the athlete to practice it in real life.

3. Un-necessary metrics

It is easy to keep doing what we have always done and be slaves to statistics and kpi’s that no one uses. Every now and then I like to do a birthday of a spring clean on my code screen and cut out any fluff. As you can see from below I am tracking a pretty limited set of metrics and thankfully RugbySmarts does a bunch of automated tracking for me!