Halfway through a season you know more about your team than you did in pre-season, and you still have time to act on it. Most teams let that moment pass, because there is always another match on Saturday. A mid-season review does not have to be a big event. An hour with the right people, a few numbers and two decisions at the end is enough.
Hold it when the fixtures give you room
Pick a week with a natural gap: a bye, a cup weekend you are out of, or a winter break. Eight to ten matches in is about right. Any earlier and you are reading noise, because a team’s first month says little about its level. Any later and there are not enough matches left to use what you find.
Do not hold it the week after a heavy defeat. A bad result needs its own review, and mixing the two turns a calm look at the season into an argument about Saturday.
Ask the players first
Before the meeting, ask every player three questions and let them answer without a name attached:
- What is working for this team?
- What is holding us back?
- What is one thing you would change?
A short online form or sheets of paper in the changing room will do. You want this first because players will tell a form what they will not say in front of the squad, and because a coach who walks in with a conclusion already reached will not hear anything new.
Read every answer. When five players mention the same thing without talking to each other, it is worth more than any number you will bring.
Bring a few numbers
Pick four or five measures that match what you said you wanted to be good at in pre-season. Tackle completion, penalties conceded, lineout and scrum retention, and points from trips to the 22 cover most teams.
Compare your first four matches with your last four, and ignore the league table for a moment. Then be careful about what you conclude. Across a season, the average team finishes about where it started, and a team’s numbers swing a lot from one match to the next, so a small change over four matches may be nothing. Look for the gap between what you planned to be and what you are, because that is more reliable than any trend.
If you do not have the numbers, do not go back and work out every match. Take your last four, or start now. It is not too late to start.
Run the meeting in under an hour
A good shape for the coaching group and your senior players:
- What we said we would do this season, read out plainly
- What the players said, in their words
- The numbers, with a few clips to show what they look like
- Two things to change, and who owns each
- What we will stop doing to make room
Keep any video under fifteen minutes, and ideally under five. Three clips that show a pattern are enough. Show something good as well: a team needs to know what to keep as much as what to fix.
Choose two things and write them down
Everyone leaves a review wanting to change six things. Teams that try that change none of them, because training time is fixed. Choose two.
Make each one specific enough to test. “Better discipline” is too vague to check. “Fewer than ten penalties a match, and we work on roll-away for ten minutes every Tuesday” gives you something to measure. Name one coach and one player who own it, and put a date on when you will look again, usually eight matches later, because four can be too few to show a real change.
Then decide what comes out of training. If you do not take something away, the new work just gets squeezed into the last ten minutes when everyone is tired.
Talk to each player once
The team review is only half of it. In the fortnight after, give every player five minutes on their own. Tell them what they are doing well, the one thing that would help them most, and where they stand in selection.
This matters most for the players outside the first fifteen, who hear the least and are the likeliest to drift away before the season ends. A straight answer about what would get them picked is the most useful thing you can give them.
Keep saying it
Put the two priorities on the wall, mention them in team talks, and check them on the date you set.
If gathering the numbers is what stops you doing this, that part can be done for you. With Framesports, your team dashboard covers your last five, ten or twenty matches, the stats for each match open the clips behind them, and each player can see their own stats and clips, so the review starts with the evidence already on the table.
Hero photo: NaBUru38, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
