Planning for Rest

Jun 22, 2022

In professional sports, coaches are always worried about practice.

Double sessions, individual work, film etc. etc.

One thing I used tell our coaches a lot was "resist the urge to coach".

Most great players don't need more coaching and most teams need more rest than work. If I had one word of advice for a coach or a GM it would be "Plan your rest."

I think we take way too many lessons from American Football, a sport that has one game a week for 16 weeks, no real minor league and no opportunity to play in the off season.

In reality, no other professional sport is anything like football so we need to be careful with our comparisons and lessons drawn from the world of American football.

Take a look at this video and listen to the quote at 2:10.

"When we get the schedule, I look for days off"

This was exactly what we did at BU during my last ten years. We did monthly schedules and, the first thing we did was select days off.

The second thing we did was schedule our lifting days.

The third thing we did was to work practice around the previous two ( days off and lifts).

I have no idea what Tampa does and, this Columbus/ Tortorella video was actually 2016 but, I have to believe this played into a great playoff upset. "No Days Off" is a great macho sales pitch but, for me, I'd be saying "More Days Off".