Hi all, I'm sharing how we manage the children’s groups in the Teens section.This was sparked by a question about the ranking of the older children’s groups.
We have over fifty children in the Teens and they range generally from 11 to 17 years old, i.e. they are Secondary School or "6th Form College" children. To manage such a large number we need to split them up into Groups, so that we can differentiate the activities' challenge for them each week, using more or less the same equipment. We have a number of parent helpers and so we can achieve a good (low) children to supervisor ratio and they can adjust hurdle spacings, heights, jump box heights, med ball weights, etc. for children with vary different capabilities.
We have five groups:
Seahawks - for the newest children to the Teens, including those coming up from the Juniors
Lions - for children with some experience of training with the Teens, or are 'early developers'
Giants - older children with strengths aligned to endurance type events, e.g. cross country, i.e. is an “Event Group”
Titans - older children with strengths aligned to more explosive strength and elasticity based events, i.e. sprints, jumps and throws, i.e. is made up of three “Event Groups”
Vikings - older children whose strengths are more aligned to ‘middle distance’ events, i.e. is an “Event Group”; or are more all-rounders, or we haven’t quite worked out which Event Group they would be best in
Yes - we did name them after NFL teams
The Seahawks and Lions groups are basically Foundation Groups in the UKA's "Athlete Development Pathway" (ADP, see above). Giants and Titans are Events Groups and Vikings is a cross between Foundation and Event Group.
One of the big challenges with the Teens and their development is how children go through puberty. This can have profound impacts on their physique, leading to agility challenges and performance. There are ways of determining where children are in this phase but it’s preferable just to monitor the children’s performance metrics we use to assess their progression. There’s been much research on the perils of too early specialisation in events, and so we try to avoid getting children into Event Groups until they have a solid foundation, physically and technically, often despite the children’s views! Hence, the reason the Giants and Titans are really quite small groups currently.
The training for the Foundation groups is broad, from sprint starts (<5 seconds) to longer running efforts intervals (minutes) plus throws (mainly pull and push) and jumps (long, vertical and triple), and includes a significant amount of underpinning “Physical Preparation” activities, e.g. balance board press-ups, and mobility drills, e.g. combined A & C skips; the so-called "ABC’s".
Progression from Seahawks to Lions is intended to be metric based, but we currently don't have enough so it tends to be age and experience based. The metrics we will increasingly use are :
how frequently do they attend training (note abscissa axis in ADP above)
the “mindset”, how they engage with
the activities,
the other children
the supervising coaches and parents
performance improvement, e.g. how high can they jump compared to last time we measured it.
For the Giants and Titans, we still monitor all the above, but we are increasingly looking for the children to take more of an interest in their own development and performnace through participation in events, representing the Club, whether XC for the Giants, or track and field events for the Titans. We also encourage this for the Vikings.
We encourage the Seahawks and Lions to also compete in events, but not necessarily staying in event groups. This enables them and us to better understand where their strengths currently are, so shaping the development programme, the “training goals” and therefore the mesocycle plan.
We generally use two venues for training the children in the winter and two/three areas of the track area in summer. We can do this as we have sufficient competent helpers / coaches. We need two venues as it's not effective or safe with too many children in the same hall or space. It increases the risk of accidents and the likelihood of inappropriate behaviour between children as supervision becomes difficult. So we put the two Foundation groups together in one venue and the three Event groups in the other. In the winter this means the Sportshall at Deer Park and the Bathurst Estate’s Old Kennels car park on Tetbury Hill. The latter is suitable for running only and so the session if focused on fitness in the three energy systems, The emphasis on which system is Group dependent. The sessions in the Sportshall are focused on Run, Throw and Jump, mainly technique and strength.
We review the Groups membership quarterly, based on the performance data gathered.
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