Become a better coach - Ep. 1

Coaching perspective

Facing a loss

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Loses are the best opportunity for a coach to find edges to improve, yet it's the hardest scenario to deal with, often you'll have to handle your own frustration, your team's frustration, conflicts between players or blame towards you, so how you approach every loss it's key to stablish a healthy and productive team mindset.

EMPHASIZE EFFORT

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You need to point that the team has worked hard for that match and the outcome of the game is not a reflexion of their level, but a cause of the eventualities that happened in that particular game. An issolated result is not what defines the team level.

RE-FRAME THE EXPERIENCE

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Always try to avoid dramatism, sentences such as "We got stomped", or "I'm so bad", or "This was like a clown fiesta" do not help, cut the dramatism ipso facto and head straight to the facts.
Players will not respect a coach that is ambiguous about what happened, you can't use statements such as "Their macrolevel was better", or "Our botlane lost and they snowballed", be precise and specific about the events that were a factor in the team loss, go through specific plays and highlight what should have been done in that situation, showing them what they did wrong, even if they know already, that will eventually reinforce their trust on your coaching skills.

STEP BY STEP

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Do not focus your whole speech in all the mistakes you've seen, you will watch a lot of games in scrims and tournament matches, so do not try to summarize everything; approach 1 or 2 microgame mistakes for every player (bad trading, not warding, overextending, etc), and 1 or 2 macrogame mistakes related with 1 topic; for example vision, or rotations, or decission making, or teamfighting. Do not try to solve all mistakes in 1 single game, because mistakes done in 1 match, will repeat in the next ones, so go step by step and solve 1 problem at a time.

HIGHLIGHT GOOD PLAYS

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Talking about mistakes is what helps the team to improve, yet pointing too many can be frustrating and irritating, players might get criticism the bad way and think you're blaming them, so you have to find a good relation between explaining mistakes, and highlighting good plays. Is not about flattering anyone, but about keeping them in a good mood allowing you to teach them about the mistakes with them having the right attitude towards you.

SHORT MEMORY FOR LOSES

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You have to prioritize short memory for loses, explaining what went bad in that game, being precise about mistakes, you know, all the explained above, then forget about that game. You have to help your players to understand what went wrong, and then, when you already did, help them to overcome that loss, to forget that game, and focus on the future steps. When you've used the loss to improve, there's no point on keeping that in your mind, be concise, precise, fast, and move on ASAP.

ASK TEAM INPUT

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You're not alone in the team. You're the coach but your players know well how the game works, and they were the ones playing that game, so asking them what they think that went wrong could help you to pinpoint the mistakes that they agree instead of showing them mistakes that could lead to a discussion between what's the best option.
This will also help your players to see the game from a different prespective, from a more objective point of view, which will make your job easier and the conversation more interactive and less speechy.

TEAM CRITICISM

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Avoid in as much as possible to point individual mistakes, always try to involve more than one player in the bad play (if possible, do not dream up events to make this possible).
Often a bad play will have a source, a person who started it all, yet other players will also make mistakes during the action, so pick a long segment of that play and explain more than 1 mistake to pull the attention away from the individual and direct it towards the team.

LOSS PILLARS

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A loss always comes from 3 pillars that are the main reason of losing. Never forget this pillars and use them to explain that more work has to be done in order to overcome.

- We were not good enough: We lost because we were not good enough, do not compare your team with the oposing team, comparisons are not good, always focus your speeches towards your team, regardless of who was the opponent.

- We did not execute good enough: We lost because tho we were better, we underperformed. This can happen, the team performance has ups and downs, you can't always play to your best level, and this can result in the ultimate punishment; a loss.

- We did not strive enough: We lost because we didn't take it seriously. This is an attitude problem and has to be approached differently, a player can underperform in purpose because of boredom, overconfidence, apathy, etc, and this is related to the previous point.

All three loss pillars are ultimately solved by the one and only remedy for failure; training, so don't forget that and motivate your players to overcome in every match they play.

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