“She was late...
again.”
Late again is a verdict. What you actually saw was a first step after the crack instead of on it. One of those the player can work with. The other one just tells her she was wrong.
We train coaches to see what happened, before deciding what it means.
Coaching education rewards one thing above everything else: spotting the error, fast. Ten years of that builds a reflex, and the reflex fires before you've finished looking.
So, you see deviation from the model, and you miss everything the model doesn't cover. In baseball: the second baseman watching the runner instead of the ball isn't on anyone's error list, which is exactly why nobody sees it.
It shows up in how you talk. Bad angle. Lazy hands. Not aggressive enough. Every one of those is a conclusion, and a player can't do anything with a conclusion.
A course for experienced sports coaches who want to look beyond methods, models and metrics. What it addresses is not another instrument. It is the person holding them.
Veldheer zijn. Being the one who is trusted with the field.
In Sun Tzu the commander is neither the ruler nor the best tactician in the camp. He is appointed, handed the ground, and answers for what happens on it, which is why the text keeps warning rulers not to direct him from a distance.
And when it says what a commander is made of — wisdom, trust, benevolence, courage, discipline — not one of the five is tactical.
The guiding principles come from Sun Tzu's Art of War, from Daoist philosophy, from Buddhist contemplation and from Korean nunchi. Around them sits a framework of structure and toolkit, so that a coach can use what they learn in the week they learn it.
How a coach grows into oneMiksang (good eye) is one of our guiding principles and a contemplative training in perception, developed for photography and unreasonably well suited to a sports field. It's a discipline, not a philosophy, and it comes down to a few plain things.
Miksang teaches us what it is like to stand still without a task, which most coaches have never done on a field in their lives. Letting something arrive instead of hunting for it. Holding it long enough to find where it starts and where it stops. Then saying it in one sentence, before you've had time to build a story around it.
Describe before you evaluate. Most coaches can't do it on the first attempt, and noticing that is where the training begins.
What changes isn't your eyesight. It's the half second between seeing and concluding, and what you're able to hand a player once you've got that half second back.
Six months. Six to eight sessions with film work in between. It isn't a workshop, because a reflex built over ten years doesn't come apart in a day, and a single day produces enthusiasm and nothing else.
Sessions build in order of difficulty, starting away from anything you have a stake in and finishing with your own team in a live game.
Developed on a ballfield, where every pitch hands you fifteen seconds of stillness whether you use them or not. It travels to any sport that moves.
If you run coaching development somewhere, write and tell me what your coaches keep missing.
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