Pokemon, Harry Potter and other 90s fads

If you're like me you grew up with Pokemon, but have you ever wondered what lessons it may have taught you as a coach?

In 1996 Nintendo released Pokemon Red and Blue for the Gameboy Color. This sparked a worldwide phenomenon that still goes until this day. In the game you travel from gym to gym training your own small team of creatures in your search to become the best Pokemon trainer in the land. As you and your team grow your Pokemon evolve and become more powerful, and the challenges that you face become more and more difficult.

If that process doesn't sound in the slightest bit similar to most people's journeys as a coach then I am definitely in need of the upcoming holiday period! If you listen to the theme song of the cartoon show it becomes even more apparent that we could learn something here.

As a coach I got into the game at the ground floor. My athletes were young, and often training sessions were really a disguised way to provide a babysitting service. My job at that time was to start to foster a love of the game, and to teach some of the basic skills. The kids I coached were more concerned with having fun than winning games, and that's ok! I was 15, and the u12s called me "Harry Potter" because I had glasses. We were all just starting out, and we were growing together.

When I got to be a little bit older, I started to help out with our local High Performance development pathway. I will remember forever the look on some of the girls faces as they realized that "Harry Potter" was back and would be helping to coach them. Some of these girls continued through the pipeline and are now playing First XI hockey. As a player they've gone through an evolution process. Their training environment has had to match that, as has their coaches style.

This leads me, in a roundabout way, back to the video game. Stick with me in this phase, I promise there's a point! Within the game your Pokemon evolve when they reach a certain level. This manifests itself with huge physical changes and ability developments. To get this upgrade in level your Pokemon has to gain experience from a battle with another Pokemon. Every Pokemon is different and has their own abilities. Similarly they evolve at different levels. As such you have to figure out a way to win, while still giving these young pokemon an opportunity to gain the experience needed to evolve. Does that sound familiar?

There were however a few issues with this process. Sometimes your Pokemon would lose their fight and "faint" (No-one died, this is a kids game remember). With that they lost their opportunity for experience. So the win was crucial as a step towards the evolution. There was one way around this though. As with every video game there were shortcuts. In Pokemon there was a "Rare Candy" you could give them to help them grow a level quickly. This "Rare Candy" approach was a bit of a quick fix as you weren't going to end up with as strong of a pokemon at the end of it.

So if to train them is our cause but we wanna be the very best how do we balance this? In Pokemon I used to do this by putting out a weak Pokemon at the start of a battle, allowing them to get the Exp and then switched them for a stronger Pokemon to make sure we got the win. Just recently I read a very interesting article on Sergi Samper a younger player at FC Barcelona who is touted as one of the next big prospects to emerge from La Masia, their youth development center. In the article Alex Jonson points out that when a soccer player is young they regularly get put on as a forward for a brief period near the end to get a feel for the speed of the game. These periods get a little longer game to game as they gain experience. But for Samper, and other young midfielders, this process doesn't work quite as well. They need time to be an important part of how the team operates. So how do we as coaches allow them to become a Gyarados without the fear of our little Magikarp just splashing aimlessly out there?

That is in itself the big challenge as we strive to become the very best. But don't forget "To train them is our cause". By doing that, we can be sure that the wins will come, and we'll have a lot less fainting to contend with.