How to Decide if You Need to Hire a Private Coach for an Athlete
To decide if an athlete requires private coaching, you first must understand the fundamental difference between training and practice.
The sole purpose of training is to get better. When you train, you are working to build new muscle memory and develop new skills. On the other hand, when you practice you are testing out what you already know.
Yes, you can also get better from practice by reinforcing muscle memory, and yes you can try new skills when practicing as well. However, the goal of practice is not to do these things. Practice is 100% about confirming that you know what you think you know and discovering things you don’t know. Then using this knowledge as input into a training program.
To that end, when an athlete is no longer getting better during their regular group practice sessions and possibly getting worse, put less focus on practice and more focus on training. Moreover, the best way to facilitate a training process is with a private coach.
Why? Because making the same mistakes repeatedly in practice will do nothing more than make those mistakes habits. Furthermore, it’s not the job of a coach in a group coaching session to focus on one individual. Their job is to get the group better which may or may not address an individual’s personal needs. It could be the case that an athlete is better than the group. So, in a group coaching session, the focus of practice is for everyone else not the athlete who is already better than everyone else.
The bottom line is that every athlete is different. In a group coaching session, there is just not enough time to customize the training techniques for those differences. Conversely, this is exactly what makes a private coach capable of helping an athlete jump levels. A private coach’s job is specifically to customize their training techniques to push an athlete to the next level.
Therefore, if the goal is to help an athlete get to the next level, then the process must include private coaching.