With our younger players, a lot of our time is spent on “Manage oneself”. The TOVO principles are:
- Perceive and conceive
- Decide and deceive
- Execute and assess
I think we as adults understand the words and concepts but our young players probably would not – if we expressed them exactly this way. I’ve been working on an alternative phrasing that our players will understand and I rolled this out few weeks ago with the U10s and U11s:
- Eyes and ideas
- Figure it out and fake them out
- Do it and did it work?
When I walked through this, it felt like the players understood that there is a sequence of steps, the meaning of each step, and that at the end of the process, the next action is to go back to step 1. With “eyes and ideas”, I also pointed to my eyes and to my head. Players like the idea of “faking”, so this seemed to stick.
The alliteration (use of the same sound at the beginning of the sub-steps) makes it easy to say and for the players to retain.