Dreaming

After 20+ weeks I've finally finished my FA Level 2 course which culminated in our assessments this weekend gone. There were three groups of 16 at the outset each meeting on a different day. 8 of the potential coaches came from our club The Mags and each group was coached by a different coach educator.

Our coach educator was a guy call Bill Prendergast who I found to be really helpful and, on the evidence of the assessments I saw from the people in the other groups, by far the better coach educator.

The course involves planning and preparing 12 or more coaching sessions using a format of technique, skill then small sided game where the coach is expected to demonstrate that he/she can identify errors and coach the player to correct those errors.

The culmination was a 2 day assessment day where each coach had to coach a 35 minute session that was assessed by an independant assessor.

I've got to say that the course was the first one run in this format over the course of 20 weeks and there were some teething troubles, but on the whole it was well run.

What I will say though, and I am glad I passed so it can't be called sour grapes is that the standard of assessment was poor.

I'm fortunate in that I did the FA Prelim course 20 years ago and also used to be a PE teacher but the standard of tsome of the coaching from some of the people that passed was not very high and yet I saw a couple of people who failed that did much better sessions.

Our Mags club did very well with 7 of the 8 coaches passing the course and I am quite keen to go on to the next level 3 course.

The other long running committment that I had has norw also finished - the Dream Team.

I ended up playing 18 of the events, and after a poor start I began to get some results towards the end including a 2nd in event 13 for $588, 10th in event 18 for $59.9 and 1st in event 20 for $1027.5.

The final result for me was played 18, cashed 3, total buy ins of $899 and total winnings of $1675.45 for a total profit of $776.45 and a ROI of 86% which is not bad considering that half the prize money was held back for the live final on Saturday and the vast majority of players are also sponsored players meaning there is not as much dead money as you would normally have.

Obviously this is only a small sample but it has highlighted to me that MTT's are my best format and that is also backed up by my return in the 18 player stts on ipoker.

Anyway, I'm looking forward the live final on Saturday in Birmingham.

On the football front I'm surprised there has not been more made of the fact that Premiership referees don't know the rules of the game, as demonstrated by the Sunderland goal at the weekend! I don't actually think it made a huge deal of difference since we were never going to score in a month of Sundays.

It was good to see Button with the F1 title on Sunday. I've heard some rubbish, mainly on Talksport, questioning whether he is a worthy champion given the way he has limped home but what they fail to realise is that the whole grid is currently separated by as little as half a second, showing how competitive the grid is at the moment. So I say congratulations to him, especially given the difficulties the team has faced over the last few years.

Anyway, that's it for now.

I'll update either after or during the Dream Team Final.