Coaching: Tips & Theories
Are you a coach? Or maybe you're looking for some coaching yourself? Perhaps you want to learn how to help your child improve? Let's take a deep dive into the uncharted world of Pokémon TCG coaching.
Welcome back to Schemanske's Corner - feels a bit strange to write that given that I am not Alex or even any Schemanske for that matter but get used to it! I'll be appearing on articles every so often as a guest now, thank you to Alex for presenting me with an opportunity to deep dive into some Pokémon TCG related topics that I don't often get to fully explore. I'm Victor, a TCG player and aspiring caster, perhaps most famous for starting last NAIC off at 9-0.
More relevant to this article specifically though is that I'm also a coach. I've only been coaching students in Pokémon for about 6 months but I find that it's very similar to some jobs/hobbies I've had in the past; being a training manager for my student IT job in College, coaching a high school Robotics team, volunteering to teach coding to elementary school students at work all have played a part in why I enjoy coaching so much and why I was able to dive right into it so quickly.
But even though I consider myself a fairly decent coach, I am by no means perfect and there's still a lot about it that I need to explore. Academic tutoring, or coaches for sports, or teachers for musical instruments are professions that have existed for centuries, long before the Pokémon TCG existed, even before TCGs existed in general. Even games that are newer than the Pokémon TCG have way more developed coaching structures, say for example, League of Legends esports, thanks to the money that exists in that scene. This is all to say that Pokémon TCG coaching is still in its absolute infancy. No one really knows the best way to go about it, barely anyone has thought about what constitutes effective coaching, much less actually research and study it. So to that end, I'm putting down all the thoughts I have about coaching so far here to hopefully guide others to becoming great coaches and maybe start discussion and discourse on what it means to be a good coach. So if you're a top player looking to get into coaching or better your coaching, or you're a parent teaching your kid for the first time, or even if you're just looking on the best ways to self-coach and improve your game, you've come to the right place.
I'll divide my thoughts up into two categories:
Tips which are guidance that I'm extremely confident in
Theories/Questions which I'm fairly certain about but could see reasonable arguments against
Disclaimer: For the rest of the article, I'm generally referring to consistent routine coaching to improve someone's game at all aspects. Sometimes I get coaching requests for a 1-2 hour tournament prep session to go over a specific deck and its matchups. I think that can be effective as well but is a different beast than what I want to dive into today - I see those sessions as more of a knowledge transfer but isn't in-depth enough to teach actual skills that persist throughout metas. Another disclaimer - these opinions are purely my own, maybe not even all of the writers here at Schemanske’s Corner completely agree on all of them, but that’s fine! The hope is to inspire some deep thought so you can be more deliberate about coaching.
Let's get started, shall we?