Using a Season Journal/Binder

This year I was lucky enough to be able to run our youth summer workouts. I was writing the first plan this morning in a new notebook and first started by writing out what I wanted to accomplish over the 4 weeks we are together. I narrowed down about 4 things I wanted them to learn and then wrote some more ideas about how they would learn that. I then wrote a big picture plan and then started to write out the plan for the first day. During the workouts I wrote every one's name down to help remember and also remember who was there. After we were done today I went back and wrote a paragraph or so of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that I had based on day 1. For instance I put down that having 90 minutes of stuff for 90 minutes wasn't feasible because Coach Klingsporn wanted about 10 minutes to talk before we got going so he could cover several house cleaning items.  Another thing was that I should narrow my focus to one skill and shooting - which is a good thing to remember.

Now this didn't all happen by design. I lack a good printer at home so I just wrote it down in an empty notebook and didn't tear out any pages. Doing this got me thinking, what if you were to do this for an entire season. Just keep a record of all practices, games, thoughts, feelings, and ideas during the season. I mean I type and keep all my practice plans, but don't have what we actually did, what happened during that time, the reflections, thoughts, game breakdowns, ideas, etc with them. How much more powerful would that be? This year I think I am going to try it, but instead of a notebook, I will use a three ring binder because I like to type practice plans and can just three hole punch them. We'll see how it goes next year and will definitely post an update as we go.

Also, would love to hear feedback if anyone has done this and how it went for them.