Your coaching can be informed by your knowledge of your friends and made easier by your level of comfort with them.
Coaching a Friend, Part 1
Protection from Feedback
I coin a lot of words and phrases related to feedback. Usually, these are complete nonsense. But sometimes the framework of this good game we play and judge offers a phrase with usefulness beyond rules enforcement. This is true of protection, a keyword that prevents something from being blocked, targeted, dealt damage, or enchanted [by […]
Scaling Feedback for Aspiring L2s
When I was a kid, I loved to read. One series that I grew to love was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. The fun in these books was the feeling of choice. You had power to decide how the story turned out. Similarly, participation in the judge program is choosing an adventure. Not every […]
Feedbag #11: Exemplars vs. Reviews
Hello and welcome to this month’s edition of the Feedbag! Last month, we covered how to sell your local TOs on the value of feedback. This month’s question comes to us from of Portugal: When you perform exceptionally in an event or during your everyday judge activities, you may get an exemplar. The reviews meant […]
Quality Is Its Own Quality
Last year, I was chatting with some judges in the Mid-Atlantic Slack about review counts, and one of them mentioned that he felt that reviews written was not a great metric to track – that quality mattered more than quantity. My response was the idea that quantity is its own quality. Receiving a well-written review […]
Coaching a Student
Coaching a student is much more in line with the traditional idea of coaching than my last topic. We do this all the time in the judge program. We call it mentoring. In fact, L2 judges are required to show a “willingness to mentor” other judges. While this practice is more commonly discussed than coaching […]
Focusing Feedback
Since I love stories, I’m going to start with one that I heard recently from a judge friend. We were chatting about reviews (surprising, right?), and he mentioned a review he’d gotten from someone recently that said something like this (paraphrased, a lot): “You seemed really down during our draft on Saturday night. You should […]
My Favorite Coach
What kind of coach do you aspire to be? For me, there’s one coach who stands out above the crowd: coach Greg Popovich of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs.
Feedbag #10: TOtal Recall
Hello and welcome to this month’s edition of the Feedbag! Last time, we covered providing feedback to a judge while playing in their event. This month’s prompt comes straight to us from the comments section of last month’s article, courtesy of : I am of the opinion that feedback should also be solicited from the […]
Coaching a Mentor
The idea of coaching a mentor, someone charged with the training and education of another, may seem to contradict the very idea of coaching. After all, isn’t the mentor the person who is supposed to be doing the coaching?