How a session is built, block by block

Every group at KRSS ACADEMY LTD works the same four blocks in the same order. What changes between a Saturday foundation group and a Thursday senior group is the length of each block and the difficulty inside it, never the shape. A coach who has not met the group still knows where the register is taken, which bays the game uses and who holds the kit bag at the end.

Sixty minutes against the clock

The bar below sets a sixty-minute session against the minutes it runs for. Each band keeps the same proportions and changes only the total: forty-five minutes for the foundation band, sixty for the two middle bands, seventy-five for the senior band.

The clock is a guide and the whistle is the authority. A coach who needs three more minutes on the skill block takes them from the game block and says so to the group, because the group can hear a plan change and will not hear a plan that was never spoken.

What each block is for

Warm-up: To get the group onto the floor, counted, and moving in a way that makes the next twenty minutes safe. Move, join, handle: running and stopping, two partner tasks, then first contact with the ball on both sides of the body. The register is taken standing on the warm-up strip and the head count is repeated at the end of the block.
Skill: To teach one thing. The teaching point is written on the whiteboard by the office door before the group comes in, and for the length of the block it is the only error the coach corrects. The point moves through three steps: unopposed, passive defender, live defender. A group that cannot hold the passive step does not get the live step that week.
Game: To make the teaching point happen under pressure without being mentioned again. Sides of three or four, played across the court so two games run at once. The coach changes a condition rather than shouting an instruction, and stops play three times at most.
Cool-down: To bring the group down, find out what landed, and hand every child over to a named adult. Two laps walking, four stretches on the mats, two questions answered out loud, kit counted in, then the door.

The handover between blocks

The joins are where sessions fall apart, so they are drilled as hard as the content. Each handover is the same four actions, in this order:

One whistle, and the group walks to the next zone — walking, not running, because the previous block has already raised the heart rate.
Head count out loud by the coach leading the next block, not the one finishing.
Kit for the finished block comes off the floor before the next block starts: cones in, bibs changed, ladder rolled.
One sentence naming what the block is and what good looks like in it. No longer than one sentence.

Two coaches on the floor split this: one runs the handover, one watches the group. With three coaches the third sets the next zone out while the previous block is still running, which is the only reason a sixty-minute session can hold twenty-one minutes of actual skill work.

When the shape bends

A short group — six children instead of sixteen — keeps all four blocks and loses the second game: one game of three against three, longer, with the sides swapped halfway. A hot hall shortens the game block and lengthens the cool-down, with the roller door opened and the group kept out of the sun strip under it. A late start takes its minutes from the game block and never from the warm-up.

The one thing that does not bend is the order. Nobody at this academy teaches a skill to a cold group, and no group leaves the floor without a cool-down and a named hand-over, however late the session started.