Hi, thanks for being a Hopcats practice coach! As a practice coach your job is to help facilitate the learning of others during free practice time. It’s a very valuable role and we’re grateful you’re helping out!

Timing and context

After the daily exercise, we will do introductions and announce you as a coach right before the start of free practice time. During free practice, we would like you to jump around to different people or groups as needed while they practice.

Approaches for coaching

People may come to you with direct questions. However, please note that people don’t always know how to ask for help or need it. Some things that might help mitigate awkwardness are:

1. YOU ask for help. If someone seems to be struggling with a move you could say “I think that’s a really cool move that I would like to learn too! Will you help me workshop it?”
2. “Hey [group of people] what are you working on? It looked really cool! Can I help you explore that?”

One common thing will be people coming to you without a strong idea of what they want to work on. One useful thing to do in this scenario is to dance with the person for a minute and pick out something to work on. Ideally, you could then spend some time working on it with them, then give them an exercise or a tip to continue working on it. Another approach is to work on something from the group exercise with them or work on related skills that would better enable the content of the group exercise. (For example, if the group exercise was about Charleston, maybe helping them with their charleston pulse or kicks)

Our goal is to have the practice coach interact with everyone who is looking for coaching. If people are not seeking you out as a coach, please try to engage with one of the approaches above.

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If you end up working with one person for a prolonged period of time (>10 min), it may make sense to provide them with an exercise, then encourage them to find someone to practice with. This is to ensure that other people are able to approach you for coaching.

If nobody else needs coaching, then you can return to folks who you’ve worked with previously or take a break!

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Providing feedback

Your attitude as a practice coach is really important. Try to be encouraging and celebratory of someone’s success. Please try to understand what success means to each individual, and give them feedback that helps them accomplish their goals, as opposed to “doing it right”. Success may mean:

• Having the courage to practice in the first place!
• Executing a move more comfortably and safely
• Mastering tiny details of a specific move
• Achieving a certain aesthetic
• Being more aware of something in their dancing

Once you’ve given someone feedback, try to gauge how much information someone might want to receive. Please check in on brain space!

• A good way to help gauge their level of engagement is taking a break for yourself (check phone, get water, go to the restroom) and then see if they are still intent on working with you upon the return. If they look busy with others or are taking time to chill, it might be good to move on
• You can also ask directly, “Hey, is this enough or do you want time to work on this more?”. But be aware that some personality types may say that they are fine even if they aren't!