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!

Responsibilities

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 expect you to jump around to different people or groups as needed while they practice.

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 can 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?”

Our goal is to have the practice coach check in with everyone attending practice in one way or another (them approaching you, or you approaching them).

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If you are working with one person for more than 10 minutes, we recommend that you provide them with an exercise or something specific to practice, then encourage them to find someone to practice with. This is to ensure that other people are able to approach you for coaching, or that you are able to go around the room checking in with other groups to see if they would like coaching.

If nobody else needs coaching, then you can feel free to return to folks who you’ve worked with previously.

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Providing Feedback

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

• Executing a move more comfortably and safely
• Mastering tiny details of a specific move
• Looking good
• 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!

So, in short, be nice and don’t hover too much.