Preseason is an exciting time of year as cricket is just around the corner.

It's a great time to put some profiling into place to help us design an strategy or coaching programme that supports your players through the season.

Technical Profiling

This is not as complex or as difficult as it sounds!

Profiling is as simple as choosing your skills - or Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) - for each discipline and assessing the players ability against each KPI.

Marks run from 0-10 with 10 being perfect performance.

Quickly a picture will form around each player. This leads to better development programming, more effective deployment of your players within your team and - most importantly - brings you and your player together to focus on their own game.

A couple of Technical Profile KPI examples that I presently use:

• Stance and grip
• Front foot on-side
• Back foot onside
• Reading spinners
• Backing up
• Involvement/encouragement
• Underarm flicks

These are just some examples I use. It is always preferable to design your own technical KPI's that best support your own coaching principles, philosophies and practice.

Bringing your flat-data to life

You have produced some great flat-data from this process which is great news as it is motivational, promotes solid conversation between players and focussed minds.

The 'boffins' amongst you will then covert this data into a Web-chart which allows the data to be presented visually.

It's interesting to see the comparison between the player and the coaches view.

This promotes stimulating conversation and graphically illustrates some development areas that can be programmed into the season.

It also confirms each players super-strengths which is good for boosting both confidence and self-awareness as you head into competition.

As well as profiling your players, It's also a good way of presenting the areas of the game that you hold dear and focuses the players minds ahead of each session or match.

When to profile

Profile a player at 3 points within a competitive phase. Pre-season, Midpoint of the season and in review which can identify areas for off-season developmental focus.

Have a go, develop your own 'Technical Profiler' and start having great player development meetings with your athletes that builds the foundation to their future successes.