As a part of esports coaching, the odds are that you have conducted or at least witnessed a VOD review at some point. VOD (Video On Demand) is a term that depicts when you go through deep analysis of games previously played by your team to detect flaws and make moves for possible improvements. Without a single doubt, these reviews are a crucial part of coaching, so as a coach, you have to understand how they work entirely.

Most coaches understand the basic concepts of these reviews. However, it takes more than basic knowledge to run a good VOD review effectively. 

In this guide, I will walk you through a detailed outline of all you need to know about running an effective VOD review by observing some crucial elements.

VOD Reviews: Why You Should Do Them

Generally, you conduct VOD reviews as a coach to improve your team. Diving deeper, however, here are some reasons you need to take these reviews seriously.

To Clarify What Happened

Emotions can get high during games, especially in competitions. Thus, it is almost impossible to analyze and understand your flaws properly. This reason, of course, is one of the reasons why you always have to conduct VOD reviews to track your game plan and detect your flaws to avoid them in future games.

To Investigate The Reason Why It Happened

Fishing out the core problems of a previous game is quite the most important thing to do while investigating the causes of poor performance in your team. This move will also enable you to comprehend the reason behind the performance level of your team. At times, misinformation, emotional trauma, and even an overall lack of mental fitness can affect the outcome of a game. 

To Actively Learn From Your Analysis And Improve Future Games

As the famous saying from John Dewey goes: "We do not learn from experience. Rather, we learn from reflecting on them". Experience, they say, is the best teacher. However, this is only a factual statement when you carefully observe your flaws, analyze them and learn from your errors.

Coaching is to lead via direct involvement. With that, you must remember that as a coach, you must develop a leadership pattern that involves recognizing your team's core strengths and weaknesses to find the right motivation for improvement.

Found out that your team's last performance was poor due to misinformation? Then you can do well to correct that and also thoroughly examine your motives with your players. 

Also, suppose your flaws happen to be centered around anything else. In that case, you can then conveniently follow up to avoid future errors. This strategy is the reason behind the success of many coaches.

Running An Effective VOD Review 

Helping players to become better is one action that takes time and dedication. As a result, you have to adopt a simple approach so that players can find it easy to understand your major objectives.

To run an effective VOD review, you need to do these things.

Set Simple Goals 

According to research by John Collard from Yale University, people naturally prefer simplicity and are more likely to choose experiences with minimum cognitive load. From the preceding text, you can confirm that creating simple goals for your team will help you as a coach and allow your players to focus. 

For a start, you can coin out one or two team goals from your analysis and work on how your players can fully understand these goals before moving to other pursuits. 

Today, most coaches set a long list of 10+ goals for their players. Of course, all your goals would make sense, but it would be difficult for players to implement. Thus, this action can ruin your overall plan and confuse players in future games.

Understand Your Players 

Open communication allows for honest feedback and a genuine relationship between you and your players. Undoubtedly, every player has a unique set of skills. As a result, you have to detect these skills and fully understand the talents and personalities of your players.

Understanding your players will enable you to easily detect the problems of your team and the proper ways to motivate players while going through reviews. Also, it will allow you to plan out better strategies that match your players' styles and improve overall productivity.

Stay Organized 

Regardless of your preferred VOD review style, staying as organized as possible would be best to get more things done. By staying organized, I mean being cautious of your review timing, structure, and other factors like your proposed goals and how to keep them simple.

Forms Of VOD Reviews

There are so many forms of VOD reviews that you can utilize for maximum success. Again, however, the effectiveness of these methods depends on several factors. Every team has a unique structure, which significantly determines the best VOD review method you should use as a coach.

Here are some of the major forms of VOD reviews.

• Coach-Led Reviews 

Just as the name implies, the Coach-Led system is a VOD review system in which you review gameplay by yourself as a coach and come up with a deep analysis with assistance from other team executives.

• Player-Led System 

As a coach, it is sometimes more effective to bring players through VOD reviews. This move can also enable you to access the skill levels of your players in terms of problem detection and analysis. 

Of course, the players played the games themselves. Thus, it makes sense to make further observations from the first-person perspective. Moreover, this method helps your players to see the game differently.

• In-client Replay System 

The in-client replay system is primarily available in games like FIFA, Valorant, etc. With this replay system, you go through a VOD review from an observer's point of view. In addition, you can switch between players to see from all their perspectives and access what each person could have done in specific situations. 

Conclusion

Whether you are early in your career as an esports coach or an experienced expert, there is always something new to learn about VOD reviews. Overall, you must fully understand the playing style of all your team players to quickly detect errors during your reviews. Furthermore, to run a successful check, you must keep your VOD sessions organized, keep your goals simple, and choose the best time for maximum player participation in your reviews. 

The topic of video-on-demand reviews is quite a vast one. However, I have compiled essential aspects of the subject so that you can improve your review game and increase productivity among your players.

Your Next Level

Are you looking to transform your esports coaching career and reach your next level by having the impact that you want and your players need, growing your career faster, coaching better teams, and learning how to position and market yourself at the same time? Then check out the Esports Coach Revolution Course, which is a unique chance to get where you want to be as an esports coach. With a community of like-minded coaches, you will learn everything you need in 10 weeks to transform your career to the next level with continuous updates, new content and courses and much more...