9. Nets
Specialists
We recognise that you as the team owner are more au fait with the tactical and business side of the game, so we have given you the opportunity to hire specialist coaches to help you to improve your player's skills. There are five different types of specialist coaches that you can hire: bowling, batting, fielding, wicket keeping and stamina coaches. All of these coaches can be hired from within the Club Info page. (You can read more about them individually in the Backroom Staff section)
Once you have hired at least one specialist coach, you can start to allocate a player to each of these coaches for the week within the nets area. Each coach will add one more available coaching session, the benefits of which are seen after Saturday's weekly training update. (See Global > Country Details > Updates Schedule for the exact time in your country). The nets and training are only applied to a player during the Training Update on Saturdays. This means you can change around the nets during the week as much as you like, but the training will only be applied to the players assigned to Nets as the Training Update goes through on the Saturday.
There are some limitations though. Due to the limited time and space available, you can only have 10 coaching sessions each week. If you have more specialist coaches than that, then you are simply paying them to sit around each week. Even if you could allocate a player to them, they would never get the chance to train as the net space would never be available.
An example of using ten training sessions from the "Nets" page.
Multiple Nets
Secondly, although each player can be allocated to more than one specialist coach, the effectiveness of the sessions will reduce with every duplication.
For example, if you allocate Botham to two batting sessions, they will get the full benefit from the first session, but due to the amount of work they have already done in that session, the amount they can possibly gain from the second session is much less. If they were allocated to a third batting session, they would receive again even less training. A fourth training session would only provide negligible benefit.
However, if Botham was told to also go to a bowling session as well as the batting ones, they would still get the full benefit from the first bowling session. Again, any subsequent sessions would also see a reduction in training received.
Squad Training
As well as hiring coaches to work one-on-one with players, you can request squad training sessions to train stamina and/or fielding. If you have a stamina or fielding coach employed, look for a "Squad Training" option at the top of the drop-down player list next to your stamina or fielding net on the nets page.
An example of selecting squad training for stamina and fielding
All players in your squad will receive a benefit from a squad training session. But keep in mind that your training grounds are only so big, and there simply isn't enough space to train more than 30 players at a time. So if you try and train your entire team when you have a squad bigger than 30 you will see the effectiveness of the training reduced.
Fitness
As the days pass, the fitness of your players will rise during each daily update at a rate depending on their stamina. If you train too hard it will tire the player rather than improve their fitness.
Playing in a match will also have a detrimental effect on their fitness, although club friendlies will have no impact. If they bowl lots of overs, their fitness would drop more than if they had not batted and only appeared in the field. Also if a player gets to 100 runs their fitness after the game will have dropped by more than a player who got a duck. A player's fitness level will have a significant effect on their performance, so you will have to judge when to rest players and when to play them. Giving a player too many net sessions will cause them to be tired for a couple of days after nets and may not recover in time for matches.
Secondary Skills
There is also another kind of specialist that you can get some benefit from; sports psychologists. While employing these specialists will help your team with any morale issues you may be experiencing, they can also help your players with the more mental skills: concentration and consistency. Your psychologists will attend all but the stamina coaching sessions, and will be passing on helpful hints to the players while they are being coached. The more psychologists you have, the more advice can be dished out, although the law of diminishing returns does apply here too with each additional psychologist providing fewer words of wisdom than the one before.
Sports psychologists will only attend the first net of a type per player per day. So your bowling trainee with 3 bowling nets only sees the sports psychologists in the first net and the sports psychologists are not available to them in the subsequent bowling nets. If they had a fielding net as well, they would also attend that session. All psychologists will attend each net for which any would qualify, so have 10 different players being trained one session of batting each and all psychologists will attend all 10 sessions.
Form
Finally, form. All players that are trained by specialists are more likely to see a rise in their form that week, as are the players who play in a match, regardless of whether they actually bowl or bat, so be careful about leaving too many players just sitting on the side lines!
Training Rate
Finally, note that younger players, being hungrier and keen to learn, will train their technical skills quicker - whilst older players (being more mature) will be able to improve their concentration and consistency quicker.
Stamina increases at the same rate, whatever the age.