DECISION MAKING PART 2

 Here's another take on decision making that can be added to the framework from yesterday's post.

These notes are taken from an article from Peter Motzenbecker, a Soccer coach from the US and quite detailed and worth a read in itself.

Here are my notes from it.

• Environment, coach, team, club and the team's game model all play a part in decision making
• Coaches can provide principles/patterns/cues that players can follow as well as feedback that players can take in/learn from with suggestions for the future, but they can never make the decision for the player
• Perception-action coupling is a good place to start but even that can be added to as 1v1 requires a lot of information processing, let alone with plenty other moving parts going on around you
• Feedback should be based on the decision making process over the actual outcome meaning if a player misses an in-board kick from half back, that the decision (correct) is applauded more than the skill error is shunned.
• Perception-decision-execution is probably a better way to go, which separates the decision from the execution
• Saying players were "unlucky" provides zero information on the actual decisions made in that instance and is usually said by coaches who can't work out what actually happened and/or how to fix it so you're better off saying nothing
• Players need conscious awareness of what’s around them, the physical references of the field (space, teammates, opposition, ball, goals, lines etc) and they need to be able to recognise patterns/cues which can both be self conscious and learned from repetitious training
• A game model teaching patterns/cues is a must but must also allow freedom to play within it
• You can’t be too game model based as you’re useless when you can't play to it (environment, opposition, manpower), but you also can't be married to the "best players" model because you'll useless again when they are not in form or they are unavailable.
• Drills allow each player to see how every other player plays that particular pattern which also allows them to play off of that better during games (being predictably unpredictable)
• Being "automatic" enhances creativity and better decision making and those who aren’t automatic for whatever reason, use too much energy/attention on simple decisions and also results players having less potential solutions to problems and low in-game variability (give someone a hammer and they'll try and hammer everything).
• Don't shy away from skill work but build a foundation in what skills are needed for your game model then allow creativity around that.
• Everything you do at training needs to be stored and then to become subconscious
• The progression of decision making is:

1 – Feedback Driven and Immediate Outcome Based Decision Making

• This is the starting point where if you see "x" then you do "y" and "x" happens

2 – Instinctual Decision Making

• This is subconscious decision making which is you have done "x" thousands of times and it is the right solution for "y"

3 – Conscious Decision Making

• Being able to consciously process information that has been instinctual and breaking down why you do "x" when you see "y" and contemplating other ways to solve "y" based on triggers/cues/patterns etc

All this leaves us with:

Perception – Visualisation – Decision - Deception – Execution

• During the visualisation stage the player sees multiple possibilities
• During deception the player is able to disguise their action via ball/body manipulation