My idea's for the player-environment approach comes from an article written by Swedish Soccer coach Mark O' Sullivan who I follow on Twitter and regularly posts juicy content for coaching geeks like me.
Within the player-environment approach the coach can be seen as a problem setter with a focus of being extremely careful as to not to over or under constrain the task so that players can’t pre-organise their behaviour like they will be required to do on game day.
This is one of my biggest gripes of local/amateur teams all doing the same drill mixed as seniors and reserves and sometimes thirds/under 18's players.
Skill is a constraint.
Drill complexity is a constraint.
Personal fitness is a constraint.
Not that the drill needs to look nice and pretty with balls zooming around never hitting the ground but the critical part is who does the drill work perfectly for (a select few) and who it does not (everyone else).
Lane work might be a perfect fit for beginners still learning the game as it encourages the player to face their target, gather some momentum and to run straight at the target and kick.
A drill with further requirments might be pushing a players personal bandwidth on what the beginner player can handle and thus perform the basic instruction of lanework.
The fact the the coach never really gives any information before doing lanework except for maybe a "let's get it hummin" means there's probably not a lot of information required for the drill and then any player who requires more information to develop further as a player, is as good as wasting their time.
Bio-banding via ability, training and playing age might be your best option and might even be forced upon on by the restrictions as we come back to training
Game forms refer to games that are based around your specific sport, in this case Aussie Rules Football, but are not of the full game.
They might be handball games, handball and kicking games or just kicking games.
They usually have constraints, or rules, placed within them to elicit the training response the coach.
For example if working the ball from cobgestion has been an issue in games then the coach might prepare a 10x10m area and perform a 4v2 small sided game in it with the aim being to get 5-10 handballs in a row within the 10x10m area before they can play outside of it (spread).
To be able to set up the player-enviroment approach to be at its most effective, the coach needs to develop game forms in training that directly talk to the players, meaning feedback is directly coming from the game form itself.
The area/enviroment is designed to cause congestion and the constraint/rules are set so that players are again forced to behave/play in a way that they'll be required to come game day, with quick/clean ball handling and rapid fire/instictive decision making.
As a result the coach has already done their job by preparing the task and environment of the drill which a regular coach would render as them now being useless but us new-age coaches know better.
We now know that the less instructon we have to provide during the drill/game, the more self exploration and instinctual/reactive freedom the players will play with.
Baring in mind that we're not on the ground when they are playing, this is maybe the most important thing you can provide your players from a training sense as it enables the players to fully focus on the task at hand and their teammates instructions.
Your further instructions on top of this, yelling things that you can see but not what they can see, overloads the amount of information they can take in, resulting in poor performance and low transferability.
At the completion of these drills/scenario's the discussion of how the drill went is not about the success of ball handling or scores but rather judged solely on the task prsented by the coach at the beginning of the drill.
Going back to our 4v2 small sided game example from above, the coach might time how long it takes it perform those 10 handballs and if the time improves from set or set, then that would be an indication that player and ball movement is clean/quick and players are playing on instict as they are not holding onto the ball before making a decision.
The coach might also feel the need to insert an extra defender if it seems the 4v2 is too easy for the offenseive players and if success is still attained, then again the drill has probably been a success and the players have been able to solve the same problem (playing in congestion) in a number of different of scenario's - the exact requirment of game day.
You then could judge the spread aspect of the drill once the handball constraint is reached (5 - 10 as above) and did players "feel" pressure from the defenders and if they did, then that might indicate that spreading from the contest needs a bit more work as position and ball/player movement could be better from the initial congestion.
My final point is how to decide what information you provide to your players in regards to the goal of the drill/session so that they can't self organise around it too much.
If players know that the drill is set up for a wide clearance then you'll simply have players on the far side all on their own, waiting for the ball to come to them.
How many times on game day can a player simply do that unmanned or without manning up?
How does that player train to get to that position if he does have to man up beforehand?
How do players with the ball find moving targets that aren't in designated positions that are predetermined?
It does nothing for anyone.
Decision making can be dictated by past coaching patterns of play from an early age (cone to cone drills coaching) which leads to players playing that pattern in games regardless of if there are other options available for them, such as to create space or even run into space.
Lastly the information required to self organise within cone to cone drills is extremely low and as a coach you simply can't expect a player to make sound decisions in a game of decision making when you don't provide opportunities to make game-like decisions at training.
Coming Up - Introducing New Training Drills
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