NEXT LEVEL COACHING – DECISION MAKING DURING GAMES: KNOWLEDGE OF/IN THE GAME

                                        

NEW TERMS

Knowledge of Opposition - refers to the knowledge of opposition team/player tactical, physical movements and positions

• Knowledge of the game connects the search for game information and selection of a relevant capability to act together through deeper understanding of why specific decisions are more appropriate in 1 scenario than another, and is attributed to the development over time of task-specific declarative knowledge stored as verbal and visual memory representations
• Players are required to update their knowledge in the game in order to adapt to changes in expectations such as when new information arises or the opposition behaves differently than predicted
• Knowledge of the game is a fast thought action and refers to knowledge of the opposition, roles, responsibilities, self awareness and tactics but is also referred to as self awareness and knowledge of teammates and what each can do, when coming to fast thought decisions
• Knowledge in the game is also a fast thought action and refers to their knowledge in the game during fast thought decisions but changes in expectations of game situations required the ability to quickly adapt and then game context can also push expectations further away if it’s chaotic and high pressure
• No references were made to knowledge of the game of knowledge in the game during no thought actions and knowledge of the game only referenced sparingly during fast thought actions
• Knowledge of the game is mostly recounted during slow thought decision making where players are presented with more time and an increased number of options to select from, and within these instances player’s share how their knowledge of opposition, tactical, roles and responsibilities, self awareness and teammates all influenced their decision making process
• Elementary units of meaning comprised from player’s knowledge of the game all relate to the successful execution of pre-planned intentions for performance
• References to knowledge in the game were made predominantly during fast thought actions with players describing that they tend to form expectations of what will happen based on their assessment of game information showing that players attempt to make sense of game information and engage in an assessment of situational probability to successfully anticipate an outcome but they can often be inaccurate when calculating situational probability from their assessments of game information so players need to constantly update their perception of the situation as game information is altered before them, where the current information is deemed unfamiliar and thus there’s a need to process the available information in relation to formed representations to generate an appropriate response
• In most of these cases players simply take the 1^st viable option presented to them to quickly satisfy the situation and to remove risk
• Lower tier teams and players update and adapt to game incidents more often than elite level, mostly from an over-reliance on tactical intentions where elites have increased perceptual capability to form accurate assessments of situational probabilities

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