NEXT LEVEL COACHING – DECISION MAKING DURING GAMES: DO THIS!

                                          

This is the final post to wrap up this study so hopefully over the last 14 posts you've learned a little bit about how to gain game information off of your players, who don't see what you see and don't feel what you feel in that given moment.

This can help coaches better understand their players on an individual basis that can then allow the coach to get a leg up on what players need what training, getting as close to even keel as possible with players of various technical, tactical and physical capabilities.

NEW TERMS

Divergent Questions - refers questions without specific answers but requiring the ability to think broadly about a certain topic

Slow Thought - refers to decisions and game actions made based on of-the-game information

• Coaches should adopt 2 types of decision making training environments
• The 1st is the use of intentional decision making training (explicit learning) to develop cognitive decisions where players know what information to search for and also what action is appropriate to satisfy game information
• This may include explicit slow deliberate sense making activities such as video analysis, previews, team debriefs, coach led rules plus individual and collective roles and responsibilities through tactical rules
• The 2nd is to encourage players to explicitly connect their perception of information to their declarative knowledge of the game through slow and deliberate environments to make better informed decisions in rapid competition environments
• The game presents player’s with incidents where tactical information can no longer be referenced from limited time and game information which demands a change of expectations, so to support this coaches should utilise incidental decision making training which conforms to variable design principles such as non-linear pedagogy, in that practice provides exposure to the perception of information in order to identify invariances between the information being perceived and the action planned
• In such uncertain environments, coaches should consider guiding players to adopt the “take the 1^st” heuristics through exploratory coach behaviors (divergent questions etc) and practice manipulation (rule modifications etc)
• Coaches also need to consistently reinforce in training shared common language, a clear common frame of reference (game model etc) and to consistently seek, develop and refine technical and physical capabilities of their players, as they afford a wider scope of game information to select from
• Don’t shy away from decoupled, mass and block instruction but ensure technique is refined and re-coupled to game information
• Coaches should also study how to support players development of decision making and how it must progress further than coaches perceptions via self confrontation elicitation interviews (no, fast and slow thought grading etc) to explore how the demands of the game are perceived and captured by the coach, and impressed onto players within effective learning environments