STUDY WEEK - SKILLED INTENTIONALITY

                                         

Full study link here.

• Team sport is analysed/explained by assuming an attacking-defending dualism whereby the game is viewed from the separate perspectives of either the attack or defense and this fragmented perspective obscures/ignores the dynamic relations and constant co-adaptation between attack and defense
• Knowledge of the performance environment is better suited for supporting perceptual learning, intentionality and the split second adaptations of players during continuous interactions of team sport
• Communicating 2^nd hand knowledge about football to players is largely ineffectual if 1 aims to optimise skill development/team coordination
• Skill development is the term we use to encompass skilled performance, perceptual learning and collective behavior in sport
• These related process are reliant on players becoming directly attuned to, and adapting with, the dynamic properties of football performance environments
• Knowledge of a performance environment helps each athlete to perceive the surrounding layout of their performance environment at the scale of their body/action capabilities
• Individuals use this type of knowledge to regulate behaviors during continuous interactions with objects/events/other people/surfaces and features of the terrain in the environment
• Knowledge of the performance environment may be comprised of surrounding info from the continuous movements of opponents/teammates/ball, revealing available affordances of gaps/obstacles/locations/spaces for achieving competitive aims
• Talking about football concepts that are abstract/decoupled from the environmental properties of the performance environment remains the predominant approach of coaching
• Overly reductionist/analytical methodologies create isolated fragments of decontextualised knowledge and these fragments are unable top account for the socio-cultural complexity and sub-system interrelations of athlete's environments and consequently present deconstructed/unrelatable pictures of athlete development
• Traditional methodologies remain focused on knowledge about the game with football concepts used to prescribe a sequence of best decisions and optimal solutions aligned to predetermined game model/tactical plans but there can be no optimal chain of best decisions in team sports
• The interdependent/relational/situational game dynamics mean that the most functional decision at any moment may compromise future decisions as interactions of players are deeply contextualised and entirely dependent on emergent info of when/where/who
• No amount of abstract representations, football concepts or coaching plans are able to account for the reality that the decisive interactions of players (passes, dribbling, tackles, interceptions, fakes, feints) are emergent/unpredictable/unknowable
• Traditional concepts focus on knowledge about the game and in practice these concepts have become the learning outcomes with training coupled to methods that encourage the verbal recall of those concepts but not always coupled with the doing of that very same concept
• Affordances always have to be understood in the context of an ecological niche that implies the form of life of a certain kind of animal and therefore we define an affordance as a relation between an aspect of the socio-material environment and an ability available in a form of life
• Ecological dynamics underscores how an athletes relates to, and their interdependence with, an environment facilitates specific behavior, emphasising the importance of interactions that are continuously regulated by information from the performance environment
• This description captures how the athlete-environment system becomes highly interconnected, attuned and resonant, making it problematic to practice performance behaviors in isolation, away from typical contexts
• Behavior/skill development can only be understood in accordance with both the characteristics of a performer and the characteristics of a performance environment simultaneously
• The process of skill acquisition is better conceptualised as skill adaptation/development, or the deep attunement to/reasonance with, the surrounding information in a practice/performance environment
• Skill develops as players become more attuned to opportunities for actions/affordances presented by the environment (players, ball, boundaries etc) but not all environmental properties are equal with some aspects weighted towards different social/cultural significance such as attention/standing out to be more readily perceived by others such as a gap between a defender’s legs resonating a cultural significance for Brazilian soccer players who can nutmeg them
• Within ecological dynamics the interactions of teams/players are deeply interconnected and continuously shaped by the constraints of the environment/tasks where constraints act as information and are related to each individual/task/environment, embedded by socio-cultural contexts and shaped by socio-cultural forces
• In ecological dynamics perception is of affordances and behavior is self organisation under constraints
• Affordances are facts of the environment and facts of behavior being physical/psychological or none and it points to both the environment and the observer
• Socio-material entanglement stresses that affordances are not just situated in the materialality of the immediate behavioral setting but entwined within a more culturally encompassing, socially shared and historically developed constellation of practices
• Affordances/effectivities can only be discovered/used when intentionality and lawfully specifies possibilities are coordinated where the intentionality of an agent and the aptness of the situation give rise to the relational properties of effectivity/affordance
• Effectivity describes the property of the agent which allows them to utilise a feature of the environment
• Affordance describes the property of the environment which the agent orients to and utilises
• Situation X affords activity Y for organism Z on occasion O if and only if X/Z are mutually compatible on dimensions of relevance to Y
• Organism Z effects activity Y in situation X on occasion O if and only if Z/X are mutually compatible on dimensions of relevance to Y
• Lawfully specified ensures that the perception of affordances is direct where the agent doesn’t need a representation of (knowledge about it) or have to think to utilise it, they simply perceive it and these possibilities are created through the properties of the environment
• A player perceives an affordance to score a goal when properties of the visual field lawfully specify openings in the defense in the direction of the goal and they have previously at training developed the effectivity to kick the ball accurately through the opening but an affordance to score is not perceived without intention to score which is embedded within the social practice of scoring a goal
• Affordnaces are also subject to changes in environment such as kicking for a goal but suddenly a mother/daughter walk behind the jumper goals and you have to change the power of your shot so as not to hit them where you demonstrate skilled intentionality which is a skillful responsiveness to multiple nested/nesting affordances simultaneously
• Players embody/display skilled intentions when they deceive/unbalance opponents with fakes/feints which is the art of deception with affordances to deceive opposition players nested/hidden within the relevant affordances that stand out
• Skilled intentionality is dependent on shared perception/affordances with teammates and opposition where an affordance to fake a pass and deceive the opposition is reliant on the opposition perceiving the opportunity for you to pass and simultaneously their (nested) invitation to intercept that pass, meaning you can only successfully perform a fake if your immediate opponent's skilled intentionality (perceptual skill/attunement) allows them to perceive your action opportunities
• Skill development/creativity is inextricably reliant on the perception of shared affordances
• Intentionality is entirely dependent upon context, inherently concerned with relationships/affordances
• Rondo’s spotlight passing/receiving opportunities by creating a relevant field of affordances that invite players to embody the value of teamwork/collaboration, coordinating their movements to create passing affordances and maintain poss but they still have major gaps in game representation
• Intentionality relates to a players’ interactions with the performance environment being directed at someone/thing = directedness and is not about explicit goals/tactics/technique that must be applied but a more flexible/adaptable environment with multiple action possibilities
• Players direct their actions towards certain aspects of the environment but their intentional state/value directedness determine what kind of aspects are targeted and which affordances are discovered, exploited and invented
• When  value-directedness is rigid/inflexible it will limit skill development opportunities (affordance detection/solution) with some affordances standing out and nested affordances undiscovered so players intentions are value directed by competition, individualism, comparison, evaluation and social status
• Coaches/clubs need to re-shape player-environment intentionality with interventions at the macros/micro level
• Successful fakes etc mark the moments in which value-directedness facilitates the detection, selection and utilisation of nested affordances and it’s worth considering if training devoid of fakes etc is too rigid, as in environments where players told exactly what to do by coaches in decontextualised settings building unskilled intentionality which when teams/players coordinate with a narrow field of relevant affordances like junior footy players all being around the ball and bad teams going down the line constantly
• To shape skilled intentions of players coaches must build training around game representative concepts such as when in possession of the ball coaches can ask players to try and play through, around or over them in order to score and vice versa for for the defensive team, where they also aim to win the ball back
• Shaping skilled intentions aims to facilitate an optimal level of team coordination/self organisation without sacrificing opportunities for adaptive, instinctive and potentially creative play and by directing players towards local interactions we avoid imposing tactical plans that aim to control, and often inhibit, local interactions
• Patterns of team coordination/self organisation that emerge from local interactions are flexible/adaptive to local information meaning players can break these patterns in unpredictable ways
• Players who display skilled intentions will balance the nested intentions moment to moment as they coordinate their movements on/off the ball, in order to play through/around/over the opposition
• To train shaping intentions coaches will often use a Rondo where there are 2 defenders but they aren’t coordinating their efforts and they are being played through easily but then start connecting, they stop most crosses and regain possession more often and the coordinated defense creates new challenges for the offense as they now might have to play around the defenders rather then through them
• Coaches must be aware of the value-directedness that is shaping intentions and the extent to which it may become rigid/inflexible
• Gains in direct perception can be mediated through communication about the environment and explained in various ways (written, drawn etc)
• 2^nd hand knowledge about the environment can illuminate the value-directedness of player-environment intentionality and play a vital role in aiding coaches’ awareness of value-directedness bit it is vastly inferior to facilitating the direct perception of affordances in a sport specific environment
• Self organisation of collective behaviors may be optimised by methods prioritising knowledge of, or direct attunement to, the local interactions of the environment
• Prioritise learning through continuous interactions of players on the pitch and in games, not through verbal instruction of football concepts
• Shaping skilled intentions facilitates self organisation in local to global direction
• Coaches should distinguish between developing players understanding about the game (ability to talk about football) in contrast to developing understanding in the game via the perception of nested affordances