4 STEPS TO EXPLOITING THE STAND RULE

                                       

This rule has been in footy for a few years now but it's still hugely underutilised at local level which is surprising because of the affordances you can attain from it which never used to be there - it's made the game easier to transition the ball but only if you know what you're doing.

Currently I'd say that most local coaches have made mention of the stand rule in relation to creating and taking 45 degree kick options, but that's not really new as it that was still in play pretty much before the stand rule came into affect.

It does open that kick up a lot more but it's not giving us anything we didn't already have but this post will tell you, and show you, the new affordances (opportunities for action) it does provide.

STEP #1 - TRANSITION TERRITORY POSSESSION...

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STUDY NIGHT - HIGH PERFORMERS

                                           

These notes are taken from a study on high performers in sport, what they look like, what they think about and what sets them apart from us normal's.

There's a saying that says "success leaves clues" so if you're goal as a player to improve, or a coach wanting to improve your players, then the answer could very well be in among these 700 or so words.

• High performers excel at learning in performance to quickly exploit opportunities to coordinate their actions to adapt to what the competitive context offers them, to function more effectively/efficiently
• The fastest sailors in regatta’s continually reorganise their actions and are highly attuned to immediate changes in prevailing currents/winds to any moment
• The skillful footballer adapts to the weight of their pass to match it to the demands of a wet surface where the ball skids or a dry surface with greater friction
• The spin bowler that quickly finds the most optimal pace when bowling on a new pitch
• The ice climber who explores/perceives properties of a frozen waterfall when traversing a route on a rocky surface
• Learning and performing are inter-dependent processes as learning cannot emerge without performance and performance needs to be assessed over time to evaluate learning
• Learning can lead to behavioral changes but refers to the set of processes that supports these changes
• Anxiety levels change the intentions of performers, what they perceive and consequently how they move
• Learning is the process of continual improvement of the relationship between an individual/environment by using surrounding perceptual information to continuously regulate actions but is a continuous work in progress as dynamic relationships can regress, stabilise or progress depending on their experience
• Individual performance solutions can vary over time scales via a change in capacity/skills, growth/maturation etc
• Learning does not occur in structured coaching sessions but rather in contextualised experiences of engaging with constraints of competitive environments
• Over all time frames, the skills/abilities that each ind develops are shaped by all the environments/landscapes of affordances/opportunities to action to which they are exposed to such as tennis players great on clay courts being a strong baseline player v a player with a serve and volley game on grass
• The perception/learning of affordances is not automatic but requires periods of individualised exploration over time to fine tune their attention as they detect meaningful properties of the environment to support/exploit their action capabilities so practice tasks need to provide athletes the opportunity to educate their intentions, attention and to calibrate their actions to achieve performance solutions
• Design learning for each stage by providing an initial period of search/exploration followed by a discovery/stability phase and for advanced athletes, activities should enhance their ability to exploit the available affordances
• Fine tuning performance involves specifying the information for skillful performance where you need to determine what variables you need to ignore or attend to but if you remove too many variables in the environment and make the practice task too easy, then the opportunity to learn to exploit relevant information to regulate their actions can be limited, as the opportunities to differentiate between unhelpful and helpful information, is denied
• An individual's degree of action fidelity is determined by the degree to which specifying affordances and the actions they support, are made available in training tasks
• Exposing learners to rich/varied practice environments can promote opportunities for individuals to develop knowledge of the performance environment by learning to self regulate and adapt (relatively) stable perception-action couplings to emergent problems
• Variability of practice refers to altering task, environment and individual constraints, not just 1 of them, such as the aim of achieving the same result under different conditions, which helps to self regulate to achieve consistent performance, and by adding perturbations you can support exploration/adaptation and not have that be viewed as a source of error in the system
• Skilled athletes are able to use task specific experiences to perceive action possibilities and exploit opportunities offered by factors such as opposition weaknesses or changes in environmental constraints such as wind, temperature and surface
• During performance this improved fit emerges through a continuous cycle of perceiving/acting to readjust intentions with respect to the (updated) knowledge of the environment
• When preparing athletes to compete, learning in action needs to be as fast as possible as task demands dynamically change as a result of interaction between task, environment and individual constraints as opportunities for action are usually brief and athletes need to pick up on them fast before they disappear
• Practice tasks should be based on matching learner intentions in practice with those observed in performance, ensuring learning tasks are highly representative of performance environments and contain key specifying information/affordances promoting maximum positive transfer with perception-action couplings demonstrating a high degree of fidelity to those seen in performance
• Practice adopting the concept of repetition without repetition to promote exploratory/performatory actions to support the emergence of stable/adaptable movement solutions and the design of constraints that invite learners to pick up/utilise affordances as and when they become available in a performance context

TEAM CHALLENGE TRAINING ACTIVITY

Not much to this but it's a bloody effective activity as it gives you, the coach, a chance to have your players attempt to interpret and put into play your specific strategies/tactics that you're aiming to use in games.

By having your players focus on using just 1 strategy/tactic at a time, it gives them a singular focus of what they're trying to achieve while also being free to play football on instinct.

The coach creates the challenge cards, then literally sits back and observes how their players carry out their challenge which allows the coach to see, in real time and within a competitive environment, what aspects of the strategy/tactic need to be addressed specifically.

If possible, I'd even record this activity so you can use it for video analysis.

Here's how it looks...

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GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - 5 PLAY SWITCH SCENARIOS

                                                 

Usually I post the game video then the training video but I'm going a different today with these 5 outnumber scenarios.

I normally leave quite a bit of bandwidth with how the scenarios can play out but these 5 are specific slices of the game with an offensive or defensive outnumber theme.

The 2nd major alteration is the use of defined space constraints which you'll see being the dotted black lines giving you a playing area to operate in and with some of today's scenarios - players starting outside the boundaries. 

If the ball or play goes outside these boundaries then the number disadvantaged team wins.

I'll explain a tiny bit about each as there's no videos for these.

SCENARIO #1 - OUT ON THE FULL FREE KICK MID WING...

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LEFT OVER GOLDEN NUGGET NOTES PART 3

Here are some more left over notes from what I originally compiled for the level 4 - game/training scenarios membership.

All notes/clips are taken from actual AFLW games from 2022 showing how things can play out in the heat of games and how much team organisation actually takes place, something severely lacking in local/amateur football but with pre-season right here, right now, there's no better time for coaches to learn so they can start to teach their players than the present.

SLOW PLAY INSIDE F50 KICK...

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IMPROVE YOUR TIME TO FATIGUE TRAINING PROGRAM

                                           

OK, you start your watch and head out for a run, get back and look at the time.

A 25sec personal best over 3kms, great.

You continue with this method time after time and at some point, more often sooner before later, you can't really beat your time anymore.

You can close to it, but you can't beat it.

When you're trying to beat your personal best every session it means you're working at 100% every session which in anything else isn't sustainable, and it isn't here either.

What you're doing "expressing"your running capabilities but once you start not beating your PB, then your still expressing your capabilities, albeit at a lower level yet you're still working at 100%.

Hopefully now you can see that this doesn't just add up.

Working at 100% each session builds fatigue and whether you think you can't feel it even though it's there (ego), fatigue effects every other output you want/need to give and everything starts to decrease.

I'm pretty sure you're not training like a maniac to build worse running capabilities.

Where most players, and coaches attempting to training fitness, go wrong is that you need to use training sessions that "build" your running capabilities as simply expressing it doesn't build it any further then it already is.

Essentially there's 2 ways to build:

1 - Build up how much volume can do in a fatigued state which is highly desired because fatigue slows you down so you'll never as quick as you were if you weren't as fatigued, or fatigued at all,

or;

2 - Build up the time it takes you to fatigue in the first place.

Once you start to build up fatigue by-products in your muscles, then you're on a 1-way path to full fatigue as you can only recover so much in games when you have to run when you have to run, not rest 45secs like your program might say then run again.

There's a million more variables at play here but the better your aerobic capacity, the more work you can do, and a higher intensity, before fatigue starts to build and then settle in for good and if this is occurring in the 1st half of games, then you're in deep trouble for the next 2 quarters from a performance and injury stand point.

I have a sprinter profile when it comes to energy systems and my time to fatigue is below average but I have above average strength/power which enables to maintain sprinting speed over the course of a game but at the same time I'm regulating how and what other running I'm doing but obviously going when I have to which isn't ideal because I can't plan what's going to happen.

So my goal since late last year has been to improve my time to fatigue time and this what I've done so far and the results I've attained...

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GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - 5 OUTNUMBER SCENARIOS

                                                      

Usually I post the game video then the training video but I'm going a different today with these 5 outnumber scenarios.

I normally leave quite a bit of bandwidth with how the scenarios can play out but these 5 are specific slices of the game with an offensive or defensive outnumber theme.

The 2nd major alteration is the use of defined space constraints which you'll see being the dotted black lines giving you a playing area to operate in.

If the ball or play goes outside these boundaries then the number disadvantaged team wins.

I'll explain a tiny bit about each as there's no videos for these.

SCENARIO #1 - FREE KICK DURING CENTER BOUNCE...

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STUDY NIGHT - A PEOPLE-FOCUSED APPROACH (SPORT4ME)

                                                            

These points come from a a study released just last week titled "Sport4Me: A People Focused Approach to Engaging Australians in Sport."

Click the hyperlink to view in full.

With such a focus only playing to win at all community levels of sport, participation has dropped off the back of it as more and more people prefer social activity over competitive activity.

Community sports clubs need to have eyes on both types of participators at their clubs, even going as far as finding who plays to win and who plays to socialise, and whose there for both aspects which could assist in how you develop and design practice activities to appease both ends of the participation spectrum.

Clubs that don't cater to, or socially "allow" for social participating members only will fall behind in total participation numbers, putting their club at long term risk.

This is not just an issue at junior level, although that's where it often starts, and  it's even worse in adult-aged sport.

• The traditional model of community sport is fine for those who enjoy competition and have the skills/commitment to play but societal preferences have changed and most kids prefer to participate in sport outside of competition/high skill structures
• Associations between motivations to play and factors that create fun/enjoyment are misaligned for each child
• Sport4Me is about flexible, inclusive and equitable sporting opportunities that focus on friends, fun, physical literacy and play  to encourage lifelong participation
• 50% of all sport participants are 5 – 14 years old but 45% of those drop out by age 17
• Adults who play sport are also opting for less competitive settings of more flexibility and less competitive options
• The Aussie context of engagement in sport has been, and continues to be, a cultural activity forming part of the imagined Aussie identity going back to colonial naturalism and serves a social purpose of achieving a false sense of community through a common vision of identity
• Sport is now a hybrid of community/corporate sport in how it is perceived and delivered
• Clubs have a playing-to-win focus on higher skilled players but fail to cater for everyone else, contributing to dwindling numbers
• Informal sport has gained limited traction from difficulty accessing facilities from traditional local clubs
• The format in how sport has been delivered is now strongly challenged by changing lifestyles
• A slow change is occurring is gender inclusiveness but again it fails to cater for those not playing for competition and without adequate skills
• 2 decades ago, a study of Aussie youth sport found that the biggest concerns were low participation rates, poor levels of skill development, a limited range of available sports, limited opportunities for females and a lack of quality sport coaches
• Modified sports were introduced to make sport more accessible
• They found that the common coaching approach was command and practice which was flagged as a concern so they developed a new game based/player centered approach to coaching (game sense) but the quality of coaching still persisted and participation continued to decline
• Participation/retention in sport is not related to a single factor like competency but a range of factors across different domains
• For children sport is something they like to be controlled by them but competitive sport is run via an adult lens with children wanting to play for fun, having to play to win
• Early participation leads to adolescence participation suggesting the initial experienced coaching methods are the most important
• In their teens, perceived/actual belief in their competence/ability and thus self esteem, begins to influence participation/motivation
• Low movement quality when entering their teens leads to sedentary lifestyles and should be focused on in early years
• Participation decreases across a lifespan x 15% for 20 – 24yr olds, 7% for 30 – 34, 6% for 40 – 44, 4o% for 50 – 54, 2% for 60 – 64 and 1% for 70 – 74 and that includes social sport/fitness focused activity (local gym etc)
• All this being said there is definitely still a place for competitive club-based sport
• Children's motivations include become a professional athlete, learn new skills, work towards a sense of achievement
• Adult motivations are much less motivated by performance/competition and more by health maintenance and being a good role model
• Older adults motivations are mostly around the social aspect
• The biggest motivator is to have fun (intrinsic motivation) followed by physical health/fitness, performance/competition, social reasons/be with friends and to generate a sense of achievement
• Male motivations include play to perform, compete, be a professional athlete and often focus on more extrinsic factors (recognition etc) then females
• Both genders have motivations including intrinsic factors such as enjoyment and socialising to enhance well being
• Females motivations include improving physical/mental health, lose weight, be a good role model, learn new skills with the group context being huge for more motivation
• When asked creating memorable experiences for kids they answered with having fun, being challenged to improve, get better at sport, playing with friends and socialising with LESS THAN HALF responding with winning
• Teens responded with personal development x trying your best, social development x playing well as a team and organisational factors x game time and well organised practices
• Adults responded with by keeping fit
• Males were more likely to have fun when winning compared to females who have more fun with a friendly coach
• Teen girls responded with trying your best, parents behaving well
• Teen boys responded with game time and well organised practices
• What is fine for 1 player will be different for another so find out what fun is to each and every player
• We choose to do things based on the memory of the experience and the anticipation of a new memory that will be created, so you need to create a story from the memory of the experience which provide positive experiences and sustains participation, limiting drop outs and continuing participation
• Emotion persuades behavior and determines moments that become remembered, but this is highly individual and if their thing isn't winning then you’re gonna lose them
• Outside circle x playing sport/motivations for fun
• At an organisation/club level be welcoming, inclusive, have well organised practices, allow flexible commitment, ensure quality coaching and include competition but also with providing everyone opportunities to play/play
• At the interpersonal level focus on playing with friends, social engagement and get great parental engagement
• At the intrapersonal level focus on physical literacy, competition/opportunities to play, gaining a sense of achievement and provide challenges for improvement

GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - FORWARD 50 DEFENSE

As mentioned in the video, set some cones up through the mid line of the ground to act as a space constraint then let them play.

We're specifically seeing how our 2 defenders can delay the ball from getting to the far wing and provide time for our pother defenders to get over from where the ball started and assist them.

PREVIOUS GAME MOMENT...

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GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - KICK OUT + FOLLOW UP

                                                     

This is a set play from the kick out but it's all about keeping the kick out player involved in the play because the least defended player on the ground is usually the one who just disposed of the ball, so they'll often be free if they keep on the move and in the play.

Set plays are the last thing you'd introduced after strategy's and tactics that I've covered before such as like length and play on handball to a running from behind option and how everyone needs to be on the same page for this to happen.

Prior to training I would run through this activity with the players you'll involve (defenders and a winger I'd suggest) but don't let the defenders (your forwards) in on anything - just put them in their positions like they would be in the kick out zone structure and off they go.

This may not work perfectly until a few "messy" reps (which is perfectly fine during learning), or at all, but you're still teaching football principles and the problem to be solves is if they can be applied in different scenarios.    

PREVIOUS GAME MOMENT...

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ESSENDON RONDO TRAINING ACTIVITY

                                          

Rondo's are used all the time in soccer, albeit in smaller areas but the Bombers have modified this to a bigger area.

I've posted various Rondo activities before but they focus on maintaining possession against aggressive defense, making 1 second decisions and being clean with your skills under moderate-to-high pressure, depending on how you design the activity. 

This activity popped up on Twitter this past week and I jotted it down but I can't find it again - it's some bloke who goes to every Essendon training and comments on who was there, what they were doing and such.

Here how the activity was set up and ran, with some of my own constraints added in...

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ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS+ DEVELOPING COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR IN FOOTBALL PART 3/3

                                             

Here is the 3rd part of what could be the most important coaching document a local/amateur coach could read all year, even though we're only 10 days in!

It comes from a monster document you can find here:

"The forest through the trees: Making sense of an ecological dynamics approach to measuring and developing collective behaviour in football" - William Sheehan, Rhys Tribolet, Mark Watsford, Job Fransen

There's a PDF link you can click on that page that will take you the full article - a mammoth 89 pages - that the authors have tried to make a reader friendly as possible for other sub-elite/elite coaches but being a local/amateur coach, I read it thought I could dumb it down even more for coaches shorter on time and resources.

It's documents like this that need to made available to all coaches, especially the ones at club level where coaching starts for EVERY player, and is why they have put this together and released it for free.

It is based on soccer but the Sydney Swans "were important in the conceptualisation of the work, as well as the testing of some of the ways we approached explaining the heavy jargon to a more general audience" as Tweeted to me from one of the authors Job Fransen, who has done plenty of work in the AFL space in the past.

I have used plenty of AFL language in my notes but it'll be handy to keep the soccer reference in mind as some bits might not connect perfectly to AFL.

This is the last part (3) so strap yourself in and let me know anything you need help/clarification on.

TACTICAL INTERVENTION USING SMALL SIDED GAMES

• Small–sided games are modified games played on reduced pitch dimensions, often using adapted rules and involving a smaller number of players, designed appropriately in accordance with representative learning design incorporating task, individual and environmental constraints, game representative information and perception-action coupling
• They allow players to develop in a training environment and allows individual and collective tactical behaviours to be adjusted to perceived information and opportunities for action, reflecting the function of a normal game

MACROSCOPIC-LEVEL INTERVENTION

• Small–sided games demonstrate inter–team level coordination with the utilisation of numerical and spatial constraints, manipulated via the number of players (3v3, 4v3, 4v4, 5v4 and 5v5), as well as relative space per player similar to full numbered games with similar centroid measures and synchronous behavior in both vertical/horizontal directions
• Small–sided games promote and preserve inter–team coordinative behavior and decision–making as the presence of an opposition and ball provide relevant information that guides co–adaptive behavior
• For coaches attempting to encourage similar kicking environments than those in a game, a 6v5 within the 50m arc with changing constraints, tempo and rules emulate the kicking environment that emerge in games (this point is taken from a different study I posted about late last year)
• Increases in pitch size leads to an elevation in team separateness which may favor defensive coordination as it allows the defending team additional time to modify positioning and movements relative to that of the attacking team
• Narrower and shorter pitches have decreased inter–team distance which may favor attacking teams, providing more opportunities to destabilise defensive lines
• Increasing the number of goals, from one to upwards of three at each end, leads an increase in distance between team centroids as well as team separateness as it forces defenders to create distance between themselves and the offending team which can assist the attacking team in stretching the opposition defense and the creation of free spaces
• The use of additional goals can expand attacking players’ breadth of attention and perceived stimuli while improving the defensive teams collective ability to coordinate and search for new affordances to cope with the modified scoring modalities
• Coaches can use game based based on scoring, time, player numbers or a combination of, to promote different adaptive behaviors and to experience the emotional feelings associated with match–contexts

MESOSCOPIC-LEVEL INTERVENTION

• Even width/length pitches (1:1 ratio) are best for training transition offense and offense
• Small–sided games and tasks are often a player–driven where players decide what the goal or outcomes should be and requires the players involved to agree about the basic assumptions about the action in front of them fostering intra-team coordinative behavior via collective intelligence
• As an example, we initially begin the game by getting behind by 3 goals and collectively agree that in order to get back in the game we need more possession of the ball whilst concurrently limiting opposition scoring opportunities leading to the common agreement that when we are not in possession then we need to force more early turnovers so now the game is for us to create 5 turnovers regardless of the amount of time it takes resulting in the implicit attunement to specific affordances that allow players to coordinate behavior at an intra–team level, resulting in the achievement of goal outcomes

MICROSCOPIC-LEVEL INTERVENTION

• When trying to improve an amateur’s ability to utilise variable behavior in attacking sequences of play during 5v5, start with larger playing spaces and gradually decrease the playing space as their ability to harness degenerate behavior improves
• Constraining players to certain areas of the pitch may hinder the emergence of favorable inter–player coordinative behavior + it limits spatial exploration which greatly impairs the regulation of collective behavior
• The best way to use a restricted–spacing constraint is to allow some players access to other areas for a limited amount of time, in a specific situation such as if there direct opposition goes in or during a specific phase of play like transition defense
• Man–on–man defense results in defensive asymmetry and a lack of coordination, as the defending team’s emergent behavior is guided by the opposition’s displacement

ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS + DEVELOPING COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR IN FOOTBALL PART 2/3

                                     

Here is the 2nd part of what could be the most important coaching document a local/amateur coach could read all year, even though we're only 9 days in!

It comes from a monster document you can find here:

"The forest through the trees: Making sense of an ecological dynamics approach to measuring and developing collective behaviour in football" - William Sheehan, Rhys Tribolet, Mark Watsford, Job Fransen

There's a PDF link you can click on that page that will take you the full article - a mammoth 89 pages - that the authors have tried to make a reader friendly as possible for other sub-elite/elite coaches but being a local/amateur coach, I read it thought I could dumb it down even more for coaches shorter on time and resources.

It's documents like this that need to made available to all coaches, especially the ones at club level where coaching starts for EVERY player, and is why they have put this together and released it for free.

It is based on soccer but the Sydney Swans "were important in the conceptualisation of the work, as well as the testing of some of the ways we approached explaining the heavy jargon to a more general audience" as Tweeted to me from one of the authors Job Fransen, who has done plenty of work in the AFL space in the past.

I have used plenty of AFL language in my notes but it'll be handy to keep the soccer reference in mind as some bits might not connect perfectly to AFL.

This is part 2 of a 3-parter so strap yourself in and let me know anything you need help/clarification on.

COORDINATIVE BEHAVIOR IN FOOTBALL

• Variables for measuring tactical behavior include effective area (a – full ground team analysis), length/width (b – team defensive analysis), centroid (c – stoppage/contest analysis) and stretch reflex (d – inside/outside players at contest)

• Voronoi diagrams shows the dominant region of these 6 players

• Greater inter–team synchrony is demonstrated in the first half of games due to changes in specific performance constraints such as fatigue or other strategic (team formation) or situational changes (change in score line)
• Voronoi diagrams have the ability to account for every player and their spatial relationships with each other especially when analysing defense as the more you can compress the less space the opposition can use when in possession but it can also show the space you are able to provide when you are in possession
• Mesoscpoic/Intra–Team parameters are often measured in isolation but still offer additional insight, especially when analysed with reference to successful and unsuccessful phases of play via patterns of behavior and decision–making afforded and governed by information in the performer–environment sub–system
• There is an increase in team dispersion (effective area) when in possession of the ball and decreased dispersion when out of possession and without possession
• With diminished physical capacities in the 2^nd half of games, the ability to explore the enter field while trying to unbalance an opposing team is compromised while player speed at which they can compress/disperse the speed also decrease
• Positional centroids appear to guide emergent, position–specific behavior especially within team defense formations where smaller distances between players allow for greater inter-player coordination
• Defender and midfielders spend more time in synchrony with each other with forwards individually trying to be creative and less predictable/degenerate to destabilise the opposition and open up scoring opportunities
• Microscopic/Inter–Player refer to how interpersonal coordination tendencies constrain decision–making, performance, and inter–player patterns and allows coaches to identify emergent patterns of coordination and behavior that precede successful phases of play that can guide task design for training
• Dyads/Player Units consisting of backs attain superior and higher regular levels of synchronisation, as opposed to dyads of forwards, who are generally further apart and dyads engaged in offensive game play spend far less time in synchrony
• Defenders use the positioning of fellow defenders, and the displacement of the ball, as key informational variables that guide decision–making, constrain behavior or provide affordances for action
• Dyads between forwards and backs have weak in–phase patterns of coordination

PATTERNS FOR PERFORMANCE

• Inter–Team x winning teams demonstrate greater regularity in defensive numerical dominance while also maintaining a greater separation between their own centroid and that of the opposing team which decreases pressure on the defensive team and allows more time to modify behaviors relative to that of the attacking team and minimising of the number of affordances available to the offense
• Zone defensive strategies leads to superior distance and variability between centroids via a shared focus on teammate positioning and ball placement information compared to man–to–man defense which can constraint players as they also need to perceive and act in accordance with their opposing player
• In attack, teams utilising direct play counter–attacks are more effective than elaborate possession play attacks when playing against an outnumbered defense with 94% of goals being scored against an imbalanced defense while only 2.5% were scored against a balanced defense
• Smaller stretch index/congestion values in defense relative to larger values in attack/dispersion are associated with more successful attacks
• Teams need to increase team dispersion, relative to the defense to generate goal–scoring affordances as effective area, surface area, length/width and dominant regions increase when teams regain possession and transition to offense
• Destabilising opponent inter-team stability by creating width but still maintaining centroids and improves your odds of developing scoring opportunities
• Increased variability between attacking and defensive centroids and a continual increase in this variability up until the critical moment/goal attempt is a vital part of creating scoring opportunities
• When the defense attempts to guard more area with a greater spread of players they were required to defend more shots on goals but when better compressed they successfully performed more tackles
• If attacking teams can cooperatively dominate greater field regions, then they will be afforded more favorable passing opportunities for teammates and create more scoring opportunities too
• Stronger teams use greater offensive length, width and surface area in an attempt to move forward into the scoring zones and create scoring opportunities
• Opposition, and in particular weaker, teams will try and counter this by defending over greater length, width and surface area which as mentioned above opens up more passing options that lead to scoring opportunities
• Winning teams demonstrate superior values of synchrony over a match compared to losing teams, especially defensively
• At the moment of inter-player pass initiation, the interpersonal distances between defenders, attackers, and ball trajectory act as an informational variable that constrains the decision–making process and reveals possibilities for successful passing or interception
• When the distance between the ball carrier and defender decreases, the distance between the ball carrier and surrounding teammates also decreases as teammates approach the ball carrier to afford a passing opportunity to maintaining possession but support players should continue to focus on maintaining distance between themselves and the nearest defenders
• Defenders should remain in line with the ball, the goal and their direct opponent as this positioning increases the chance of interception via having more time to anticipate the attacker’s actions while guarding the direct line to goal
• Attacking players should explore the positional misalignment of the defenders in relation to the goal to gain favorable goal–scoring affordances and supporting teammates should continuously move to create passing angles as far away from the closest defender as possible
• There is a decrease in interpersonal distances from the moment at which a ball carrier passes to a teammate and then to the proceeding moment of a pass initiation by that individual to a fellow player and there is greater variability in these measures when a ball carrier opts to run and carry rather then pass by hand or foot
• Winning teams demonstrate well–connected passing networks where each player has nearly the same connectivity v team’s where only certain players connect the team
• For defensive success, aim to attain collective positioning of your team’s centroid between that of the opposition and the their goal while remaining in synch
• For attacking success, players should move unpredictably in an attempt to misalign their opposing defender to develop passing/scoring opportunities

ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS + DEVELOPING COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR IN FOOTBALL PART 1/3

                                         

This has literally taken me all week to put together but might be the most important coaching document a local/amateur coach could read all year, even though we're only 6 days in!

It comes from a monster document you can find here:

"The forest through the trees: Making sense of an ecological dynamics approach to measuring and developing collective behaviour in football" - William Sheehan, Rhys Tribolet, Mark Watsford, Job Fransen

There's a PDF link you can click on that page that will take you the full article - a mammoth 89 pages - that the authors have tried to make a reader friendly as possible for other sub-elite/elite coaches but being a local/amateur coach, I read it thought I could dumb it down even more for coaches shorter on time and resources.

It's documents like this that need to made available to all coaches, especially the ones at club level where coaching starts for EVERY player, and is why they have put this together and released it for free.

It is based on soccer but the Sydney Swans "were important in the conceptualisation of the work, as well as the testing of some of the ways we approached explaining the heavy jargon to a more general audience" as Tweeted to me from one of the authors Job Fransen, who has done plenty of work in the AFL space in the past.

I have used plenty of AFL language in my notes but it'll be handy to keep the soccer reference in mind as some bits might not connect perfectly to AFL.

This will be a 3-parter so strap yourself in and let me know anything you need help/clarification on.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

• Attack x move the ball individually or as a team by maintaining possession, passing through/into empty spaces in the direction of the goal where players are constantly deciding to carry the ball, pass or shoot on goal
• Defend x moving/coordinating to protect their own goal and attempt to regain possession
• Experts achieve higher levels of task outcomes from more effective/adaptive interactions between teammates via functional linkages/synergies and exploiting those functional couplings to quickly/accurately solve tactical problems as they emerge, to achieve a common goal

ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS INTRODUCTION

• Refers to the use of the most relevant information for decision–making, regulation of action, and coordination arising from the continuous performer–environment interaction which then allows you to dive deeper into the how and why of successful behaviors and then being able to repeat them, rather than just focusing on the end result
• Information perceived in this environment drives decision–making and collective organisation, shaping player behavior
• Levels of coordination x macroscopic, mesoscopic and microscopic
• Macroscopic scale x global synergy between all individuals of both teams within a performer–environment system
• Mesoscopic scale x intra-team relationships
• Microscopic level x in–depth information regarding functional linkages between 2 or more players being either teammates or attacker/defender
• You need to understand macroscopic before shifting to mesoscopic and subsequently microscopic (more on this below)

ASPECTS OF ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS

• Perceiving Affordances for Action x each player chooses which ones to take that will edge them towards to the team goal/s and as each/all players move current affordances disappear, new affordances emerge providing an ever-changing environment
• For each player affordances are shaped by past experiences, beliefs, knowledge of/in the game etc, and these factors will afford each player a different set of possible actions/responses/solutions to different situations (a past short kick in the backline resulting in a turnover/goal and goal and now only does long kicks for territory)
• It is the perception of affordances that consequently controls behavior and is the difference between higher and lesser skilled players
• Collective Affordances x refer to similar affordances perceived by surrounding that allow synergist behaviors based on shared team goals where every player needs to be attuned to affordances ‘for’ and ‘of’ others
• Constraining Affordances x constraints are either intrinsic (within the player or team – territory v possession based game model) or extrinsic (within the environment – boundary lines/weather) bound and can also govern behavior
• Action Goals refer to player/s having in-game roles/responsibilities and searching for the most relevant information specific to the desired outcome (inf defenders/backline group coordinating behavior/s to limit scoring opportunities
• Individuals possess unique intrinsic dynamics that act as constraints on individual behavior such as their physical, psychological, cognitive and emotional make–up which allow for unique, functional solutions to emerge
• Individual Intrinsic Constraints + Individual Extrinsic Constraints = Collective Perceived Affordances = Coordination/Behavioral outcomes

STABILITY, VARIABILITY AND SELF ORGANISATION

• Changes in informational constraints give rise to potential attractors (favorable/stable affordances) and repellers (unfavorable/dysfunctional affordances) which guides behavior
• Bifurcation points are the transition points between each disappearing/emerging constraint where a stability-breaking process occurs, the game can changes and it’s at this point where the ability to quickly decide and act v being idle while this process occurs that is crucial to being the first team to reorganise
• A 5v3 number advantage in attack will likely provide additional open space and passing attractors where evening up the numbers may present more repellers that need to be considered as each player will be marked and finding free space will be more difficult

ADAPTING TO CHANGE

• When players can perceptually attune to affordances/favorable attractors they can enter a state of metastability, where they are able to maintain a high level of decision making during multiple bifurcation points and being able to solve problems through various solutions
• With time and space, players have greater degrees of individual freedom to solve game problems but when the environment becomes congested, individual degrees of freedom decrease but collective degrees of freedom increase dramatically as players shift to collective couplings, shared affordances and more varied patterns of play
• The availability of a variety of movement solutions is commonly thought of as a negative in team sports but it is an essential component of flexible and stable behaviors

APPLYING ECOLOGICAL DYNAMIC PRINCIPLES TO MEASURING AND DEVELOPING SPORTS PERFORMANCE

• Traditional approaches to decision–making tasks and evaluation tests lack game representation by removing perception–action couplings that would otherwise be present in competition conditions and fail to recognise the importance of variability in the environment and performer
• Ecological dynamics refers to a representative environment that possesses same/similar game information such as perception action coupling allowing players to perceive different and new sources of information and action in the performance environment, thus triggering new affordances for action and new and improved problem solving and decision making skills
• Task designs utilising game representative design can improve individual performance through enhanced attunement to relevant and valid affordances as they interact with the unique set of constraints that have been manipulated to direct them to specific/favorable affordances to achieve a task or goal or via stabilisation of an intended performance outcome and the ability to perceptually attune to affordances ‘of’ and ‘for’ others, allowing adaptation to the actions of teammates and opponents
• Key components of representative tasks include allow messiness in training as players are in the midst of exploring and searching for solutions in unfamiliar conditions, design training activities that enable and facilitate the perception of information directed towards affordances/attractors in the performance environment, avoid repetitive sequences, provide representative affordances relevant to the intended performance environment and scale the task to the performer/s as much as you can by acknowledging individual differences in movement solutions
• For practice task design, coaches need to identify the primary constraints to be manipulated and the desired movement patterns and outcomes, while steering players towards collective behaviors

GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - HALF BACK/WING PLAY SWITCH

                                                        

Here is another switch of play scenario from an actual game.

This one starts from an out of bounds on full free kick and Freo are able to work the ball from 1 side of the ground to the other with patience and above all, using 100% options around the ground.

100% Option = A non-pressured kicking player kicking to a non-pressured marking player!

As usual set the players up in their positions where you might alter them slightly from rep to rep then let them play it out and try top get the ball inside forward 50.

If the defensive team causes a turnover then they can play to score or you can reset the scenario from the start again.

PREVIOUS GAME MOMENT - OPPOSITION OUT ON THE FULL KICK

CURRENT GAME MOMENT - OUT OF BOUNDS ON THE FULL FREE KICK HALF BACK FLANK/WING

GAME VIDEO...

For full access to this game/training scenario register for a level 4 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.

LEFT OVER GOLDEN NUGGET NOTES PART 2

                                                  

Here are some more left over notes from what I originally compiled for the level 4 - game/training scenarios membership.

All notes/clips are taken from actual AFLW games from 2022 showing how things can play out in the heat of games and how much team organisation actually takes place, something severely lacking in local/amateur football which is weird considering we aren't all 6'3 mid fielders, we can't all run 3min 1km splits and we can't all kick 60m so how can we develop all players to solid contributors each and every week?

PRESS v CORRAL...

For full access to this coaching/training article, register for a level 1 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.

GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - GET WIDE TO OPEN UP THE CORRIDOR

This scenario focuses initially on getting wide from the ball carrier to open up the corridor but also encompasses other vital tactics such as run from behind and utilising a number advantage, all while keeping your entire team connected all over the ground.

In the training video I go through just 1 way this might play out, a sort of "preferred"way if you will, but it gives you an idea of the tactics you are trying to teach in this scenario and will give you an fair idea of what to look out for in regards to what you do, and don't want happen, during this scenario. 

PREVIOUS GAME MOMENT - OUR KICK OUT OFF AN OPPOSITION BEHIND

GAME MOMENT - MARK FROM KICK OUT STRAIGHT OUT FROM OPPOSITION GOALS ABOUT 40m OUT

GAME VIDEO...

For full access to this game/training scenario register for a level 4 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.