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