EXPERT v ACADEMY PLAYER DECISION MAKING

                                   

This is a study I just read last night and this morning that took some reading.

It uses players from Gaelic Football consisting of 2 groups - senior players and under 17 players - who are both shown game clips which were then paused and then each discussed the options the ball carrier has, what decision/s they could make and what factors might influence the final decision.

As local footy has you coaching players at polar ends of experience, age, ability and game intelligence, these notes can have huge ramifications of how you go about coaching each and every player. 

• Players generate 4 main options (pass, recycle/play back, point and goal) through situational awareness which is influenced by 4 primary themes being pre-match context (coach tactics/instructions, match importance, opposition status), current match context (score, time), visual information (player positioning, field space, visual search strategy) and individual differences (self efficacy, risk propensity, perceived pressure, physical characteristics, action capabilities, fatigue)
• The 4 primary themes above generate option awareness/generation and that all makes up your final decision
• Option awareness is dependent on experience/capabilities and expert players demonstrate's a more complex/sophisticated awareness of available options v academy players and they can assign probabililities/make future projections on those options which requires to perceive/comprehend the available sources of information
• Senior players can update their decision making based around the coaches tactics where academy’s are only aware of exactly what they’ve been told meaning they rely heavily on coaching tactics when forming their decisions as they are unable to integrate this with current environmental information
• Acadedmy’s, already over-reliant on coach tactics/instructions, will rarely disagree/question tacrics, where seniors will, and this can restrict creativity in the academy’s
• As seniors often have game analysis, this can restrict their decision making if not in a psychological safe environment to make their own/risky decisions
• Providing players with prescriptive feedback (what to do) can further hinder problem-solving abilities but feedback can leave players with a sense of autonomy (here’s what you did wrong now go and fix it)
• Decision making may be altered depending on the importance of the competition
• In "big" games players might select riskier options (personal highlights, game hero, winning goal etc), potentially resulting in more errors
• Coach tactics/instruction can also go ignored in these games to the detriment of the decision made
• Risk taking may also be linked to self efficacy/action cababilities
• Senior players know what you can and can't do against good opposition and also why that's the case v academy’s who simply only know who you can't do it against good opposition, underpinning their “on-the-surface” knowledge
• Both groups demonstrated awareness of specific opposition team status/strengths but academy differentiated in how this information influenced the decision (we might only get a low amount of scoring chances so take the riskier shot v take the safe option and maintain possession)
• Being behind on the scoreboard is a determinant of riskier play v being in front promoting safer play
• Academy players identified earlier stages of the game as windows as opportunity for riskier play as you’ve got time to recover and in later game stages it’s all about safe play v senior's who were the opposite
• Visual information available in the environment (positioning/field space) affected the decision making process but is also dependent on the use of effective search strategies
• Senior visual information takes into account teammate positioning + pitch space and then comprehends this information and makes projections about the future state to enable sophisticated decision making v academy who lacked detail, was more descriptive then prescriptive with a more wait-and-see what happens approach which delays decision making/action execution
• Both groups identified opposition positioning as restricting the options available
• Senior players can project future states and provide more detail as to why the options are limited due to the opposition player's positioning which for academy’s can restrict the inability to restart/try to create more options and usually just selects an option as soon as possible to try and release the pressure from themselves
• Seniors can find number advantages where academy’s cannot
• Academy’s only considered what they could see on the screen, not what is probably/possibly happening off it in their answers, with seniors basing their assumptions off of pattern recognition/sequences of play that they anticipate from the footage
• Seniors have a superior knowledge base/better probabilistic expectations related to pattern recognition
• Academy players need to be told where to look and often referred to their inability to see all the information in the environment whilst playing and often rely on teammate communication in helping to direct their attention v seniors who don’t rely on any outside help during search strategies
• Experience does not seem to have a meaningful relationship between self-efficacy and decision making performance, contradicting the current study
• Players develop skills that are position dependent and therefore have greater confidence in carrying out position-specific skills then skills more predominant in other positions (mids v backs taking on tackles etc)
• Academy’s seem to base decisions on whether they were more confident in a specific moment rather than based on whether they had experience in achieving the skill
• The perception of how risky a play might be is dependent on the individual’s propensity for risk taking behavior so it is a personal difference rather then an experience difference
• Attacker's are more riskier than defenders but that fits the personality profile of those positions as well
• Percieved pressure is greater for academy citing external factors (crowd etc) which increases mental stress which can impact decision making v seniors who have already mediated perceived pressure and can put in in a box during games
• Players weigh up their physical characteristics against opposition players with academy's referencing it more then seniors
• Regardless of playing level, physical attributes play a predominant role in decision making processes (fast is always fast, strong is always strong)
• Both groups often justified the option they selected according to their action capabilities/ability
• It is plausible to suggest that as the performance demands increase, the academy players due to lack of experience would perceive the situation to exceed their capabilities which increases levels of perceived pressure
• Fatigue also impacts decision making, especially as the game goes on
• Academy's made no reference to physical fatigue suggesting they underestimate its effects on both physical/cognitive performance