LEVELS OF GAME MASTERY

 

I've posted about mastery v ego before so in a nutshell it's:

Mastery - locating, finding and completing a pass to the best, usually most open and easy target available.

Ego - ignoring the most open and easy target to attempt a pass with a low chance of being completed and that puts our team at a huge disadvantage if not completed.

1 will usually go unnoticed but does wonders for your team's performance and the other is all about being noticed by everyone, and bragging about it later.

These notes touch on the different levels of mastery, compiled by Paul Gamble, who I'm pretty sure I've posted notes of before.

You'll have players in all of these 5 categories and it's your job as coach to know which players are in what category and then how you'll coach differently to reach and improve them.

• Identifying what stage you’re at can help reveal blind spots and weak areas, and what it will take to get to the next stage
• The 5 stages are novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient and expert
• Novices are entirely reliant on what they’re explicitly taught and blindly follow procedures/templates for how to practice, irrespective of it’s quality
• Advanced athletes are more aware of the gap between what they’re taught and what works in practice, and they start to recognise scenarios and how they each require a variation of the plan, but their pattern matching is flawed/prone to error
• Competent athletes are deliberate and analytical in their approach who can now formulate plans to fit the situation but tend to rigidly follow through with the plan once in motion and can't switch course as the situation evolves
• Proficient athletes are less formulaic and can now custom-fit to each situation while improvising and being highly adaptable/flexible in their responses to unforeseen developments
• Experts are fluid, adaptable, intuitive in how they practice/make decisions on the fly and have superior judgement/tacit knowledge which means they see things others don’t and detect anomalies sooner

I would strongly guess that most of your players are in the top 2, possible 3 categories but also, what category do you, the coach, sit in, and what do you need to do to also move up a level or 2?

The new Game Intelligence Challenge (Level 1) is a great place to start!