ECOLOGICAL FOOTBALL NOTES

 

These notes come an article by Mark O'Sullivan, a UEFA Coach and researcher from Sweden and is definitely worth a follow, looking at Ecological Football.

• Ecological football refers to knowing not just more about football but to know better
• Players should be active agents in their learning and not just mere receivers of knowledge
• Agency refers to humans that are capable of acting intentionally + meaningfully in the world
• Traditional coach-led approaches involve a lot of external verbal feedback, the replication of ideal movement patters and internal mechanics that separate perception from action, information from the environment and the mind from the body
• They risk conformity/compliance at the expense of the development of agency which limits exploration that develops perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities
• Coaches tend to overwhelm athletes with knowledge about the game (secondhand knowledge) which limits opportunities to grow knowledge of the game (in-game and attained via direct experience of perceiving affordances-opportunities for action)
• Game Models can limit unpredictability which also feeds into this, so players learn the model of the game but not the game itself
• Ecological Dynamics refers to the many ways to solve a problem as every problem is unique
• Skill emerges from complex/dynamic interactions of an individual’s adaption to the surrounding constraints
• Constraints can be either individual, the task or the environment and they all interact/evolve over varying time periods such as growth spurt leading to new/altered movement behaviours to changes in behaving in the same environment)
• Skill is when you can adaptively attune to affordances in the environment which are relational as they emerge from the interaction of the action capabilities and the environment
• A gap perceived directly on the field may afford a dribbling action for 1 player but a passing action to another due to their differing action capabilities
• Skill learning is when you become attuned to information that specifies opportunities for action matched to your action capabilities
• All coaching is constraints-based but the difference lies in how those constraints are manipulated
• Over-constraining can strip away var, unpredictability and realism needed for true skill transfer leading to the emergence of new behaviours and team play not representative of the performance environment
• A constraint-led approach has the coach act as a facilitator that manipulates constraints to encourage problem solving and skill development through exploration and adaption
• A non-linear pedagogy involves learning strategies such representative learning design, repetition without repetition and constraint manipulation
• Players should never perform movements separated from a performance environment
• The task model design is based around the ball, the opposition, a direction and consequences.
• Phase 1 – co-designs your training activities based around your players' current action capabilities to align and shape intentions that are adaptable and information-rich that foster exploration, adaptability and decision making
• Phase 2 – the players will now refine their perception-action coupling through progressive detection of information and the (re) organisation of action/s learned through exploration and adaptation
• Phase 3 - highlight recovery/adaptation while considering how action capabilities evolve over time and as players develop cognitively and skillfully and their ability to act on affordances also changes
• An affordance is always available but it’s value/meaning for each individual can change as they mature, develop and grow
• Players can still use unopposed practice but it has to explore many different techniques within their individual action capabilities so keep movements driven by information (scale them if needed) and keep the skill whole (simplify them if needed)
• When designing practice embrace variability, repetition without repetition and remember athletes need to deal with fluctuating physical, psychological and environmental variables and encourage exploration