Sport Coaching as Play with Purpose: When do I plan for players to work on those things that don't pick up automatically from 'playing the game? When do I work on 'technique'?

I've recounted in past posts ( see here) how I have been influenced by the work of Rick Charlesworth and his idea of Designer Games (1994) for match simulations that package technical, tactical and fitness training into a combination, and his suggestion to start practice (after the warm-up) with small sided game play (2001). The idea that game play needs to be purposefully focused and explicitly directed to maximise the opportunity for learning, rather than learning be left to chance, is why I interpreted the Game Sense approach as play with purpose. Further, the idea that practice could be non-linear rather than a direct progression warm-up-drills-game play-warm-down is an idea I embraced early in my coaching by necessity. I was coaching the 1st XVIII football team and the state wide competition called the Quit Cup was on a Wednesday night. I had one training session with the squad on a Monday to prepare for that game. I put the practice emphasis on game simulations to teach a style of play, as the team was drawing on players who on the weekend played at many different clubs and I needed the team to come together into a consistent style of play. 

I often get asked: When do I plan for players to work on those things that don't pick up automatically from 'playing the game? and When do I work on 'technique'? Apart from withdrawing players into practice form activities as indicated in the model above, there is also time for this 'technical work' to occur in the warm-up and the warm-down. The 'old days' of run and few laps, do some stretches, then into lane work 'marker to marker' is long not considered 'best practice'. Assessment of technical actions can occur in the closed to open practice tasks of the warm up (I explain closed and open practice tasks in this post here). Practice might thus look like:

Or, it might look like this:

Line work' is a term used for when players are in positional groupings. For example, in Australian football (AFL) forwards, midfielders and backs/defenders are positional 'line' groups'. Line work involves practising skills and technical actions specific to a players game day role: their line.

'Craft work' refers to practising skills and technical actions specific to a players individual development program. Groups of players may have the same pr similar developmental focus.

Some think these ideas only work in 'high performance' settings. That is not the case. To illustrate, I recently had passed on to me feedback from a coach who adopted these ideas with a division 7 community league football team (I believe division 7 is the lowest division this year/there is no division 8) after attending a coach education session. Over the years, I have received many of these type of emails from community and country league coaches or had them passed on to me after coach PL sessions, a variation of which sometimes is about how many more players are coming to training as the players get to play games instead of doing 'drills' most of the night.

As shown in the above diagrams, a Game Sense coaching approach is not adopting one coaching/teaching style, rather, it is a cluster of styles. Brendan SueSee and I explain this using Mosstons' Spectrum of Teaching Styles in the forthcoming text Perspectives on Game Based Coaching available here