A review of small sided games as a coaching pedagogy

 Small sided games (SSGs) have been part of the coaching lexicon for decades. During the 1960s and 1970s, there were several publications explaining how to use them, reasons for their use, and their teaching benefits, particularly in the sport of soccer/football (see e.g. Wade, 1967; Worthington, 1974) where they were used to teach attack, defence and transition principles of play. SSGs have also been a pedagogical staple in progressive physical education (PE) approaches, such as Games Teaching: A New Approach (Mauldon & Redfern, 1969) and Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982) in the UK, the Game Sense Approach (Australian Sports Commission, 1996) in Australia, and the Tactical Games Approach (1997) in the US. Charlesworth (1993, 1994) promoted the use of modified and small sided ‘designer games’ for a coach to achieve fitness objectives at the same time as pursuing technical and tactical training objectives through the employment of game play, rather than fragmenting training sessions into separate technical, tactical and fitness training segments.

The increasing recognition of SSG as a training and coaching/teaching tool over the last forty years has led to the research community paying increasingly greater attention to them. A number of micro instructional strategies within the pedagogy of SGG have been identified. These include manipulating the playing space, the number of players, and restrictions and directions placed on player behaviour in the games. The purposeful management of such variables was once referred to as modification by exaggeration, elimination or restriction (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982), but is now increasingly referred to in the literature as the manipulation of game constraints (Davids, Button & Bennett, 2008). 

Previous systematic reviews have considered the use of these micro-instructional strategies for fitness and conditioning, and tactical and technical development, as for example that by Aguiar, Botelho, Lago, Macas, & Sampaio (2012) in the sport of soccer/football. We undertook a review with a broader approach by considering the use of SSGs as a teaching or coaching pedagogy across the game categories of invasion games (such as, soccer/football), net/court games (such as volleyball and tennis), and striking/fielding games (such as cricket and baseball). These are the game categories identified in the game-based coaching approach in Australia labelled the Game Sense approach, as well as in the game-centred teaching approaches TGfU and Tactical Games. The aim of the review is to determine what can be generalised for all coaches and physical education teachers from this body of literature. Physical education teachers are an important group to include as sport teaching remains a substantive focus of physical education curricula globally (Pill, 2012).

Pill, S., & Agnew, D.  (2019). Small sided games: a scoping review of literature 2006-2016. International Sports Studies, 41(2), 5-31.

If you are interested in this area of coaching pedagogy would like to read the review, it is on ResearchGate available HERE