Teaching players to pay attention

 

"Your head is not in the game. Concentrate"

I have often heard coaches say versions of this statement to players. I worked with a coach at one time who didn't like to use 'long lines' at training as he believed waiting for a turn meant players 'switch off' mentally and he wanted training that taught his players to "sustain their brain's in the game" (as an aside, when this coach switched to a game sense coaching approach and athlete-centred practices the team made a grand final and the following year a preliminary final after having failed to make the finals the previous four seasons). Concentration, or more precisely the directing of attention, is generally acknowledged as required for successful sporting performance.

How then do we coach to teach players to concentrate - metaphorically, to shine an intentional 'spotlight' on the things to attend to?

Oliver and Colleagues (2020) proposed that teaching players to understand their attention is teaching them concentrate. By attention, they refer to players selecting information for cognitive processing consciously or unconsciously (to understand the neuroscience of this, see my blog on the practical applications of neuroscience to sport teaching and coaching here). To direct players attention, Oliver et al suggest that players require knowledge and control of their 'attention system', which from a cognitive perspective relies on knowing they are attending to what is most important (expert players are better at selecting visual information because they know 'when' and 'where' to look), and the player is able to implement control routines to attend to the most relevant information for performance.

Oliver and colleagues propose that an understanding of meta cognition helps coaches to understand how players think about and control their cognitive processes in performance. As a teacher, I am well familiar with the idea that teaching students 'to think about their thinking' (to be metacognitive) is a good strategy towards developing independent, self-regulated learners. Research on cognitive skills suggests that 'competence' may be facilitated by making 'higher-order' processes explicit when teaching (see here for a review of teaching metacognition in schools). Within the field of sport coaching, Amy Price is looking at the metacognitive aspect of player learning and a pedagogy directly related to this - see here for an example of Amy's work. Oliver et al link metacognition to skill learning by stating: " proficiency in metacognition can be linked to skill development because the most successful athletes are likely to have knowledge of their current skill set" (p. 3).The evidence for metacognition and skill attainment is explained by way of think aloud concurrent data collection capturing players attentional thoughts and control strategies as their performance occurs.

Assumed in metacognition is a cognitive architecture of complex movements organised over levels upon specific 'building blocks'. I have written previously on the neuroscience of movement and the practical applications of neuroscience to sport teaching and coaching (see here). Schack (2004) is an interesting paper to read if you are interested in the 'building blocks' of cognitive architecture of movement, as he discusses the role played by 'basic action concepts' as cognitive tools in mastering the functional demands of movement tasks.

Oliver, A., McCarthy, P. J., & Burns, L. (2020). Teaching Athletes to Understand Their Attention Is Teaching Them to Concentrate Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, iFirst.

Schack, T. (2004). The cognitive architecture of complex movement International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2(4), 403-438.