Small Sided Games - a coaching tool for technical, tactical and conditioning

Published 22/02/21

Updated 08/02/23

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. Much of what we read today about manipulating conditions or constraints to focus player development by the shaping of the playing environment and what players can 'do' in the game is 'pretty much the same' as this earlier work.

Over the past 40 years there has been a lot of research into specific uses of SSGs resulting in a number of micro-pedagogies becoming 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) 

or the conditioning of games by rule modifications (Worthington, 1974), 

and are now referred to by some coaching scientists as the manipulation of game constraints (Davids, Button & Bennett, 2008).

In summary, 

SSGs can be used pedagogically by a coach to elicit physiological responses for a 'fitness' training effect. 

SSGs can be adapted by playing area size and shape, player numbers, and player movement options to effectively influence the in-game tactical behaviours of players and the coordination team play. 

The instructional consideration arising from this is that coaches are able to purposefully frame the dimensions of the playing field to teach for specific tactical outcomes and/or train for specific conditioning effects. Given that the intensity of SSGs, movement patterns of players, and players’ tactical decision making can be altered by applying changes to rules, field dimensions, and numbers of participants, it is important that the objective of the training be the key determining factor in the implementation of SSGs as training activities.

SSGs have also been a pedagogical staple in progressive physical education (PE) and sport coaching approaches since at least the 1960s. 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) and Play with Purpose (Pill, 2017) in Australia, and the Tactical Games Approach (1997) in the US all feature use of small-sided and modified games. Small sided modified game forms were foregrounded in the Australian Sports Commission-Aussie Sports Modified Sports Program of the early 1990s, which also featured the introduction of scaled 'entry versions' of most sports in Australia: such as Netta-Netball, Walla Rugby, Minkey Hockey, Kanga-Cricket (etc) which have all now evolved into other names.

How and why small-sided games feature in practice session design really 'gelled' for me when I read the work of Rick Charlesworth. One of Australia's most successful international team sport coaches, Rick Charlesworth 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 (1993, 1994). Although much is known about the use of small sided games, the research is dominated by the invasion games category. While there are some studies in the other game categories, most notably the striking and fielding game of cricket, there is a relative absence of research consideration of the effects of SSGs in net/court team sports such as volleyball and striking and fielding games such as baseball and softball. 

If you are interested in a summary of the research on small-sided games, please check out Small Sided Games: A Scoping Review of Literature 2006- 2016, published here and also available from my Research Gate site here

For those new to using small sided games as a game development tool, I have written Play with Purpose resources for Netball, Australian football (AFL), Football (soccer) and Rugby codes featuring small sided games for technical and tactical game development available from the ACHPER Resource Portal here A few years ago, I was commissoned to write a Play with Purpose Lacrosse resource but at the last minute, the publication funding fell through and so that resource is available for free download from my ResearchGate site.