Concept driven sport practice session design

Concept-based sports coaching is an approach to session planning that starts with the intention to develop a player’s understanding of the underlying principles, tactics, and decision-making processes of a sport. The coach acts more as a designer of learning environments, fostering independence and adaptability in players 

Three  ideas that inform my ideas of concept driven practice session design are

1.      Realism:  Make the practice representative of the logic of the game. The shift in coaching from this perspective is a move from "repetition of a movement” to repetition of game-based decision-making. The take-away Message is that practice should look and feel like the game if you want the practice to influence the way the game is played.

2.      Specificity. Which relates to the old saying ‘practice how you want to play’. I reckon the S.A.I.D. Principle sums up the idea of specificity - Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. The take-away Message is that Practice Context – Conditions Matter.

3.      Transfer: This is the idea that when there is a high degree of similarity between the practice task and the game task the practice is more likely to have an impact on game play ability.

I recommend Hodges & Lohse (2022) article, ‘An extended challenge-based framework for practice design in sports coaching’ in the Journal of Sports Sciences as a good read on optimal conditions for transfer from practice to play.

Concept driven practice session design

Concepts are principles of play that allow players to recognise and understand what’s happening on the pitch and respond together. They are a form of advanced cognitive organiser - a high-level conceptual framework that reduces cognitive load and facilitates meaningful learning through the shaping and focus of thinking. Some might call them strategies. Here I differentiate between tactics as the individual at action decision-making of the player in the moment and strategies as the team collective understanding of ‘how’ to play.

 Concept-driven practice is contextual practice: that is, ‘game-form’ practice.

 What I call ‘first level’ concepts are those that help understand the nature of any game – Time, Space, Force, Flow or Momentum, Body Control-Coordination. For example, in a game of cricket the batter wants to create time to score a run. That means, targeting space that affords that time and the ability of body control to execute the desired hit into space. Whether the player goes for high risk-high reward and targets the outfield or boundary with a shot in the air or targets space with a hit along the ground, and whether that hit is into the outfield for time to make more than one run or into the infield for a ‘single’ may be determined by the desired flow-momentum of the game at a particular stage of the innings or strategy against a particular bowler.

 What I call concepts of play are those specific to the game category and therefore common across games in the same category. For example, hockey is a territory game. In Possession (Attacking Principles), Out of Possession (Defensive Principles), Transitions and Starts/Re-starts principles of play will be similar to other territory category games (like soccer-football) but nuanced by the specific rules of hockey (such as no offside rule). This is shown in the following image.

This diagram by England Hockey illustrates the concepts for hockey very nicely.

Image from Hockey England - Game Understanding

https://www.englandhockey.co.uk/play/talent-system/the-complete-player-qualities/game-understanding#:~:text=their%20game%20understanding.-,PRINCIPLES%20AND%20PHASES,by%20denying%20time%20and%20space

 Once a coach conecptual understands their game, a coach can then start to think about how they want to layer the learning of the concepts  as ‘principles of play’ – width, depth, penetration, density, etc. These can be contextually taught through what coaches of my era called a ‘Conditioned game’ where game rules are modified to encourage a game behaviour, and some now prefer to call essentially the same activities a ‘Constrained game’ where the game rules are manipulated to constrain the ability of the players to particular actions. However you want to describe it and whatever your explanatory theory for what you label it, the coach is in essence a designer, an ‘architect’ of the play by game design - setting the conditions/constraints by the playing rules, then, stepping  back to observe, and intervening with questions to encourage player reflection on the  game in preference to giving the answer. An example is provided by the image below – 

I make sense of the idea of concept driven practice session design through the Play with Purpose pedagogical loop. I illustrate that at this post click here

In summary, concept driven practice session design is an 'understanding by design' (Wiggins et al., 2005) approach to practice session planning. That is, start with the concept that you want players to learn, and then design 'back' from this a game that focusses and shapes player learning of that concept. 

Concept driven sport coaching is assumed to lead to player better decision-making. Research confirms that decision-making is a primary differentiator between elite and sub-elite athletes (Ashford et al., 2021). This advantage is characterised by superior speed, accuracy, and anticipation under pressure. This advantage is enabled by higher cognitive functions, such as better inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and metacognition, which allow the player to make quicker and more accurate choices in the complex, time-pressured situations of game play. 

In a recent book chapter, we created this diagram as an attempt to make sense of this ‘higher cognitive functioning’ for sport coaches.

The chapter is available click here

Thanks for stopping by and reading this post. If you would like to connect with me about a project to do with this blog or any of the other ideas that I have blogged about, you can contact me by the email link available here 

Related posts

Developing players technical and tactical connection here

Learning games through understanding here

Coaching for player learning here

Small sided games - a coaching tool here

References

Ashford, M., Abraham, A., & Poolton, J. (2021). Understanding a player’s decision-making process in team sports: a systematic review of empirical evidence. Sports, 9(5), 65.

Hodges, N. J., & Lohse, K. R. (2022). An extended challenge-based framework for practice design in sports coaching. Journal of Sports Sciences, 40(7), 754–768

Pill, S., & Williams, J. (2023) Play with purpose: teaching games and sport for understanding as explicit teaching. In Teaching Games and Sport for Understanding (75-84). Taylor & Francis.

Wiggins, Grant P., and Jay McTighe. 2005. Understanding by Design. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.