Applying an Ecological Approach to Practice Design in American Football: Some Case Examples on Best Practice

If you'd like to read my more detailed notes the link is below

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Applying-an-Ecological-Approach-to-Practice-Design-in-American-Football-Some-Case-Examples-on-Best--Practice

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. Discusses how practices are ‘traditionally’ designed from an American Football perspective
2. The paper then outlines how an ecological dynamics approach could be used to help develop more skilful players
3. There are then two case study examples given which show this approach in action. They are full of nuggets coaches of any sport could learn from

🤝Impressions

Really enjoyable read. It struck a nice balance between giving the theory and practical examples. Even though the case examples were American Football based, coaches of any sport could benefit from reading them.

👨‍🏫Who should read this

This is obviously targeted at American Football coaches but it would benefit anybody that is coaching.

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• Players and coaches must be honest about where there is room for improvement in the players movement repertoire. This should be a cooperative process where both the player and coach work together to decide areas that they will focus on
• The concept of football speed could be potentially framed as ‘tennis speed’
• Enriching one’s knowledge of the environment is one of the main goals of practice design in sport
• Dexterity doesn’t focus on the movement rather how the movement interact with the ever changing constraints of the environment.
• In the competitive 11vs11 the players are likely to resort to familiar movement strategies and skills. The players may only get limited exposure to the problems that they need to work on when playing the full game
• The player needs to be willing to explore. The coach needs to create a safe environment where the player feels comfortable and safe exploring. The coach also needs to set the players ‘intentions’ to encourage exploration
• As part of an exploratory practice, the player is likely to lose or make more mistakes. This may make certain players uncomfortable, especially against players they usually beat. It’s important for the coach to make sure players understand that it will ultimately benefit their skilfulness and make sure they don’t resort to ‘safe’ solutions
• To create opportunities for the player to explore specific problems you can place constraints on the other player(s) to give them plenty of opportunities to do this
• Learning to learn how to move. Athletes are learning to adapt their movements to suit to dynamic environment
• Getting the players opinions and involving them in the design of the games is very powerful. They can help to design activities that feel more like the game situation
• The coach needs to analyse and observe how the players are performing in the game to identify areas in which they improvements could be made and to aid the design of practice environments to simulate areas they may be struggling with in the game.

🥇Top Quotes

💡 Rather than trying to automate a technique or specific play, it is our contention that coaches in American football could shift their focus from coach-centric practices to facilitating athlete-environment interactions, encouraging players to learn how to functionally adapt their movements under constraints representative of those experienced within competition

💡 In human behaviour, the act of ‘doing’ never occurs in a vacuum. To do is always to do something somewhere.” In other words: context is everything! 

 💡 Practice should offer players opportunities to learn how to adapt movements to emergent problems likely encountered during gameplay, as in this messiness, dexterity comes to life 

💡 Instead, dexterity emerges from the process of solving movement problems through repetition without repetition (Bernstein, ), where athletes are challenged to adapt their behaviours and perceive affordances as they meet the everchanging nuances of the performance problems faced in competition. 

 💡 Additionally, we also found that, though the problems here could be deemed more representative, the number of repetitions and associated exposure to these types of problems in the practice environment with the team, was actually rather limited 

💡 To accomplish each of these goals, the player first had to be willing to explore the problem-solution dynamics in practice settings to search the perceptual-motor workspace to discover opportunities for organising movement system degrees of freedom in adapted, novel, and creative fashions (Orth, van der Kamp, Memmert, & Savelsbergh,

💡 To continue to stretch the grip of the defensive end, in attempting to pursue amplified attunement to his unique affordances for action and ultimately striving towards enhanced dexterity in his movement skill, modifications to the problems set were made frequently through constraint manipulations

💡 Designing representative learning environments for a specific individual or group of athletes requires the coach to watch their movement behaviours within the context of their sport (both practices and games) to identify strengths and weaknesses (or opportunities).

Link to full paper

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21640629.2022.2057698

Yearby, T., Myszka, S., Roberts, W. M., Woods, C. T., & Davids, K. (2022). Applying an ecological approach to practice design in American football: some case examples on best practice. Sports Coaching Review, 1-24.