The Blog

Game-based learning has enormous benefits in terms of decision-making and skill acquisition. PE Teacher, blogger and regular PDP contributor, Sporticus shares his fantastic article on the advantages of manipulating games and the environment and how coaches can adjust conditions in order to help young players improve their skills.     At the heart of a games based approach to teaching is the challenge to the centrality of learning isolated and decontextualised techniques that will ‘allow’ the child to play. Instead of starting with the practice…

Despite all we know, size still matters in youth sport. Founder of TOVO Institute, Todd Beane discusses the challenge for parents and coaches in helping young players ‘control the controllables’ and embrace physical diversity on their non-linear journey.   “What can I do to grow?” my son asks as we drive home from training. “Why?” I respond. “Because everyone is bigger than me and I just want to be their size.” When your child enjoys playing sport, size matters. Being short, slight, and weak compared…

Do you understand the context of your coaching environment? PDP contributor and associate lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, Ben Franks discusses the issues around the ongoing unopposed vs. opposed training debate and explains why context is key in a learning environment.   Going Beyond the Opposed vs. Unopposed Dualism Unopposed vs. opposed, technique vs. skill – these arguments are forever plaguing Twitter, Facebook and coaching platforms. Some arguments come from theory, others from years of coaching experience, but all seem to be missing a really obvious point: everything pertains to context….

What influence does sporting governance have on player development and the athlete environment? Mark Upton, founder of myfastestmile, discusses how governing and funding bodies are PART of a complex social system – not THE system   Previous fragments – #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9 In one of the links in fragment #9 it was intimated that innovation in football academies could be hampered by rigid regulations imposed from the governing body of that sport. This is not a sport-specific phenomena…Peter Gray (2014) talks of the same issue in education and the challenges of…

Game sense, how do we develop it? PE Teacher & regular PDP contributor, Sporticus shares his innovative approach to PE and helping his students develop skill and game understanding in cricket through realistic scenarios, interactions and guided discovery. As a department we have over timed moved away from ‘sport as sports technique’ method of teaching sports within our curriculum to ‘sport as tactical concepts’. This is in the belief that: The game sets the context of learning and gives that learning some meaning. Play is…

Recently, Mark O’Sullivan and James Vaughan attended the ICCE (International council for coaching excellence) conference in Liverpool to talk about the approaches of AIK Football Club and Player Development Project. Before the conference kicked off on Monday they spent the weekend at the research fair listening to some of the world’s leading academics in the field of Sport Coaching. What follows is a combination of their notes and ideas. “It’s not what you said…it’s how you said it!” How many times have we heard this…especially in…

What would you do to overhaul your national player development pathway if finance was not an issue? Founder of Changing the Game Project, John O’Sullivan discusses the financial position of US Soccer after it was revealed they had $100 million in the bank.   What would you do with $100 million to improve the sport you love? It’s kind of a magic wand question, isn’t it? You have enough money to make a significant impact in a sport on every level, how do you spend…

Is the structure of the traditional education system stifling the development of young players through a mechanistic view to learning? Co-Founder of myfastestmile, Mark Upton, discusses the work of Carol Black and the impact it can have on player development.   I have been following Carol Black’s writing and thoughts for the last couple of years…I would like to say with enjoyment but in reality she often leaves me feeling jarred and unsettled. In The Future of Big Box Schooling, Carol casts a critical eye over the mechanistic…

After a summer of unprecedented success at youth level, English football has demonstrated that there is no shortage of talent in the country. However, the vast sums of money that now dominate the bi-annual transfer windows are still causing a crisis when it comes to opportunities for many of these young players to showcase their talent in the top leagues. PDP Assistant Editor, Jon Hoggard discusses football’s financial crisis.   At the time of writing, transfer spending in the Premier League sits at £850 million,…

Coaching can be a balancing act. When should coaches step in and help and what approach to teaching should you use? PE Teacher & Blogger, Sporticus discusses complexity thinking, the value of uncertainty and examines various methodologies and processes that a coach can go through to truly help their players. In Complexity Thinking in PE, Richard Tinning and Anthony Rossi write ‘In the face of messy, unruly, boisterous classes of school children and the expectation to deliver predictable, explicit, educational outcomes, teachers of physical education…

On a recent trip to the Indian sub-continent between study, football coach & sports coaching tutor at the Queensland University of Technology, Ben Galloway and his best friend encountered a range of constraints that influenced the games they joined in, teaching them some valuable lessons about coaching.   A wise man once told me that to become the best football coach, you need to work hard to develop three fundamental things: a deep understanding of the sport of football, an in-depth understanding of learning theory, and a broad understanding…

What are affordances? PDP contributor and associate lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, Ben Franks shares his work on affordances, what the term means and examples to bring the concept to life.   Affordance is a new ‘in vogue’ term, and appears to be replacing the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) as the modern evolving coaching methodology. Similarly to the nature of a CLA, affordances exist – they are properties of the environment that are ‘real’, emerging and decaying naturally. By definition, an affordance is the key origin…