Research Reviews

Keith Davids, Duarte Araújo, Luis Vilar, Ian Renshaw & Ross Pinder The Big Idea When asked to comment on what he found to be so special in playing the classical guitar, Andres Segovia spoke of his sitting position in playing it.  He said he leans his body forward slightly to support the guitar against his chest, “for the poetry of the music should resound in our heart.”  So why shouldn’t the poetry of the sports player resound in his or her heart?  Which is what…

Martyn Rothwell, Joseph A. Stone, Keith Davids, and Craig Wright The Big Idea In the pursuit of producing “expert” sports men and women, there is a myth worth exploring.  It is common to take for granted that the number of years or hours of practice are predictive of becoming expert.  For example, there is something called the 10,000-hour rule.  The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson studied how people become experts in their field.  He concluded that 10,000 hours of practice was a reasonable rule of thumb. …

Christine S. Nash, John Sproule, and Peter Horton The Big Idea Albert Einstein was said to have said this about the nature of research: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn’t be called ‘research,’ would it?”  And so, it goes.  Researchers try to figure out creative ways to answer the questions they ask themselves, knowing all along they have no idea what they are doing.  Not knowing in advance provides the go-juice to power the research process. Sometimes it is best…

Luca Oppici; Derek Panchuk; Fabio R. Serpiello; and Damian Farrow The Big Idea If this study does nothing else, it should reinforce a couple of useful ideas hovering over our sporting life.  First, there is inherent relevance for the power of field research to inform our sports practices.  Second, we are learning that our sporting practices, where possible, need to be as game-specific as we can make them. This study is field-based in both its design and technical sophistication; it is not simulation, but fact-based…

Tom Johnson; Andrew John Martin; Farah Palmer; Geoffrey Watson; Phil Ramsey (all with Massey University, New Zealand) The Big Idea In the so-called olden days “to win” meant the struggle, not the outcome.  In this research paper, we find a bit of both meanings.  For the subject of this study is the remarkable winning legacy of New Zealand’s men’s national representative All Blacks rugby team.  Since its inception in 1903 the All Blacks’ winning record is 77%.  By any account and compared to any sports…

Pedro Passos, Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids The Big Idea Since these investigators brought it up in their abstract’s first sentence, let’s briefly talk about ant colonies as a bridge to the subject of self-organization in field-invasion team sports. Imagine this.  There is a flood threatening a colony of ants.  What do they do?  No problem or panic: they simply build an ant raft.  These pancake-like rafts are composed of the ants themselves—sometimes as many as 100,000—who instinctively connect themselves perpendicular to each other—always heads up—and…

Rushiella Songca, University of South Africa The Big Idea Consistent with our effort to review worldly research publications for our PDP coaches, this paper on transdisciplinarity training was published in the International Journal of African Renaissance Studies.  Professor Songca isn’t writing explicitly for our PDP readers, but there is a way of seeing the paper as though he were. Remarkably, the kind of transdisciplinarity training described in this appeal is consistent with a line of thinking in coaching education and development that values collaboration, dialogue, and interaction…

Alfonso Montuori and Gabrielle Donnelly The Big Idea The winningest coach in the (USA) National Basketball Association is Phil Jackson with 11 NBA titles. Whatever you might think of Jackson’s coaching philosophy, there is one thing he seemed to intuitively know and later put into words: “The strength of the team is each individual member.  The strength of each member is the team.” This research discussion on creativity is unwittingly a suggestion of the meaning and implications of Jackson’s paradoxical quote about individual and collective…

Duarte Araújo, and Keith Davids The Big Idea The authors of this is recently published research paper (Frontiers in Psychology, September 2016) aim to demystify how individual players can better become a coherent team in sport performances.  More team coherence usually translates into more team success They do this in three steps.  They:  1) explain the ecological dynamic frameworkof their theory; 2) describe what they call the shared affordances of the individual players and of teams; and 3) reveal four necessary ecological properties of team synergies and their measurement. While understanding…

Renshaw, Duarte Araujo, Chris Button, Jia Yi Chow, Keith Davids, and Brendan Moy The Big Idea First off, let’s set the context for this commentary paper.  As is the norm in most any profession, there are both historical and continuing aspects to its practice.  In the profession of teaching physical education, such is the case.  Two of the more popular approaches are Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA). Of the two, TGfU is older, having its origins in the 1960s.  TGfU…

Margaret J. Wheatley The Big Idea Margaret (Meg) Wheatley has been an organizational development speaker and international consultant since 1973.  In this keynote conference address published in the Occupational Development Practitioner, she chides us for so willingly continuing to use 17th Century images of the universe in the 21st Century world. For centuries, she argues, “we have been planning, predicting and analyzing the world . . . holding on to an intense belief of cause and effect and we’ve let numbers rule our lives.”  Her major concern is…

Margaret Wheatley with Debbie Frieze The Big Idea Get ready for a wake-up call to the common among us—which is to say a call to all of us.  In this short paper published in Resurgence Magazine (Winter 2011) Margaret Wheatley takes a unique position regarding leadership.  She will argue that the place to look for true leadership in an age of complexity is inward, and not outward to the time-worn desire for heroes to come to our rescue. Early on, Wheatley refers to the opening line of the…

Joseph P. Mills and Jim Denison The Big Idea While this research topic is specific to endurance running coaches’ practices, these authors believe their findings have implications for all sports.  The more obvious sports would include those with family resemblances to endurance running, such as triathlon, rowing, swimming, cycling, cross-country skiing.  But their findings could easily apply to the wider range of sports where human performance limits are not the primary impact on success. The topic these authors pursue is the relationship between how conventional…

Bert H. Hodges and Reuben M. Baron The Big Idea As any reader of PDP’s research summaries knows, the journal selections for these reviews favors fairly recent research.  Also, the selections for the most part have an obvious relevance to sport in general and coaching/playing team sports in particular. So why would we give time and space to an oldish paper (1992) that appears by its title to have nothing to do with the subjects our readers are interested in?  Because this paper has everything…

Richard Tinning The Big Idea The subject of this paper is what Richard Tinning calls “the idea of physical education.”  In one form or another Tinning argues, physical education is universally familiar.  As a cultural manifestation, we find it early on.  In ancient Greece, it was institutionalized for the all-around education of male citizens.  Since then, even if in fits and starts, wherever formal education in general is valued we find in one form or another a physical component attached to it. The question Tinning…

Shalom H. Schwartz The Big Idea There could hardly be a bigger research goal than what this paper represents.  In the last quarter of the 20th Century the nature and function of human values and the cross-cultural value comparisons between entire countries has attracted a fair number of international researchers.  One of the more recent research efforts (M. Rokeach, 1973) was a cross-cultural Value Survey proposing 36 values thought to be “reasonably comprehensive and universally applicable.”  Nonetheless, Rokeach also recognized that such a claim to completeness…

Keith Davids, Duarte Araújo, Vanda Correia, and Luis Vilar The Big Idea For this research reviewer, who is also an ex-youth soccer coach, occasionally there are uncomfortable moments arising from summarizing research papers for our PDP coaches and readers.  This is one of those moments.  You see, this paper essentially points out to modern youth football coaches the crucial differences between coaching the practice and coaching the game. We confess to this:  Our personal coaching history is testimony to the weaknesses of traditional coaching practices.  They were something…

Jonathon Headrick, Keith Davids, Ian Renshaw, Duarte Araújo, Pedro Passos, and Orlando Fernandes The Big Idea The time and path of a major storm ravaging parts of Europe can be influenced by the flapping wings of a butterfly in the Amazonian jungle (“the butterfly effect”).  So too can small changes in the sub-phases of a non-linear dynamic system of a football game have big later-consequences on the outcome of the game.  In other words, small causes may have larger, later effects. In this research paper,…