What can we learn from one of the most innovative companies on the planet? Since its inception, Google has been known for innovation and creating environments where its people flourish. Founder of Raising Excellence, Reed Maltbie discusses the cross over from commercial to coaching environments. Headed into the 2004 Olympic Games, the Men’s USA Basketball team was 110-2 all-time. They were 24-0 since the introduction of the 1992 “Dream Team”(NBA-era). The team consisted of current and future NBA stars. The best of the best. The…
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Content focussed on helping you take a holistic approach to developing your players.
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…
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…
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…
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…
El Clasico is the most anticipated regular football fixture on the planet. Player Development Project Lead Researcher, James Vaughan was fortunate enough to experience the rivalry himself in early 2017. The legendary Barcelona vs. Real Madrid fixture got James thinking about the history of his adopted home in Catalonia and the way it has shaped FC Barcelona. In this two part article, we follow James’ match-day experience and find out how Catalan and Barcelona history and social construct interlink. I emerge from the metro in Badal…
In the second part of this ethnographic insight on El Clasico, the biggest match in world football, PDP Lead Researcher James Vaughan continues with his observations from his experience watching a masterpiece inside Camp Nou… My friend and I part ways as we reach the Camp Nou and I walk the well-travelled path through access 18, in gate 39 and up to level 3. As I climb up and out into the open-air stadium I see the green grass and the colossal circular stands, and my heart…
Are you running ‘static’ sessions? Regular PDP contributor and founder of TOVO International, Todd Beane explains the dangers of static sessions and gives some practical advice for coaches to move towards ‘solution’ based sessions. There are voices from locker rooms of false wisdom suggesting that to train we must we must suffer through some rite of painful passage. It is a very macho and misguided notion of how we must make “suck it up” to stack up. It also tends to justify horribly boring training…
Systems tend to dominate organisational thinking in the modern age. So how do these systems potentially harm player development and participation? Co-founder of myfastestmile & regular PDP contributor, Mark Upton discusses the dangers of a ‘mechanistic’ approach to sport and the risk we run when working to a one-size-fits-all approach. Amongst a long and enjoyable conversation with a colleague involved in rugby last week, there was a somewhat sobering moment. He intimated his love for the game, evident since early childhood, had eroded to the…
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…
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…
Adrian Bradbury is the founder and academy director of Football for Good, Uganda’s only full-time residential elite youth football academy and scholarship program. He has over 10 years’ experience in international coaching, education, and community advocacy and development. In this article, Adrian explores the unique obstacles impacting young footballers in East Africa, and explains that we all have ‘outset obstacles’ to overcome in our coaching. Aubameyang, Mahrez, Mane, Salah and Wanyama are just a few of Africa’s growing list of global household names, rightly…
The environment surrounding the player must be understood to ensure we help players achieve their potential. PDP Lead Researcher and PhD candidate, James Vaughan discusses the holistic view of player development that the PDP team has been working on as a result of over two years of conversations, interviews, research and experience. Ruben Jongkind is the former Head of Talent Development at Ajax and now works for Cruyff Football. He and Johan Cruyff worked together to implement ‘Plan Cruyff’ at Ajax between 2011 and 2013….
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…
What are the benefits of learners exploring their environment and self-correcting? How can a coach guide this discovery? Founder of TOVO Academy in Barcelona, Todd Beane shares his excellent blog on the idea of discovery learning. I have six children and thus have personally funded a human laboratory in learning and chaos. Those of you with more than two children will understand this blog. I say more than two because once we have three or more children as a couple we are in a…