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…
Latest Research
Stay up-to-date with key player development research. Our resident Professor, William A. Harper, breaks down research papers into simple, easy-to-read articles with takeaways for coaches.
What role might emotional intelligence play in coaching? In this conclusion to his two-part blog, we follow the personal journey of A-Licensed coach Sam Grace, Youth Development Phase Coach at Reading FC, as he seeks to understand the importance of emotional intelligence and how applying the principles outlined by leading psychologist Daniel Goleman can help coaches. For the past four months, I have been on a mini-journey trying to establish the role emotional intelligence plays in my own coaching. I have done this through…
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…
What are team values and how do they influence culture? In the first of a two part feature, International Coach Developer and expert in culture in sport, John Alder discusses the balance of team culture and how often this is an element in team sport where control cannot be exerted and we have to look beyond slogans on walls and team meetings in order to greater understand team dynamics. *John contributed to this article in his personal capacity. The views expressed are his own…
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…
Winners and Warriors? What is the difference and how can you help your players adopt a growth mindset and a focus on process and performance over outcome? TEDx Speaker & Founder of Raising Excellence, Reed Maltbie shares his ideas around intrinsic motivation and the dangers of being outcome-driven. A few years back I was walking through the parking lot at a tournament my club was hosting. It was Sunday, late in the afternoon, which meant all the games being played were for trophies. I had…
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…
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…
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…