Reference

Renshaw, I., Chappell, G., Fitzgerald, D., Davison, J., & McFadyen, B. (2010, June). The battle zone: Constraint-led coaching in action. In 1 of 1-Conference of Science, Medicine & Coaching in Cricket 2010 (p. 181).

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. Backyard games were where players typically developed a lot of their skills that underpinned their later expertise. The more structured training they went through wasn’t as big an issue due to the hours they spent playing the ‘backyard games’.
2. There are problems associated with structured practice and the authors propose the CLA as an alternative fix some issues with ‘structured practice’
3. The Battle Zone game is introduced and they discuss some of the implications of designing game from a CLA point of view

🤝Impressions

It was really nice to see an article based around the design of a constraint-led game in a high performance setting. Examples of well designed constraint-led games are really useful for coaches starting out on their journey.

👨‍🏫Who should read this?

Every coach that is implementing or that wants to start using the CLA should read this piece. Even though it’s a cricket game the principles of game design they follow transfer to any other sport.

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• Come up with some more ‘backyard game’ examples for tennis to include in sessions and encourage kids to play these away from the session-
• Make sure that the you set the intention of the game to make sure the intensity is raised. -The importance of having a clear intention for each task is hugely important. This needs to be made clear to the players when explaining the task. This will help guide the player’s perceptions/actions when trying to achieve the task goal as well as stopping them going through the motions.
• Skill development programmes are crucial and something you need to start doing more of

📃Takeaways for coaches

• Backyard games were where players typically developed a lot of their skills that underpinned their later expertise. The more structured training they went through wasn’t as big an issue due to the hours they spent playing the ‘backyard games’.- I think that this is a such an important point to consider when we think about the design of our training sessions. Formal training used to make up a small part of a player’s development but now usually is the majority. There were so many important skills such as creativity that used to be developed by their participation in a wide variety of backyard games that aren’t developed in drills.
• Isolated tasks don’t help to develop decision making skills.
• Playing games is crucial for developing players because it “includes the critical mix of physical and mental development under simulated match conditions in real-time environments”
• Technique and decision making cannot be separated as the correct movement will be based on the perceptual information that emerges.