A Communal Language for Decision Making in Team Invasion Sports

Abstract

Invasion team sports coaches are faced with the problem of developing players who, in any given situation, can make decisions that lead to successful outcomes. Research into human decision making has established three widely accepted perspectives, which sports coaching has used to understand player decision making and inform practice: information processing, ecological psychology, and naturalistic decision making. As a result, coaches are challenged with perspective-specific terminology and having to draw connections between similar findings that are explained in quite different ways. This conceptual paper presents a plainer account of player decision making by proposing a communal language within a conceptual framework for decision making in invasion team sports. It is hoped that the proposed language and framework will, together, facilitate knowledge exchange between researchers and coaches for the betterment of player development.

The Structure and Delivery of Police Use of Force Training: A German Case Study

“…The assumption is that isolated processes (e.g., techniques) can be decoupled from the action in the performance context and effectively integrated back into the whole system to advance performance ( (Renshaw et al 2019). However, this assumption is not supported by other theoretical rationales, like the NDM and ecological dynamic frameworks (Ashford et al 2020;Correia et al 2018;Renshaw et al 2019;Seifert et al 2019) which argue that skills are best developed in context.…”

What Cognitive Mechanism, When, Where, and Why? Exploring the Decision Making of University and Professional Rugby Union Players During Competitive Matches

“…This may include explicit slow deliberate sense making activities such as; video analysis sessions, previews and team debriefs (Richards et al, 2012(Richards et al, , 2017Richards and Collins, 2020); coach led if-then rules of thumb (heuristics; McPherson, 1999;McPherson and Vickers, 2004) and the development of individual and collective roles and responsibilities (McKay and O'Connor, 2018) through tactical rules (McKay and O'Connor, 2018). Subsequently, we agree with Richards et al (2012Richards et al ( , 2017 position that players should be encouraged to explicitly connect their perception of information to their declarative knowledgeof the game through slow and deliberate environments to make better informed decisions in rapid competitive environments (Ashford et al, 2021).…”

“…Sixteen adult rugby players conducted three stages of data collection within 48 h of two competitive fixtures to: (i) consider how game situations influence players perception of information; (ii) to consider how game situations influence the application of cognitive mechanisms whilst making decisions; and (iii) to identify the influence of tactics and/or strategy on player decision making. (Raab, 2003;Bar-Eli et al, 2011;Araújo and Bourbousson, 2016;Birch et al, 2019;Bourbousson et al, 2019;Ashford et al, 2021). Players were required to verbalise their lived decision making experience during self-confrontation interviews, which were framed along a continuum of No-thought, Fastthought and Slow-thought (Varela and Shear, 1999;Macquet, 2009;Bourbousson et al, 2010;Macquet and Kragba, 2015;Johnston and Morrison, 2016).…”

“…The Game sits at the centre, as the goal and rules of the game interact to create problems that both the Player and the Coach need to solve. The player interacts directly with both the game and the coach, by performing shared solutions to the problems the game presents (Ashford et al, 2021). The Coach acts as a central agent in (co)creating, sharing and developing a view of FIGURE 1 | A unified conceptual framework for player decision making in invasion team sports (Ashford et al, 2021).…”

“…Through interaction with the game, decision making of The Player is, in part, governed through task dependent Perception of Information (Ashford et al, 2021). Research has demonstrated that skilled perception is task dependent, that is, player's visual fixations and verbal descriptions change in line with changes in the demands of the task, presumably as they search for means to a successful outcome (Roca et al, 2011(Roca et al, , 2012(Roca et al, , 2013.…”