Exploiting Bi-Directional Self-Organizing Tendencies in Team Sports: The Role of the Game Model and Tactical Principles of Play

Abstract

Research has revealed how inherent self-organizing tendencies in athletes and sports teams can be exploited to facilitate emergence of dynamical patterns in synergy formation in sports teams. Here, we discuss how game models, and associated tactical principles of play, may be implemented to constrain co-existing global-to-local and local-to-global self-organization tendencies in team sports players during training and performance. Understanding how to harness the continuous interplay between these co-existing, bi-directional, and coordination tendencies is key to shaping system behaviors in sports training. Training programs are traditionally dominated by designs, which shape the self-organizing tendencies of players and teams at a global-to-local scale by coaches imposing a tactical/strategical plan with associated tactical principles of play. Nevertheless, recent research suggests that performers also need to be provided with opportunities to explore self-organizing tendencies that emerge at the local-to-global scale in training. This directional tendency in synergy formation can be facilitated by players being given opportunities to actively explore different adaptive and innovative performance solutions, coherent with principles of play circumscribed in an overarching game model. Developing methods (coaching sessions rooted on principles of dynamical systems theory that foment the development of such local-to-global relations) to exploit the continuous interplay between these co-existing tendencies within sports teams may promote more effective and efficient athlete skill training programs, in addition to enhancing performance.

Sport Practitioners as Sport Ecology Designers: How Ecological Dynamics Has Progressively Changed Perceptions of Skill “Acquisition” in the Sporting Habitat

“…This is likely to augment the design of representative practice tasks as the coach and the athlete work together to co-design critical affordances that the athlete attunes to, thus guiding their behaviors. Traditionally, for example, the role of the coach has been conceived in a hierarchical way, sometimes even autocratically, preparing athletes and teams for performance through a strong emphasis on global-to-local synergy formation processes to externally regulate dynamics in performance and learning (Ribeiro et al, 2019b). In team sports, this can be typically exemplified through an external agent (i.e., coach, instructor, and trainer) prescribing strategic patterns of behavior in specific phases of a game.…”

Theory to Practice: Performance Preparation Models in Contemporary High-Level Sport Guided by an Ecological Dynamics Framework

“…This process assists the coach in identifying the informational constraints that players detect when attempting to solve emergent problems within competition, thus enabling them to manipulate these features to educate a player's attention in future practice designs. As per the first example, understanding passing interactions could be further enhanced through the utilisation of more advanced analytical techniques, such as network analysis [4]. Such analyses would enable deeper inferences into the collective behaviours of players at a local-to-global scale of analysis in response to an environmental constraint [4].…”

“…As per the first example, understanding passing interactions could be further enhanced through the utilisation of more advanced analytical techniques, such as network analysis [4]. Such analyses would enable deeper inferences into the collective behaviours of players at a local-to-global scale of analysis in response to an environmental constraint [4].…”

“…coach determines in advance the specific theme, presents predetermined coaching points and controls the sequence and duration for each part of the session). Within the younger teams at AIK youth football, it was revealed that coaches' planning and practice designs were aimed at shaping self-organising tendencies of players and teams at a global-to-local scale by explicitly imposing a game model [4]. Put simply, youth players were seemingly 'props' in some type of coach-conducted orchestration, where players learned to play an idealised model of the game as opposed to functioning in the game itself, limiting player autonomy and self-regulating tendencies.…”

“…Athlete-environment interactions have been modelled as complex adaptive systems composed of many interacting parts or degrees of freedom, which need to be coordinated and continuously regulated in achieving task goals [1,3]. Two main pathways have been proposed for learners to successfully satisfy the constraints of challenging performance environments: externally and internally driven [4]. Externally driven (re)organisation of degrees of freedom in athlete-environment systems develops from an external influence globally prescribing instructions and directions, for example, from a parent/ caregiver, teacher or coach.…”