When I come across something that I feel is interesting or applicable to the people I work with I try my best to send as soon as possible and with a bit of a synopsis. I decided to concentrate on this after reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin, the idea being to try and spread your knowledge, communicate and link as many people together as possible. This will make you an invaluable cog in professional and social networks, increasing your effectiveness and worth. (I have bastardised the concepts here but I hope you get the idea.)
So after coming back from my break, one of the first papers I sent was the book chapter by Jean Côté and Jessica Fraser-Thomas “Play, practice and athlete development” in Developing Sport Expertise (2008).
I find the area of expertise and expert performance very interesting and very applicable to my work as a coach and a student looking at development, maturation and elite sport. I find the process and the logic behind the founding work by Ericsson to have far more value and strength than the concepts of Balyi and the ever popularised LTAD Model. Being able to relate the 10,000 hours to sport is a little contentious however the idea of focussing on deliberate practice and challenging the athlete/player both from a physical (strength and conditioning) and sport skill point of view is exactly the process we should all be applying to our athlete’s development.
The ideal of 10,000 hours deliberate practice to reach expert status has been taken directly to relate to sport, this is ridiculous, anyone who quotes this to you clearly has not grasped the concept and has taken the number suggested as an average from the world of other performers, chess, music, mathematics, to name a few, far too literally and not considered the concept and theory behind the conclusions.
Sport is a different beast! There are cognitive AND physical qualities that need to be considered. Cognitive forms a difficult paradigm in this context because it’s not simply learning the skills, techniques and tactics of the sport, but in a physically demanding environment where you are expected to reach structural, psychological, and emotional limits, motivation and drive can take a real hit. All the qualities have to go hand in hand. You cannot have all the cognitive skills without developing the physical attributes or vice versa the physical qualities without the cognitive skills.
As a strength and conditioning coach when dealing with this picture I feel the best way to look at how you help with the development of athletes is that you put in place the physical qualities/abilities to enable your players to perform the technical and tactical aspects of their sport.
By taking the concept of deliberate practice and Ericsson’s words to heart you evolve a model that emphasises the need for early specialisation, early initiation of deliberate practice in one chosen area and the accumulation of hours of deliberate practice. This will not work for the majority of sports or people. The caveat to this is that some sports do require early specialisation; I will consider these sports in an alternative blog, I promise.
So, to combat these thoughts Côté and colleagues have come up with a great solution; Developmental Model of Sport Participation (DMSP). The concept being that there are 3 stages, sampling, specialising and investing. I do like this concept and it does align nicely with the theory of deliberate practice and with the unique world that is sport. The only issue I have is over the use of participation in the title. As an uncompromising elitist in elite sport, participation is the scourge of high performance! (Tongue in cheek)
The model addresses what we like about being in a multi-sport environment from early with little restrictions on what is done (play), this is the sampling stage. By sampling, not only do you address the need for athleticism and diversity but also deal with the demons of motivation. The idea of play in early, formative years not only develops physical qualities but also perceptions of competence and this can in turn lead to motivation for continued participation and hopefully excellence! I also like the idea of more deliberate play; again, I’ll have a go a posting in another blog about this.
Sampling leads to specialising that leads to investing. Specialising is a transitional stage where there is an increased involvement in only a few sports and where techniques can be refined. There is a balance here between play and practice and including some performance-orientated activities.
Once you get into Investment years this is where the hard work pays off; persevering with the previous stages, fighting the parents and other officials within the sport. Who cares REALLY if you make the U13 world cup team?? I want you to win the Senior World Champs, go to an Olympics, break a world record!
The remainder of the chapter deals with the practical implications of coaching within the model. I like what they have done here and have given a fairly structured framework to work within. This is good, however, you are all smart people, take the concepts, consider them and apply them to your own organisation, sport, athletes, environment. Although I agree some people need to be given fairly strict guidelines, within coaching this will not work. Every team you coach will have different connotations that you simply cannot generalise or not even consider. Hopefully I have commented on the concepts enough to give you a little extra help.
If you are to read and take away any of this chapter print off the Coaching in the .....Years paragraphs. It is very good and I would effectively be directly quoting the 3 pages on the topics so go and read for yourself!
With all these models and concepts that are out there, there is one area I’d like to see investigated more, defined a little more clearly and included within development models. I would like to address the definition of the time spent preparing for their sport, I’d like to see how much time the elite sport performers spent actually preparing to perform. This includes doing additional pre/rehab work, extra recovery, extra flexibility, just extras in general, how much time do you prepare your body to perform at the highest levels? Also spent time thinking deliberately about the sport, how they are going to solve the tactical and technical problems?, both in their heads and actually walking through the issues by themselves, not just dreaming about lifting the world cup but deliberately trying to make themselves better. This area has no doubt been addressed from a performance psychology point of view but I think it should be included in the development model; they are not separate beings and must exist together.
In conclusion, the deliberate practice framework is an excellent concept that has been evolved into a working model in sport by Côté, the DMSP. Unfortunately for some, there is NO one size fits all model, so consider this best practice and try hard to put in place a system that satisfies the theories, but have the freedom of thought to produce an individual model that can be applied to your environment.
As this is the start of my new series of works in the area, I’d appreciate any feedback you may have and any suggestions for new subjects or clarification on specific topics would be very welcome. Some of the email discussions I have been part of have been fantastic, please keep them coming and if I haven’t gotten back to you as yet, give me a kick up the ass and I will get on the case.
