How different constraints in the practice environment influence skill behaviours in professional Australian football
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
Australian football (AF) is a dynamic and complex team evasion sport, which demands high levels of team and individual skilfulness. From an ecological dynamics perspective, AF performance is a complex system characterised by dynamic interactions between the players and the environment. These interactions provide collective opportunities for action through shared affordances and consequently, players’ decisions and actions are influenced by many different sources of information. Coaches’ manipulate and implement different activities in practice, attempting to change or reinforce certain behaviours and to ultimately have this behaviour transfer to match-play. In practice, coaches’ typically rely on experiential knowledge (intuition, ‘gut feel’) to design practice, typically without using empirical information. There has been little evidence supporting the use of objective data to aid decision making systems for practice design in AF and therefore the sequence of studies presented in this thesis aimed to provide insights into this important area of inquiry.
Study One revealed that coaches’ changed the frequency of practice types across pre- and in-season, in addition to the duration of the practice type activity. Furthermore, coaches’ implemented more training-form activities during pre-season than in-season. Study Two demonstrated that feedback intervention frequency and practice time along with the interaction between both were associated with the amount of augmented feedback provided by coaches’, explaining 65% of the variance. Study Three explored the factors and constraints explaining Connectedness, a particular cooperative passing network variable associated with successful AF performance. The results demonstrated that the time in the small-sided game (SSGs) activity and the number of shots at goal explained 65% of the variance in Connectedness scores. These findings provide possible applications about how constraints can be manipulated to elicit favourable cooperative behaviours. Study Four showed goals were scored more frequently with less passing actions per minute during match simulation than during competitive games. Furthermore, the receiving and distributing passing networks during simulations were more centralised (reliance on fewer key individuals), with less turnovers and tackles per minute compared to match-play. Such differences have implications on skill transfer to competitive environments. Study Five investigated individual level changes in individual and integrative levels of behaviour across six conditions (SSGs, match simulation and AFL match-play), suggesting no or negligible changes for integrative measures across changes in condition. Individual level behaviours demonstrated varied responses across changing conditions. Overall, the findings of this thesis can enhance current practice design in team sport settings and guide future empirical research.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: