Thread by @AlexJSarama

The Swedish Basketball Federation are the first🏀 federation in the world to adopt an ecological framework with their coach and player development. What does this mean in-context, and how can coaches, teams and other organisations benefit from incorporating these ideas?

Sweden's coach educators @RikardAspegren and @AndrewPleick just had @markstkhlm on their Coachteamet podcast. It was a fantastic episode, with Mark giving excellent responses in an easily digestible manner: open.spotify.com/episode/0JGg0S…

The podcast is a great introduction for coaches looking to learn more about moving away from traditional coaching methodologies. I have summarised some of the best parts of the podcast in this thread...

It all starts with asking the question: what is skill acquisition? Mark makes a great point that in many coach education courses, no one talks about what skill is. "What is skill and how do we learn skills? What happens to them, do we own them, keep them, do they stay with us?!"

Mark goes on by saying "Traditionally the idea is that skill is something in our heads, and coaches can plant this through showing players the “correct” way of performing something." This is what we see frequently at all levels of basketball from NBA to grassroots...

Coaches work with mental models of how they think a skill should be performed. For instance, many replies on my dribbling thread earlier this week saw coaches say that the players were not dribbling the 'correct way.' So what is skill?

"We need to understand skill is a functional fit between an individual and an environment over time. Because it changes: players adapt, bodies adapt, the environment changes etc." - @markstkhlm

Mark gives a specific example of how in a game, fatigue sets in and players must adapt. Being down 2 points with a minute left in the 4th quarter changes how a player performs skills vs being up by 15 points in the 1st quarter.

This is very different to the traditional approach which is coach-centric, with the head coach, rather than the players, at the centre of the practice: “I’m going to show you how to perform this skill and now you’ve learnt it.”

@AndrewPleick made a great point about how frequently we see this in basketball, with coaches and skills trainers showing one very specific way of dribbling, passing, shooting. There’s never a consideration for what the player prefers and what suits their body.

Mark then referenced Gibson’s knowledge of vs knowledge about. Traditionally coaches teach knowledge about. This is descriptive as it including showing ways to perform a skill, such as having your foot and hand in a particular position. However...

skilful performance in the game requires knowledge of. This is IN the game and in context. Mark goes onto say that "We have to develop players knowledge IN the game. Just because they can answer a question doesn’t mean they can perform the skill in their environment!"

When it comes to interpreting this practically, this means coaches must be more patient giving their players opportunities to explore. This also means as coaches we must have some type of information that is representative in our practice activities.

By playing with an opponent, this ensures players are acting on relevant information while dribbling. Instead of breaking the skill apart (decomposing) and dribbling on-air or versus cones / a fake defender, we’re keeping it together.

@RikardAspegren asked a great Q about the role of the coach. Mark replied about how instruction is part of coaching, but over-instruction is the issue. I can tell you what (dribble past the defender in a 1-on-1) but the key thing is we're not telling the player how to dribble.

@AndrewPleick spoke about how coaches in Sweden are buying into the CLA, but that many are also resistant and say "yes but we need to work on their fundamentals and technique." This is often the most frequented response I receive to my posts, blogs, podcasts etc...

Mark's response was about skill is not about fundamentals, it’s about functional. "The only fundamental we’re dealing with in sport is gravity!"What’s fundamental for one player isn’t fundamental for another player because we have different bodies: heights, arm lengths, weights.

Cont... "A lot of those fundamentals don’t apply as they’re averages based on one universal average. Functional = you’re finding your unique solution through exploration that works for YOU."

Mark referenced his foundations for task design. Is there a ball, an opponent, direction, consequence (eg transition if opponent steals the ball)? The diagram below is taken from Mark's blog and can easily be adapted to basketball... footblogball.wordpress.com

One of the reasons why traditional methods remain so popular is due to the copy-paste nature of coach and player development schemes in basketball. For example, Andrew spoke about when he was sent to Lithuania for coach development.

He returned and said are you implying I should implement what I saw in 🇱🇹? This would never work for me, my personality and players. He saw very authoritative coaching that wouldn’t work in his environment back in 🇸🇪(12 year olds). We have to understand the environment we're in!

I love the work being done in Sweden and it's been a pleasure to be involved with the new coach education program. Swedish coaches are now being immersed in a completely different approach. Hoping many other federations and organisations follow suit over the years!