How does ecological dynamics translate to grassroot coaches?

Firstly, I hope this blog post finds you, your family and friends in good health; as the strange times continue with new territory for us coaches; writing from Australia, the light at the end of the tunnel is very close and bright from the commitment of many with social, recreational and regional sports starting up over the past few weeks offering solid silver lining for all involved so I encourage everyone to follow the guidelines offered. During this time, I like many have been able to further look into areas of research or articles to gain further ideas and perspective around new areas of interest. One of these areas is the concept of ecological dynamics in sports settings, an area widely discussed and written about during this period which I wanted to look into a bit deeper. Being a novice around the subject, I wanted to talk to coaches around the ideas and framework and largely found many other coaches were fairly new to the concepts and terminologies around the area which promoted me to consider and start writing “How does ecological dynamics translate or look like to grassroot coaches?”

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough”; starting (and continuing!!) as a novice in this area of interest, I needed to get some heavy lifting done and read a lot of accessible articles, many I shall quote on below. However, I encourage you to listen to Rob Gray Perception and Action Podcast, Stu Armstrong’s Talent Equation podcast and reading information posted by the likes of Tyler Yearby and Shawn Myszka from Emergence and UK Coaching’s Marianne Davies amongst others.

Firstly, let’s have a look at the definitions and reasons behind ecological dynamics in sports context; Tyler Yearby has written this as (https://emergentmvmt.com/ecological-dynamics-summarized-in-less-than-5-minutes/):

It is a framework that appreciates the whole athlete, and the environment where the interactions occur. There is a reciprocal relationship between the two. The ecological dynamics framework acknowledges ideas from ecological psychology and dynamical or nonlinear systems. Dynamical systems theory harnesses ideas of complexity and self-organization. The ecological psychology side can be thought of as the functional act of picking up information to use for regulating actions (Chow et al. 2016).

Information is omnipresent, and there is a circular link between information and movement. Information specifies invitations or opportunities for action (affordances) that are available for pick-up in a performance context. These invitations are athlete-specific, and they emerge and decay rapidly in sports. The performer-environment relationship is reciprocal, and the information that emerges between the two is viewed to guide movement activity. The confluence of the constraints shapes the movement solution that emerges. Constraints are classified as the task (rules, equipment, boundaries, etc.), environment (light, humidity, temperature, social expectations, etc.), and individual (height, weight, emotional and motivational levels, etc.). 

Under an ecological dynamics framework, athletes and sports teams are considered complex adaptive systems. Additionally, proponents of an ecological dynamics framework view learning to occur by continuously solving movement problems and not performing repetition by rote. This is crucial if coaches expect athletes to adapt their skills to different problems they encounter in sports. Finally, under an ecological dynamics framework, the athlete-environment relationship is viewed as the appropriate scale of analysis for studying emergent behavior. As a coach, we can design-in relevant invitations to the practice sessions if we study this relationship.

Some real strong points and takeaways from this initial overview; embracing the dynamic or non-linear nature of learning whilst allowing the athletes in this case to recognise, adjust and self organise based on what the offered environments present shall help them reflect and link representative scenarios to their sporting development. Below is a series of points I believe stand out from this defining statement for us as as teachers or coaches:

• Don’t underestimate or undervalue the environment when structuring practice or learning opportunities: Coaches should see themselves as “environmental architects”, designing games or tasks where the relevant sport’s constraints offer immediate feedback and affordances (opportunities to act and react), focusing on relationships with athletes to offer timely feedback and behavioral cues when needed. If we as coaches have to step in and explicitly instruct, we need to review our environmental design or adjust some constraints to create new affordances. We need to offer our athletes experiences and learning opportunities to adapt, adjust and self organise based on current experiences and capabilities.

• The idea of “repetition without repetition”: As coaches, we need to understand what the players are collectively and collaboratively trying to achieve within their relevant sports plus understand what they need at their stage of development or performance level and continually adjust our environment or create variability around the tasks within to offer new information and affordances for them to explore and overcome. If done right, I believe you shall hopefully get continual development progression and sustained enjoyment from less introjection as a coaching group.

Adding onto these points, UK Coaching Senior Coach Developer, Marianne Davies describes the role coaches have to play in offering and enhancing learning opportunities within this framework:

Psychological and cognitive factors, whilst creating more complexity for coaches to think about, form some of the individual (organismic) constraints in skill acquisition. The key ones that influence the quality and quantity of energy that an individual puts into learning and performance are; intention, focus-of-attention, arousal and motivation. This is why motivation and self-determination are so important in coaching from an ED perspective. Motivation matters, intentionality matters, relationships matter.

An information processing approach focuses on the reduction of errors and variability, internal representations, ideal technical templates, isolated practice of movement patterns that can then be transferred into different contexts. ED (Ecological Dynamics) focuses on interactions and relationships, emergent movement patterns and decision making, increasing movement variability (repetition of outcome, without repetition of movement pattern), releasing movement degrees-of-freedom, engaging and motivating, it recognises the uniqueness of every individual. It also gives a way of understanding the sometimes unintended consequences of what we do, of socio-cultural influences and other wider consideration

Like I mentioned previously, these points again highlight the importance of our role as coaches to embrace the individuality of their athletes whilst developing an understanding and strengthening coach-athlete relationships when trying to introduce methodologies such as ecological dynamics in sport. Davies highlights the complexity of coaching, not solely due to the dynamic nature of sports participation and development yet the added, layered intricacies of individual motivations and cultural influences. The challenge of successful coaching is acknowledging social interactive dilemmas within individual and team goal setting and development, offering suitable scenarios and choices with all members’ involvement whilst acknowledging the uniqueness of every individual and collaboratively dealing with social and sport matters as opposed to eradicating them.

I have previously written around James Vaughan’s research and observation of FC Barcelona where he discussed the use of skilful manipulation of sociocultural constraints, where the form of life or environmental conditions surrounding the club could both constrain or afford creative moments, akin to Rietveld & Kiversten’s research (2014). Combining ideas from Davies and Vaughan, I believe this shows the socially dynamic role coaches have to offer; both acknowledging the pull of form of life surrounding strong club and locality cultures while adopting ecological dynamics to sport development and individual motivation. However, as previously discussed, it is important that the coaches are mindful and present for their adopted coaching methodologies and adopt the form of life offered from the coaching scenarios offered as opposed ignoring the sociocultural embeddedness and forcing your ideologies on the group. That's where the relationship parts come into the transition; I believe the coach’s understanding players or athletes and how to engage them shall make the understanding of why these technical aspects are important, understand what the environment is offering them (in way of information) and open conversation lines for when they're applicable and what to do to improve in these areas.

So, taking this framework, new ideas and some new terminology into account, like the original question posed, how does this translate or what does it mean for grassroot or age grade coaches? How can we as coaches introduce some of these ideas in our daily practice? What small steps or initial ideas can we introduce to allow our athletes to explore and find new information, ideas or techniques to overcome task, environmental or individual constraints? Akin to my research findings, plus comments made by Davies and Vaughan, understanding, appreciating and embracing the uniqueness of individuals and their cultures or identity in their development and environment design, allows us as coaches to focus on interactions, relationships and creating engaging and motivating scenarios for our athletes to test and seek new information. Research by Mageau and Vallerand regards the “actions of coaches as (possibly) the most critical motivational influences within sport setting”. Coaching should be recognised as an educational dynamic relationship, where the coach can satisfy player’s goals (or needs) and development but both sides have an investment of will capital, where human initiative and intentionality are both dedicated to show commitment towards goals and relationships. The role of performance coaches for professional, HP athletes is highly important; coaches are “preparing athletes for consistent high-level competitive performance” (Côté, 2009a) through effective tactics such as integration of professional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal knowledge and developing player’s specific competence, confidence, connection, and character needs on regular basis.

The main aspects of influential and successful coach-athlete relationships revolve around ideals such as mutual trust, respect, support, cooperation, communication and understanding of each other and impact of each other within the relationship. Both performance enhancement and physiological well-being is deeply ingrained within the coach-athlete relationship; for example, studies have shown that athlete satisfaction is related to the degree to which athletes understand their role and responsibilities within interactive sports teams. (Eys, 2007). Therefore, adopting ideas such as ED approach should enhance coaches ability to acknowledge and develop positive interpersonal connections, which can create a united sense of purpose and achievement and offer solid base for positive relationships and engaging learning atmospheres. Coaches should design practice and develop learning environments which are reflective to the identified goals of the players and their current capabilities, both as individuals and as a group. This process is not solely playing games and asking questions as this shall not answer to their needs; it is creating an environment where players explore their ideas, test their capabilities and work towards identified goals while the coach creates scenarios and adapted learning situations to ensure players are building towards development and with competitive performance in mind through decision making, being creative and problem solving as individuals and as a group.

These discussed ideas are great starting points for coaches as they describe how these dynamic coaching techniques are reflective and cyclical in nature, having to constantly review and adjust accordingly, plus puts the athlete’s current needs front and centre for training design. Remember coaches; Give yourself a break, this IS complex! As we well know, coaching all sports yet especially team sports is periodic or seasonal by nature. Within age grade sports particularly, you shall be exposed to new players each season or be experiencing players as they develop and go through different stages of personality development. Like suggested, we need to offer our athletes experiences and learning opportunities to adapt, adjust and self organise based on current their current motivations and capabilities to create better people as well as athletes. Treating your involved athletes as unique people as well as athletes shall hopefully get continual development progression and sustained enjoyment during a time when we have never appreciated and missed organised sports more.