THE DECISION MAKING PROCESS – STAGE #4 x EXECUTION

Stage 4, execution, easily the most used stage of the decision making process for a few reasons.

The main reason being that the coach can clearly see if the ball got to should have got to, and where it needed to go, or not, and this is how players are judged a lot of the time.

But knowing what we do now about decision making, the reasons for this will lye far deeper than most coaches care to know or delve.

The final stage of most learning models ends in autonomy which is the ability to perform an action on demand but the other side of that is that when that action isn’t successful is that by this stage you should also have the ability of self error detection.

This refers to the player being able to assess the action based on the 4 points above:

• Correct
• Successful
• Incorrect
• Unsuccesful

To take that a bit further:

• Correct = a correct decision using the correct skill/technique (ball made it to the right person)
• Successful = a successful decision but incorrect skill/technique (ball made it to the right person but maybe the kick fell short putting them under some form of pressure)
• Incorrect = an incorrect decision using the correct skill/technique (a safe backwards/lateral kick around half forward that’s not in your game model but a successful kick)
• Unsuccessful = either or both incorrect decision and skill/technique (kicking error)

If players have reached a level autonomy through your/the coach’s training enviroment and design then players can pretty quickly sum up what correct/incorrect actions were made at any given point of the game and this helps tremendously in building game intelligence.

Inexperienced players will make mistakes and have no idea why they occur and how to correct them, your mid-tier players will have this knowledge for some actions but not all and your experienced players will have this knowledge for most, if not all, game actions.

If you want to make your coaching gig a lot easier than presenting a framework like this can assist them in some self learning which usually sticks a lot more in the brain then simply being told from someone else.