Category: Training/Coaching Articles

The 3rd and final installment of psychological co-active tips from Dan Abrahams. Cognitive Player Issues – Paying attention to cues and clues that are irrelevant/noise. Letting your mind wander. Will present as slow decision making through inexperience, inhibition through anxiety and an internal focus of attention too often. Learning – Promote learning rather than performance...

Here’s another 15 tips from Dan: Training Environment – Shapes attitude, energy and effort and each of these aren’t simply traits players have or not, they are choices the player has to display or not, and you have to bring it out of them and players will become better at choosing them in their given...

As I’ve mentioned many times before there’s 4 co-actives of performance: Tactical Psychological Technical Physical I’ve actually listed them in order of what I think is most important, especially for local/amateur football, with psychological being my number 2 behind tactical. My reasoning you ask? Tactics teach the player what to do and when. Psychological is...

Once you’ve devised your list of training scenarios that you think are important to be successful at to win games, then choose 1 scenario that consistently presents itself during a game to focus on at training, in this case fast play defense. The concept of defender 1/2/3 isn’t new but is probably more a case...

As I’m about the nuts and bolts of footy training being as representative of the game as possible, I believe the best way to go about that is through the use of scenarios. This resembles the game more than cone drills because it trains what does happen, not what you want to happen, which may...

In the final part of this Game Intelligence series inspired by this monster article I’ll take a look at how movement fits into all this and finally in-game decision making, which is how everything presented up until now presents within a game, why it presents as such and who it presents to specifically. I’ve deliberately...

As we slowly develop the holisticness of what Game Intelligence is after parts 1 and 2 earlier this week we look at part 3 which discusses a little about scanning and the visual system. Performing scanning of the field requires a higher functioning mind to decode, which is fundamental to on-field awareness, we looked at...

In part 1 yesterday we looked at what Game Intelligence is and how elite and experienced footballers use it to their advantage. Today we look at awareness. From an early age you’re looking to see if a kid has spatial awareness which could present as positively handling play in congestion or finding dangerous space in...

This series of posts was inspired by an article I read just yesterday but is one of the best I’ve read in recent times as far as putting a lot of tactical and technical co-active elements together. It was originally a soccer based piece but I’ve altered it to suit Aussie Rules. This series will...

Here’s another take on decision making that can be added to the framework from yesterday’s post. These notes are taken from an article from Peter Motzenbecker, a Soccer coach from the US and quite detailed and worth a read in itself. Here are my notes from it. Environment, coach, team, club and the team’s game...