Decision Making in Team Sport: Rugby
Decision Making in Team Sport: Rugby Union
Philosophy of Decision Making
Question: why do traditional training methods typically prepare players for certainty of their actions instead of preparing them for uncertainty? Team sport is unpredictable by nature and therefore uncertainty should be embraced by the coach in practice and used to enhance the learning and performance process. Expert decision makers are more able to adapt their decisions and actions to a changing environment and are therefore more able to perform in unstable or uncertain situations. Here the emphasis is placed more on the adaptability and variability within the ‘player-environment’ relationship rather than the traditional approach which focuses on the repeated stability of player decisions and actions.
Traditional Decision Making Training
There are three main issues concerning traditional methods to training decision making. First, they involve repeating decisions and actions at practice against constrained or predictable opponents usually until they appear errorless and automatic with little emphasis on what problem they help solve. Second, players are evolving from being largely emergent decision makers who can read the game, adapt and ‘play what they see’, into pre-programmed robots that are sequenced and patterned, performing specific roles with a rather limited skill set. In some cases, players are not in a position to make decisions based on basic principles of the game (i.e., possession, progression, compression, delay etc,) like they did in their back yards and during unstructured practice. Finally, the balance in coaching between providing ‘stability’ or structure (game plans, zones, channels etc, which act to constrain a player’s decision making) and ‘instability’ or variation (creativity needed for generating uncertainty in opponents) has leaned more toward structure and this has lead to higher levels of predictability in training and performance, reduced creativity in decision making and actions and even more importantly a lack of an ability to adapt to sudden changes. I will highlight some concepts from sport science skill acquisition literature that may assist the coach in addressing these concerns.
Dynamical Systems in Sport
A recent theoretical approach to coaching in sport, views team sports as dynamical systems (see Passos, Araújo, Davids & Shuttleworth, 2008). A dynamic system is something that is composed of many parts (e.g., players in a team or teams in a game) and is open to exchanging information with its environment in order to adapt and achieve its goal (e.g., making a decision based on visual information of opponents and support players). Decisions and actions are influenced by constraints acting on it both internally (e.g., structure; game plans,, zones, channels, defensive and attacking patterns) and externally (e.g., scanning the positioning and movement of opponents). The system attempts to stabilse by making a decision and acting to satisfy these constraints (e.g., attacking wide when opponents are grouped together or attacking close in when opponents are spread wide) and often experiences a transition between decisions to achieve a desired outcome (e.g., switching from a wide point of attack to close in to exploit and penetrate the space in close). Decision making is an interplay between structure (premeditated decisions using rehearsed or known movement patterns) and variation (emergent decisions arising from engaging with opponents using creativity and individual skill).
Balance: Stability & Variability
Stability: players need a level of stability through structure (often referred to in coaching circles as game plans, strategies, tactics, zones, channels, shape, patterns). Stability is critical in driving goal directed behavior among players, generating predetermined options and running lines for support players, creating uncertainty in opponents and instilling confidence in players who desire a level of certainty. It generates a degree of coherence in decision making among players by constraining their options to a select few. Early in learning it’s best to stabilise decision making through fundamental principles of play derived from for example invasion games (i.e., possession, progression, support, compression, delay, width, depth, movement on-off-the-ball etc,), and from this, shapes and patterns emerge and evolve from the many interactions between players in a range of situations. It is important for the coach to guide and assist players in the pattern forming process more so as a facilitator than a director. At later stages these players are more able to adapt to different structures imposed on them by the coach for performance. From this approach, there needs to be a balance between stability (structure) and variability (change) for decisions and actions to be adapted into performance.
Variability: also known as change allows a team the chance to ‘adapt’ their decisions and actions in response to their opponent’s actions but also enables them to use creativity, deception and disguise to create uncertainty and then to exploit this if the opportunity presents itself. Teams that use an optimal level of variation in games will usually attempt to vary their movements or points of attack and thereby create periods of uncertainty generating critical information on potential instabilities in their opponents. Structured play can do this to a degree but becomes very predictable unless there is a level of variation to it, and these are critical skills needed when breaking down rigid attacking or defensive structures. Variation can also be applied to existing structures for example; having multiple options in an attacking pattern, executing an attacking pattern from multiple starting positions, or at different speeds or over different size spaces. In all of these examples the opponent’s movements are the primary information source for influencing these variations. Here the emphasis is training players to perceive information to support their actions by engaging their opponent’s under appropriate amounts of uncertainty decided by the coach.
Engagement: Perception-Action
Players learn to apply meaning to perceived information through actively exploring providing them with action possibilities or ‘affordances’ for example a player learns that a fast approaching defence may afford them the opportunity to exploit the space created in behind by using a kick or flat pass to a support runner in space. Carefully manipulated practices will strengthen ‘perception-action’ couplings between relevant information and affordances for action and also provide the player with an ability to adapt their decisions and actions to sudden changes which is often the case in dynamic team sports. The challenge for the coach is to represent and often exaggerate the problem facing the players in practice with the aim of guiding the players search (through guidance and questioning) to relevant information so that it becomes meaningful and will afford them the desired action. This process can be accomplished on an individual and team level where the team has developed a high level of spatial awareness within their opponent’s structure affording them similar action possibilities and therefore greater coherence in their decision making. A player’s decision making can be developed by creating a greater level of awareness of team affordances in relation to the principles of play rather than solely relying on structures which are heavily dependent on predicting ahead of time their opponent’s movements and also require high precision of execution in an environment that is dynamic and changing.
A reason why the Brazilian soccer team is so hard to play against is that their decisions are based on their opponent’s reactions to their own original actions. These players learn very early on that every decision and movement they make has an effect on their opponent(s) and that they perceive these changes instantaneously and can adapt to exploit them the moment the opportunity emerges. Their strength lies in being able to engage their opponents to the point of controlling them while adapting to exploit any opportunities that emerge. Due to their high level of individual skill (ball control) their affordances are even greater. Implementing a more adaptive dynamic playing system will enable players to make more effective decisions based on perception-action processes, individual and team affordances, while embracing variation through creativity, flair, deception and disguise to generate more uncertainty around them. Coaches should also try not to separate perception (information) from actions. This occurs a lot more than we would care to imagine in current day practices. Performing drills often involves repeating actions without any decision to be made which only serves to encourage athletes to ‘go through the motions’. The challenge for the coach in designing practice is to attain ‘repetition without the repetition’ simply meaning that coaches should design modified tasks or games which represent the same problem but allow for variations of a solution to emerge from carefully manipulated situations rather than repeating exactly the same solution each and every time to the same problem.
Critical Periods: Breaking Symmetry
Decision making can be thought of as a process involving a player, subsystem (2-3 players) or system (team) attempting to ‘break symmetry’ with an opposing system. Symmetry breaking can be thought of as a process where one system attempts to get the ball and a critical mass of players in behind the opposing team in order to penetrate the space. In order to do so the attacking system attempts to destabilize opponents momentarily while spontaneously adapting its structure to take advantage of this. The ebb and flow nature of symmetry breaking is likened to a system in a continual struggle between maintaining its own stability while creating instability in opponents with effective transitioning between structure-chaos and chaos-structure. Players need to develop awareness within chaotic situations with ability to recognize patterns or structures emerging and evolving therefore giving them time to act and adapt. Furthermore, players also need to acquire an ability to generate chaos out of structure in order to break symmetry with their opponents (e.g., ‘playing what you see’ which provides opponents minimal information as to your intentions or using deception and disguise to create uncertainty in opponents).
Players who possess a greater level of movement variability or creativity and ball control are often the ‘key play makers’. These players should possess the ability to strike the right balance, at different stages of the game, between playing with structure and variability than most other players. They are also able to engage more effectively with their opponents and are therefore instrumental in creating uncertainty in them. It often makes sense to involve these players as often as possible especially during critical periods. An example of a critical period in rugby is in and around the 4 meter zone between attackers and defenders (Passos, Araújo, Davids, Gouveia, & Serpa, 2006). Around this distance there is a greater propensity for attackers to create instability or uncertainty in their opponents providing that their relative approach velocities are ±4m/s. Such parameters are only conducive to each player’s action capabilities meaning that each time a player engages with a different opponent this critical period changes. Those players who can most effectively engage their opponent(s) while perceiving information about their capabilities (ie, acceleration, positioning, etc,) have the most chance in creating instabilities. Implications for practice are to rotate opponents during repetitive practices or alter arrival speeds and positioning so that structures are more able to adapt to these uncertainties and can better transfer to competition. It is beneficial to have supporting players in close proximity to key
decision makers who are able to adapt their support structures to take full advantage of any opportunities arising. If players are to be most effective in transferring this skill into competition then they should be able to adapt or vary the structure on-the-go by using primarily visual information. During the early stages of training system stability-instability it is suggested that we can; 1) place an emphasis on the ability of the ball carrier to engage opponents by exploring their own capabilities and their opponents while being encouraged to actively explore strategies such as deception and disguise to create uncertainty 2) then switching to off-the-ball players learning to engage opponents while co-adapting to changes of the ball carrier in order to exploit any individual or team affordances, 3) and when the team can learn to adapt their dynamic system to any sudden or unexpected changes in the environment in complete silence and manage to exploit their opponent’s uncertainties consistently then it has become a skill. It often takes time to achieve this level but it can force players to actively scan the environment heightening their awareness to situational changes over time and affording them time to adapt into a dynamic rather than structured system. Self-Organising: Player Combinations In contrast to a coach assuming the decision making role by prescribing structure or adaptation, rather it is a self-organising process through which player’s themselves engage and form combinations within smaller subsystems (2 to 4 players), that learn to co-adapt spontaneously to their opponents actions. To become an expert decision maker, it is not sufficient for players to develop situational awareness and couple this with an appropriate action (see Fig 1.), rather players need to engage with their opponents and surroundings (see Fig 2.), using actions closely coupled to perceiving changes related to their previous actions. Therefore, a player’s ability to perceive and adapt are critical components in breaking symmetry.
The coach is instrumental in facilitating variations to structure but not necessarily by direct intervention but via deliberate manipulation of the amount of uncertainty provided by opponents and varying the many task constraints (i.e., task goal, rules, boundaries, equipment). Players need to explore multiple strategies and solutions and the coach should allow time-outs whereby players can observe, review and provide each other feedback to adapt aiming for a more dynamic, adaptive and open system.
Passos, P., Araújo, D., Davids, K., & Shuttleworth, R. (2008). Manipulating constraints to train decision making in rugby union. International Journal of Sport Science & Coaching, 3, 125-140.
Picture One: Wallabies adapt an attacking structure to a dynamic situation in a confined space (reduced time and space for on and off-the-ball decision making). Carefully manipulated player engagements that differ in the amount of uncertainty presented will help create a more adaptive and robust goal driven system. Increased perceptual awareness of the situation (space and time) and what action possibilities it affords the players will strengthen the decision making process.
Picture Two: A structure (ruck) emerges and evolves among junior players in response to a perceived threat from the opposition to the possession of the ball. It is critical that during these early stages of learning that player’s are aware of the effects that their own actions have on their opponents otherwise players will make decisions and actions based on none-perceived or a pre-determined threat that may not exist and therefore their effectiveness is reduced.
Richard Shuttleworth Skill Acquisition Specialist Australian Sports Commission
