I often get asked this question from kids and parents at IFS; ‘why aren’t we doing any ‘drills’?’
Traditionally, football coaching wisdom has led us to believe that to improve a skill we need to break it down into small chunks and practice said skill for thousands of repetitions in a controlled environment. Once that skill has been mastered, we can then take that skill into a game situation and apply it. This dogma is still alive and kicking amongst ‘prehistoric’ coaches today. Unfortunately, this concept is fundamentally flawed.
The science of Skill Acquisition has evolved. Without wanting to bore you, let’s look at some of the science.
Human learning is highly task specific. So the task of Striking the Ball in a pre-planned way in a drill, (without opposition or decision making), is a very different task from Striking the Ball in response to positioning and movement of teammates/defenders in a real game. The less these tasks resemble each other in terms of perceptual information the less likely it is that there will be transfer from one to another. So the notion that young players must learn skills through drills in isolation is flawed.
A quote from famed Sports Scientist Rick Fenoglio:
“Techniques learned by the player in isolation, (drills), usually do not transfer to the game because the player has to essentially re-learn the skill, (almost from scratch), within the ever-changing context of the game. As a result, it makes you wonder whether the skill would have been better taught within the game context in the first place.”
And another from Perception-Action expert Dr Andrew Wilson:
“The old-college way of thinking about learning is as you describe; the learner has to acquire some core competence, a motor programme that they can then roll out on demand and tweak to fit the current context. This, frankly, isn’t true at all. Learning really requires that you spend time learning to perceive the relevant information which will support your action selection and control, and this information is only created by the task as it unfolds. So learning to kick in drills is not learning to kick in the game and there really will be relearning required.”
This is why you will rarely, (if ever), see coaches at IFS using ‘drills’ within practice sessions. We prefer a game based approach, utilising carefully manipulated constraints to achieve our objectives within a session. It is also important to note this is Football Federation Australia’s development approach in their National Curriculum.
The next time you see a coach utilising drills in a football session, let them know, ‘drills are for dentists, not footballers!’
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