Encouraging deception, exploration & more
Do we really want to encourage deception?
After many false starts I think I can safely say the newsletter will be back on track (and no I’m not deceiving you). I had a lovely few weeks travelling and now I have a few weeks to get sorted properly before school starts again after the summer. Let’s get to it
Research Insights: Deception in Tennis
Podcast Snip: Importance of Exploration
Putting it into practice: Encouraging Deception
Research Insights
Deception in Tennis: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective (O’Connell 2026)
This paper explored deception through an Ecological Dynamics lens, showing that it emerges from the ongoing interaction between opponents rather than from rehearsed tricks or techniques. I thought it was a really nice practical and coach friendly paper. I liked how William O’Connell talked about the 3 D’s of Deception: Deceive, Disguise and Distract (not quite as good as Patches O’Houlihan’s 5 D’s of Dodgeball). The paper finished by discussing the role representative practice in developing players who can both create and respond to deception in competition.
Here’s one of my favourite pieces of deception from the master Roger Federer
Here are my 5 key insights:
1)I think the point about tennis being relational is so important. Each players actions will shape the affordances available to the other player. Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how sport is both a problem solving and problem creating activity.
Affordances are the directly perceived opportunities for action relative to a player’s capabilities (Araújo et al., 2025). In tennis, affordances evolve relationally — each player’s actions shape the other’s
2)This gives a really nice insight into the goal of deceptive behaviour. Player’s aim to make it harder for their opponents to perceive the specifying information to help them problem solve effectively.
A player’s deceptive behavior can impair the opponent’s attunement to specifying information, undermining their grip on the point.
3)The 3 D’s of Deception can also operate in combination and I would say a lot of the time they are acting in combination rather than isolation. I think what’s a nice link between all 3 is that they are all about changing the information your opponent has available. Sometimes that’s disguising information, delaying information or redirecting attention. All with the goal of making it harder for your opponent to become attuned to the information they need.
These subcategories can operate alone or in combination, and all function to impair the opponent’s perception-action coupling
4)There are two things here: The more skilled a player is the better able they are able to deceive. Think about how much harder it is for an opponent to know what a player is going to do when they are able to solve the problem in a number of ways rather than having one solution. The piece around having a manoeuvrable racket highlights why scaling is so important in junior sports.
Active deception requires a player of sufficient skill and a manoeuvrable racquet, since the time available to transition from deceptive to veridical action is scant.
5)When a player keeps the affordances open as late as possible, they make it extremely difficult for their opponent to pick up the necessary specifying information they will need to act effectively.
The player should aim to keep affordances open until as late as possible — delaying the release of specifying information to hold the opponent in suspense.
Reference
O’Connell, W. (2026). Deception in Tennis: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective. World Tennis Coaching & Sport Science Review , 34(98), 49-55. https://doi.org/10.52383/itfcoaching.v34i98.767
Podcast Snip
Giving time to explore and experiment
William O’Connell (author of paper above) speaks in this about how unstructured play is often where we players can have to space to explore and develop the skills behind effective deception. Often there are lower stakes in these games which gives players more freedom to explore and problem solve. I also liked the idea of 70-20-10 and is this something that we could use in our own session design.
Putting it into practice
Encouraging Deception
One of the key questions this paper made me think about is not, “How do we teach deception?” but rather, “How can we design practice that encourages deception to emerge?”
From a CLA perspective, our role isn’t to tell players when or how to deceive an opponent. Instead, we can manipulate constraints to create environments where players are encouraged to explore, adapt and become less predictable.
1)Help players build a bigger toolbox
The paper highlights that effective deception requires a high level of skill. The more ways a player can solve the same problem, the less predictable they become.
As coaches, we can encourage this by designing tasks that invite multiple solutions rather than reinforcing one “correct” technique. The bigger a player’s toolbox, the more opportunities they have to adapt to the problems of the game
2)Keep the interaction alive
In the paper William talked about the importance of Representative Training Tasks.
Following RT guidelines will elicit and nurture the brinkmanship needed to perform and defend against deception. At minimum, RT will avoid obstructing these skills emergence, as task decomposition and decoupled perception-action training would.
I really liked the use of the word “brinkmanship.” It captures the constant interaction between two players, each trying to gain an advantage while making life more difficult for the other. Deception emerges through the interaction between opponents, with each player’s actions shaping the opportunities available to the other.
3)Create time to explore
This links nicely to the podcast snip above. When coaching using a CLA, we can create tasks where players have lots of chances to explore. These would look quite like ‘backyard games’ where players have the freedom to explore and experiment against real opponents. A lot of the time I would use these games as part of the warm-up or even use bonus points during some of the tasks when I see players use creative solutions.
That’s all for this week
See you soon,
Philip
If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter, you might like my new website. It has links to some of my notes on my favourite research papers that you can check out if you’d like to explore some more skill acquisition ideas over the weekend.