Late developers, developing skill within games & more
Here's some Skill Acquisition content for you to explore over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it!
This week at a sconce:
Research Insight: Developing Skill within a GBA
Podcast Snip: Importance of RLD in Skill Development
Resource: Levels of Representativeness
Tweet: National Team Player Development
Due to some time ‘constraints’ a slightly shortened newsletter this week as I didn’t include a quote
Research Insight
Developing skill within the context of a Game-Based Approach (Barrett et al., 2025)
This was a really insightful paper around developing skill within the context of a Games Based Approach. While a GBA approach encompasses many different approaches to coaching, I think there were some really nice insights for coaches using a CLA.
The paper examined how coaches can better support skill development through a GBA in Gaelic football. It highlights key challenges like time constraints and competing priorities, and calls for more sophisticated practice design and coaching alignment. To fully realise the benefits of GBA, coaches need a clearer understanding of skill and how to structure learning environments
5 Key Insights:
1)In many sessions, skill development becomes an afterthought—with mistakes punished instead of used as part of the learning process. Simply playing games isn’t enough; the design of the game matters. Coaches should move beyond using games to enforce standards and start using them to create opportunities for players to adapt, explore, and refine their actions in context.
Quote
"Skill development was thus relegated to a secondary consideration within most games described by the coaches. That is, instead of designing games for players to develop particular aspects of their skills as part of a progressive series of activities, players were simply punished for poor execution: ‘If I'm planning a conditioned game, if the pass hits the ground, it's a turnover; if a pickup is missed, it's a turnover
2)Practice design starts with how a coach understands skill. If you believe skill is about repeating a fixed technique, you’re more likely to design drills that isolate movement. But if you see skill as the ability to adapt actions to the demands of the game, then your practice will look very different—more dynamic, more representative, and more focused on helping players attune to the game
Quote
"A coach’s actions are anchored to their fundamental understanding and beliefs in relation to what skill is and how it is developed.”
3)Rather than asking whether a game-based or technical-focused approach is better, the more useful question is: how can we use game-based approaches to support skill development? Skill isn’t just about repeating actions—it’s about adapting movement solutions to fit the dynamic game. With careful Representative Learning Design, coaches can support skill development, without stepping completely away from the game.
4)There’s an important difference between representative task design and representative learning design—and many coaches lean too heavily on the former. It’s one thing for practice to look like the game, but it’s another to shape it so that players are guided to explore new movement solutions and adapt their actions to key information. Coaches should consider how they can tweak or exaggerate features of the activity (e.g., space, time, constraints) to help players develop skill.
Quote
"That is, the coaches’ concern when designing practice appeared to be more for representative task design (ensuring training faithfully mimicked the game) rather than representative learning design (deliberately exaggerating features of the practice activity to guide the learner towards exploring new movement possibilities while preserving the functional coupling between perception and action processes)."
5)Unopposed practice still has a place, but it should be used with clear intent and not overused. It’s main purpose is to help players explore new movement solutions, or get a feel for a coordination pattern. A helpful mindset is to treat it as a “minimum necessary dose”—just enough to support learning, but always with the aim of returning to a more representative task as soon as possible.
Quote
"To be clear, we are not dismissing the value of some unopposed practice in enhancing player understanding, confidence or exploration of new coordination patterns; rather, we are highlighting that unopposed practices may be best utilised under a “minimum necessary dose” philosophy.”
Here’s the link to my detailed notes if you’d like to take a look
Reference
Barrett, L., Kinnerk, P., & Kearney, P. E. (2025). Developing skill within the context of a Game-Based Approach. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 17479541241311673.
Podcast Snip
The importance of Representative Learning Design in Skill Development
This is a really insightful snip from Rob Gray around Representative Learning Design. It’s fits really nicely with the insight from the paper above around the difference between Representative Task Design and Representative Learning Design. The key idea behind RLD is keeping the essential elements of the performance environment present-it’s not about replicating the performance environment exactly. We can also borrow another idea from the paper above ‘the minimum necessary dose’ when applying RLD. When simplifying a task, we want to keep the necessary key information while reducing the complexity.
Link to the full episode
https://open.spotify.com/episode/51stnJCHFAYHUICvICj9a0?si=3f89568c08664898
Resource
Levels of Representativeness
This is a graphic from a paper that we released around the same time as the ‘developing skill within the context of a Games Based Approach’ paper came out. I think it fits really nicely with some of the ideas shared above so I’ll share it here as the resource (nothing wrong with a bit of shameless self-promotion 😂)
Link to the thread if you’d like to read it
https://x.com/Mr_Tennis_Coach/status/1882874982063108590
Tweet
The difference between Bundesliga pros and National team players
Joel has been sharing some brilliant Twitter threads lately and this one is on a brilliant paper that looked at the development of players that ended up playing for the German National Football Team (Senior Level) and those that played at the Bundesliga level. One of the key findings was that those that ended up playing for the national team had
• More unstructured game play in childhood
• More engagement in other sports in adolescence
• Later specialization
• Less organized practice
• Less fitness and conditioning
An additional finding that I really liked from the paper was that many of the players that ended up playing for the senior national team didn’t start playing for their Junior National team until a lot later (U16+). -a lot of them were late developer
Here’s the link to Joel’s thread if you’d like to check it out