Exploring football coaches' views on coach education, role, and practice design: An Australian perspective.

Despite the importance placed on the design and delivery of formal coach education programs by Football Australia, there remains a lack of research relating to how formal coach education strategies support Australian football (i.e., soccer) coaches and their coaching practices. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, 20 highly qualified and experienced Australian senior football coaches shared their perspectives on: (i) coach education, (ii) their role as coach, and (iii) practice design. Findings revealed that formal coach education in Australia was largely ineffective in preparing senior coaches for the realities of senior football. Coaches attributed this to a number of factors, including the content's quality, structure and delivery, which they viewed as rudimentary, outdated, repetitive and lacking in relevance and depth. Coaches also revealed there was an expectation of conformity to the content and practices endorsed by the National Football Curriculum, limiting the value and impact of formal coach education in supporting the development of coaches' theoretical and practical dispositions. These findings point towards a number of broad and systemic issues relating to the conceptual, theoretical and practical foundations of the National Football Curriculum and subsequent courses. If Football Australia are to reach their goal in designing and delivering effective and meaningful coach education programs that support the highly complex and multifaceted role of senior coaching, formal coach education may need to adapt and evolve in a manner that better supports the multi-dimensional and context-specific needs of Australian senior football coaches.

"Train how you play": Using representative learning design to train amateur cricketers.

Training task design with amateur female cricketers has typically comprised of deconstructed and monotonous approaches which may not maximise skill development. Clear guidelines to improve these practices in this cohort are lacking. The training environment should provide the same sources of information, decisions and variability as matches in order to prepare players for the match environment, which can be achieved through representative learning design (RLD). An RLD training intervention designed to promote skill development was performed over five weeks with two amateur female cricket teams to provide a framework for community coaches at the foundation stage of cricket. Skill development was recorded as changes in skilled actions for batting and bowling, with cognitions coded as themes for each skill during training. Six of ten batters and seven of eight bowlers exhibited increases in skill development ranging between 7-49%. Changes in batting and bowling behaviour improved substantially between moderately and extensively designed sessions. Batters' thoughts shifted from their own skill execution to objectives, while bowlers focused on their opponent's execution. Moderate to extensive RLD appears to promote skill development in amateur cricketers, making it a viable option for coach education and training design at the foundation level of cricket.