This is how we cognitively coach players
This article will be more practical than the previous articles about learning. In this article, we will tell how we teach professional football players through our Elite 1 on 1 video sessions service. A lot of the concepts we discussed in our articles about learning we implement in the sessions with players.
After the player showed interest in working with us, we propose to do a trial session. We do this to show and tell how we work and what the player can expect, we tell the players what their tactical strengths and weaknesses are. We show him the possibilities of improving tactically. We also use this session to find out more about the personality of a player.
What kind of language does he use, how does he learn, and what does he feel he needs to improve. But also to find out about the situation of the player in his club and how the coach wants to play. So if this is something you want to try out, send us a message and we will set up a session for you.
When the player decides to work together with Tactalyse, we set up the real first session. Then one of our coaches will analyze a game to decide which individual tactics he will introduce to the player. We mostly start with two individual tactics to focus on, a defensive and offensive individual tactic. So what we don’t do is go through the complete game minute by minute. We only select the specific game situations where the individual tactic is performed. We only pick two individual tactics to not overload the player with too much information. Because this will cause decision fatigue. The individual tactics we decide to focus on first is a combination of the level of the player of the different individual tactics, the situation of the player at the club, and what the player wants to develop himself. After several sessions, when the player is familiar with our way of working, we might introduce one or two more individual tactics.
After this onboarding process of the player, we start with the first actual sessions in which we discuss the game situations with the player. Out of the 300 video clips, we cut out of a game with all the individual tactics a player does in a game we discuss a defensive and an offensive individual tactic. This may seem like not much, but in reality, this means discussing between 40 and 50 game situations. Our experience is that focusing on too many different game situations at one time will only result in less effectiveness. In our eyes, it’s better to focus and move on to more individual tactics later on. A lot of individual tactics are built up in several steps, so we start with step one and once the player is ready we move on to step two in an individual tactic. So you can say that we cut up an individual tactic in several steps before the individual tactic is covered as a whole. Another reason is that a lot of basic behavior in every different individual tactic is the same. Think about how we build up an individual tactic. Perception is always the first step in an individual tactic, to recognize that you’re in a certain game situation and which individual tactic belongs to that situation. By knowing this you know what to do. So one of the basic behaviors in almost every individual tactic is doing head checks.
It only takes two or three sessions for most of our players to become conscious of their behavior in individual tactics. This is an important shift because when they move in the matrix of the four steps of individual tactics. They are now conscious – incompetent. This often is a real eye-opener for players, because they start to recognize patterns in football. This also often is a frustrating time, because some players won’t learn so fast and they get conscious of the mistakes they make. At this time it’s important for us coaches to remind them of the progress they had and show them that they are doing it right a lot of times. We often ask the players to reflect after a game and tell us how they think it went. We notice that once players are conscious about their behavior they tell us how they thought about specific things while playing. We think this is a cool thing, we coach a player on behavior and in the middle of a high-speed football game they think about the video session with Tactalyse and that one of our coaches told them about this.
Then after several sessions, we often get the phenomenon of super-compensation. The player’s brain has adapted cognitively and is now operating at a higher level. After this has happened we can decide to introduce a new step of the individual tactic or a completely new individual tactic. This depends on our estimation of where we are in the learning curve. But sometimes a player experiences difficulties in making the behavior a habit. We try to have three stimuli with a player to teach him the behaviors for an individual tactic. The first one is the video sessions that we’ve talked about in this article, the second one is a pre-game video where we highlight video clips of the previous session we had. In this way, the player gets reminded about the most important things again. The third, and secret weapon we try to use with all of our players is the concept of implicit learning. Every player we give the order to find an object or picture that reminds them of the behavior that they have to (un)learn for the individual tactic. Read more about this concept in this article.
The results we get with this way of working are amazing. The players are getting better each session and we are coaching players in every major league in Europe. We have several National Team players that will play in the world cup and have players in the Champions League. So it’s safe to say that these players are satisfied with their development through our service. If this is something you want to start with, shoot us a message and we will set up a video session.
Summary
We always do a trial session with players to show and tell how we work and what the player can expect, we tell the players what their tactical strengths and weaknesses are. We show him the possibilities of improving tactically. We also use this session to find out more about the personality of a player.
When the player decides to work with Tactalyse we analyze a game and start the process. The sessions are usually built up with two individual tactics to focus on, a defensive and offensive individual tactic. So what we don’t do is go through the complete game minute by minute. We only select the specific game situations where the individual tactic is performed. On average we discuss 40-50 video clips in one session.
It only takes two or three sessions for most of our players to become conscious of their behavior in individual tactics. They are now conscious – incompetent. This often is a real eye-opener for players, because they start to recognize patterns in football. Then after several sessions, we often get the phenomenon of super-compensation. The player’s brain has adapted cognitively and is now operating at a higher level. After this has happened we can decide to introduce a new step of the individual tactic or a completely new individual tactic.
The results we get with this way of working are amazing. The players are getting better each session and we are coaching players in every major league in Europe.
