Practice behaviors of youth soccer players.(Report)

Abstract

Coaching youth athletes has much in common with teaching physical education. Over the past three decades there has been substantive research in physical education settings that has given educators empirical support for effective teaching practices to improve the learner's performance. However, little research has taken place in youth sport settings. The purpose of this investigation was to examine youth soccer training and game environments. The dependent measures were ALT-PE and opportunities for players to participate (i.e., number and success of trials). Three 9 year-old male players of average and below average ability levels participated in the study. Results show while the players were engaged 75.5% of practice time, there were less than 20 trials per 10-min for players to improve. These data have important implications for both coaching and physical education instruction. The most important of which is that coaches and teachers need to create practice environments that provide opportunities for students to engage in high numbers of successful trials.

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It has been estimated that upwards of 35 million children and youth, ages 6 to 16, are involved in organized sports in and out of school (McCallister, Blinde, & Kolenbrander, 2000). These youth are taught by 2.5 million adults in non-scholastic sport settings and by about 400,000 in high schools (Malina, 1997). Many of these coaches are trained in formal coach education programs such as the American Sport Education Program and the National Youth Sports Coaches Association (Siedentop, 2001). Despite the increasing emphasis on training coaches there is very little empirical evidence that can be used to guide coaching practices in youth settings. Much of the literature on coaching and player behaviors has focused on elite coaches and their athletes (Lee, 1993; Tkachuk, Leslie-Toogood, & Martin, 2003).

Coaching elite athletes is not the same as coaching recreational youth athletes. The instructional skills needed to coach youth in recreational leagues have much more in common with physical education than it does with elite sports. Youth coaches and physical educators have the task of developing skills, knowledge, and values with their charges. Both teaching and coaching are complex and challenging activities because youth vary in learning styles, in the skills they bring to the learning environment, and in their motivation to participate (McCallister et al., 2000). There are at least two important differences between coaching and physical educations settings. First, youth athletes participate on a team because they have an interest in the sport, while students in physical education classes participate as a requirement of their school curriculum. Second, in the coaching setting the coach is able to spend more time on a practice session, and often more frequently per week, than physical education teachers can devote to instruction. Moreover, in coaching contexts this time is devoted to one sport. This is not the case in physical education where teachers often cover as many as five sports in what would be considered a single soccer season. These differences notwithstanding, coaching youth in recreational settings and teaching these youth in physical education is more alike than dissimilar. Given the similarities between instructing in physical education and youth sports, using the physical education research strategy of examining player behavior could contribute an important piece of the puzzle of youth sports that is currently missing. This strategy is characterized by systematic and direct observation of player behavior.

Research conducted in physical education has shown that time spent in the practice of motor skills is quite low. Students are engaged with the learning task for less than 30% of the lesson (Siedentop, 2001). Researchers report that students in physical education spend 22-32% of their time waiting, approximately 21% of their time receiving instruction from their teacher, and close to 15% of their time involved in management tasks (e.g., assignment to groups). Research instruments such as Academic Learning Time-Physical Education (ALT-PE; Siedentop et al., 1982) have been used to collect the data. Time-based instruments like ALT-PE distinguish between two broad categories of student behavior, non-motor engaged activity (e.g., waiting, management, and instruction), and motor engagement (e.g., time spent practicing and being successful). Because the majority of time is used in non-motor engaged activity there is less time for practice and this ultimately limits the students' opportunities to improve. As a result of this, physical education researchers and teacher educators have for more than two decades, emphasized the importance of devoting time to learning and correspondingly minimizing non-motor engaged activity. Research from this line of inquiry into how teachers arranged lessons in terms of time and how students spend their time have become important mediating variables in understanding teaching effectiveness defined in terms of student learning in physical education (Metzler, 1989). The absence of a similar literature in the youth coaching area provides little guidance to coaches regarding best practices.

Knowing how students spend their time in physical education and coaching settings provides a key piece of the puzzle to understanding what is going on in these instructional settings. This data has one limitation, time-based variables do not provide information relative to the number of learning trials students have in a lesson nor the success of those trials. In the past decade the use of trials as a dependent variable has been used to provide another piece of the puzzle relative to student learning in physical education. Typically trials have been used as measures of technical performance and outcomes in a number of studies to show the effects of instruction on student performance (Ward & Barrett, 2000). Using trials as a variable is particularly useful, because unlike time which is a measure of the duration that students are engaged in the activity, trials provide a direct measure of the number of times a student performed the skill and the number of times a student was successful or the outcome was successful.