PE teacher PHILIP O’CALLAGHAN tells STEPH FAIRBAIRN how novice players can be taught soccer skills and explains how he borrows ideas from other sports
Philip O’Callaghan is a physical education teacher from Cork in Ireland.
Though tennis was the sport he played growing up, and coaches now outside of school, his PE sessions mean he teaches a variety of sports.
Much of his approach to teaching sport is based on skill acquisition, a topic he says he researches and reads about as a hobby - even running a Twitter account to make the approach more accessible, and to “give coaches a starting point…to see how they can use some of the skill-acquisition research or theory to improve their sessions".
SCW caught up with Philip to find out more about skill acquisition and how it can be better understood in the context of coaching and session design...
PO’C: “It depends. One view of skill acquisition is that it is something that is acquired - it might be a pattern, or something ingrained into your muscle memory or brain, and then you repeat that.
“The other view of skill acquisition would be skill adaptation. What is actually acquired is a better relationship with the environment that you are in, so you become more sensitive to information in the environment that will help you control your actions.
"I’m firmly with ’developing a better relationship’, rather than something that’s acquired. I view it more as skill adaptation, rather than skill acquisition.”
PO’C: "You differentiate it as technique versus skill. Technique would be something like dribbling with the outside of the foot - but the skill is how you apply the technique in a specific context under changing conditions, and how you can adapt it to suit.
“Every time you dribble, the conditions are going to be different - you might be on a different part of the pitch, you’ll have different people around you.
"The way I view a skill is becoming better at engaging with the emerging problems that are coming at you as you’re dribbling the ball."
"Skill is how you apply technique in a specific context under changing conditions..."
PO’C: "If I was coaching dribbling to beginners, instead of going into a drill, where they are dribbling around the cones, I would just simplify the task for them, and give them lots of opportunities to explore different ways of dribbling.
“When you’re teaching beginners, what is really important is that they are given lots of opportunities to explore and try different things.
"So, instead of dribbling in a match, they might be dribbling in a one-on-one or two-on-one situation.
“If they’re finding it too difficult to dribble in that, you could reduce the pressure a bit - start the defender further away to give them more space to work with before they engage.
"Then you might have something like dribbling with smaller balls. Rather than setting a base foundation, you’re letting them explore different ways of doing it and finding a solution that fits them best.”
PO’C: "You can give pointers - there’s no problem giving some instruction. But there’s different types of instructions.
"You might use something like an analogy, rather than a specific instruction. You can also set up your practice design to encourage certain behaviours - the constraints-led approach.
"That is going to align with the skill adaptation approach. By using little constraints, you can guide the learner towards better dribbling, or better ways to dribble, through your practice design, rather than specifically telling them what to do.”
PO’C: "I’ll use an easy example. If a player always wants to kick on their right leg, you can say every goal they score on their right leg is worth one, [and] every goal they score on their left leg is worth three.
"You’re not saying they have to shoot with their left leg all the time, but you’re rewarding them for doing it.
“You could make the game first to 15. So if they keep scoring one goal [with their right foot], they’ll never get to 15 - whereas if they get three goals with their left foot, they’d get there way faster.
“So you can incentivise certain behaviours you’d want them to explore, especially ones that they might not do otherwise, without ruling out other ones.
"If you say you can only shoot on your left foot, then the defender knows they can just stand on their left foot - whereas if you say, three for your left, one for your right, they can go both ways still, so it keeps it more game-like.”
PO’C: "I find it really enjoyable seeing what other coaches are doing in other sports and how I could adapt that to suit my own sport.
"Tennis wouldn’t have a lot of game-based approaches, so a lot of it was seeing examples in soccer, [field] hockey, rugby and basketball, and then seeing how it could be applied to that [tennis].
"I think it’s really worthwhile to see what coaches in other sports are doing..."
“I enjoy trying to do things in sports that I might not be as comfortable teaching, seeing how they’re working and then maybe taking ideas from what I’ve seen, in soccer to basketball or basketball to soccer - things where the games have similar principles.
"They’re both invasion games where you’re trying to score, so it has some similarities."
PO’C: "100%. I think it’s really worthwhile to see what coaches in other sports are doing.
"There’s a thing called the ’form of life’. It’s things that have a really big influence on the culture of soccer - the way it’s been coached will influence the way that it’s coached now.
“For example, tennis has a big history of drills, building off consistency. But there’s a limited benefit to that, in my opinion.
"It’s the same in soccer. Rondos are very popular in isolated practice and because they’re such a big part of the history, coaches would really value them.
“But maybe if you look at other sports, see what they’re doing, it might change your mind or it might give you some ideas you could apply in your sport that might be different to what you usually see."
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