 and welcome to my talk on Skill Acquisition in Cricket, part of the Science in Cricket series. Today, we'll cover how Skill Acquisition concepts fit into the coaching kit bag we all have and how we can go about helping others develop their skills. There are some theories to help guide us through this process, so first and foremost, we'll set some ground rules. My name is Alex Lascu. I'm a PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Canberra in Australia. I've been coaching cricket for a decade now and my research focuses on talent development in female cricketers. If you have any questions about this talk, please reach out to me on Twitter. Okay, the ground rules. We'll carry these concepts with us through this talk, so this is a great place to start. The blueprint, which helps us understand humans and their skill development, is based on a prevailing theory in Skill Acquisition known as ecological dynamics. While that may seem like a mouthful, the concepts behind this theory are actually quite relatable and help us see or explain some of the more complicated parts of human movement. I'll walk you through this blueprint now. So ecological dynamics is where ecological psychology and dynamic systems theory meet and Rob Gray's talk in this series is a great place to start if you want to know more about these theories. Here, I'm talking about the relatable parts, the things we can observe and consider as coaches. There is one simple instruction that underlines this theory, that the person, their task and their environment are constantly interacting. If we want to understand how Skill Acquisition works, we need to see it from these three perspectives at the same time. If we only observe one or only train from one perspective, the skills we develop may not be what we intended them to be. When we say person, we mean that each individual develops in a nonlinear way or at their own unique rate and our skills are influenced by our early learning experiences. When we say task, this refers to solving the problem at hand, such as how to score the next run or take the next wicket. Our brains can actually perceive the information we need to solve that task without any conscious effort. And when we say environment, we're talking about the learning and training environments that coaches can create. And in some cases, coaches are considered gardeners because of how they cultivate skills in others. Now that we know the three tenets of our blueprint, we'll bring them with us through his talk as our ground rules. So based on the previous slide, our ground rules are that people develop in nonlinear ways. Skills develop based on the tasks we're given and problems we learn to solve and our environments influence skill development. I always prefer to word these as questions to reflect on. So we have, how can we account for nonlinear development? How can we design training sessions? And how can we construct supportive environments? Let's start with nonlinear development. In this section of the talk, we'll consider what nonlinear development looks like and how we can personalize our coaching to recognize it. There are many personal factors that can influence our skill development. These include early learning experiences, relative age, siblings and birth order, physical characteristics and emotional disposition. Positive early learning experiences can have a lasting effect on our skill development. Many cricketers recognize the value of playing backyard cricket as a child and can link how certain features in their backyard shaped the cricketer they are now. Personally, I had an orange tree which made for an excellent cover filter. If one orange ever fell from the tree, I'd be grounded for a week. So I learned to play a mean on drive to avoid it. There are other positive learning experiences like meeting friends at the park and playing there, making up rules and adapting to them, navigating disagreements with peers and learning to work together and playing lots of different sports. On the other hand, the effects of negative early learning experiences can also stay with us as we develop. And these include limited time outdoors or limited time playing, an over commitment to only one sport to the point where they start feeling tired and don't wanna play anymore. Maybe there's even anger or outrage during play. There could be favoritism and not everybody gets a go or a bias towards bigger and older athletes. I mentioned relative age effects before and this is a particularly tricky one to navigate. Each individual develops at their own rate and we know that mental skills, physical capabilities, physical size and maturation occur at different stages. But despite all these things happening at slightly different ages, many sporting competitions are still based on age. This makes it incredibly difficult to answer one crucial question about an athlete. Do they have advanced skill development or are they just more mature? In talent identification, this makes selecting cricket as difficult because so many cricket skills benefit from being physically mature. Bigger, stronger, faster kids are more likely to bowl faster or hit the ball further. But does that mean that they are better cricketers or just bigger, stronger, faster than everybody else? For now. The reason we need to consider this question is to firstly avoid the bias towards mature athletes but also make sure we adapt our training to suit the different developmental stages of all our athletes. Siblings and birth order are really interesting because often a younger sibling will surpass their older sibling in their chosen sport. But why? Well, it's because siblings provide rich socio-developmental experiences which means they develop social and emotional skills as well as having someone to help hone their physical skills. Having someone to play with can present as a role model and provide social interactions. They can influence the chosen sport of a younger sibling. They can contribute to advanced skill development, provide a partner for unstructured play and provide emotional and instructional support. As older siblings are often the one doing the modeling and supporting, sometimes we need to give them someone to model from and play with too. We also have personal characteristics which can mean that some people may appear to be better suited for certain sports than others based on their height, limb length, speed, agility, critical thinking, coordination and relative size. We need to consider how to challenge athletes who are well suited for the physical aspects of cricket and also how to nurture the development of athletes who may not appear to be well suited. It's our responsibility as coaches to provide every person with the opportunity to reach their full potential. When selecting a team, sometimes skill development and execution can be interrupted by physical characteristics, especially around times of disruption like puberty. With growth spurts and more analytical thinking can come messy movement patterns or awkward actions and overthinking or anxious thoughts which can render an athlete unsure or unable to decide. This can be a very frustrating time for athletes, especially if they place high personal value in their skills. Being an understanding and supportive coach during this period can make a world of difference. Great, let's move on to the task side of our ground rules where we consider how to design training which is an art in itself. Another set of complex words with a simple meaning, perception, action, coupling. When we want to make a move, whether in cricket or even just walking around at home, we use the information around us to choose our actions. We don't necessarily think, I'm going to move now or I see that table over there as we do it so our brain isn't actively processing that information but we can still use it. If we walk through a doorway we've never been through before, we use any information we can perceive about what is on the other side before walking through it or maybe you don't perceive the glass door in front of the doorway and you walk right into it. We need to identify these helpful pieces of information if we want to use them to inform our actions. In cricket, this is how we help an athlete go from being a net batter to scoring runs during a match. If they go from playing a beautiful array of shots in an enclosed environment with no fielders to being timid and unable to score in a game, it may be that the information now available such as fielders, a live bowler, space and pressure is a bit too much for them and they don't feel like they can act in the same way as they do at training. What this means for our training design is that the connection between the bowler and the batter is crucial for skill development. We know that batters can pick up early information in the bowler's approach to anticipate where the ball might land. They can then use this information to inform the shot they might play. Bowlers also use information from the batter like their technical competency, stance and shot selection to inform where they bowl next. This is complimented by previous experience which is difficult to recognize if you train by bowling one ball every two minutes. If we want our athletes to be able to identify the sources of information which may help them, those sources need to be available at training. It's worth considering who, what, where and how that information is presented during the game and allowing athletes to explore them at training. Remember, we don't need to cognitively process this information to use it so athletes may not be able to verbally tell you which information sources they're using or looking for. If they can think, feel and act as they would on game day while they're training, they're more likely to develop skills which actually transfer into the game environment. Does that mean we need to play mini games at cricket all the time? Not quite. We only need to recreate enough of the game environment to help the desired skills emerge and to do so, we need to know what, when and how. In particular, when would the skill be most functional during the game? What information is available in that moment or the moments leading up to it? And how do you know it's the right time to act? Let's explore an example here. If we want to encourage batters to score more singles, we need to think about when they would want to score a single, what would contribute to scoring a single and how they would know it was a single scored. My answers to these questions were, the skill would be most functional when there have been a few dot balls in a row or to keep thinking over the run rate. The bowlers plan and or style is available as well as the positioning and capabilities of the fielders. Ball placement and distance traveled as well as teammate speed, attention and communication allows the batter to know a single can be scored. If you can answer those questions, they serve as a nice guideline for your training design. The next step is to incentivize the desired skill within our guideline. Some examples can be, you can say the batter to face the least amount of balls in the next 15 minutes wins, which encourages batters to get off strike and subsequently a run to be scored. You can say every single is worth four runs, where the goal is to score as many runs as possible in a timeframe. You can say the person with the highest number of singles wins the session and tally each one. And of course, there's more. Cricket training often occurs in an enclosed net environment. So as a batter, it's difficult to know how far the ball has traveled, if it was a good shot and whether or not it's got a run. As such, learning to score more singles becomes difficult without those decision-making elements. It's also worth noting that while we know a lot about batting behaviors, we often neglect the live bowlers who are integral to our sessions. Make sure you take the time to discuss their goals and plans at the same time during this activity, such as how they might try to restrict single score through their bowling plan. Knowing where the fielders are might help the batter inform where they would hit the ball, and we can replicate this in different ways. You might like to use a whiteboard with a field setting drawn, but it may be difficult to compare the ball direction off the bat to a drawing. I personally like to tie a stump to the net, which roughly represents where the fielder would be in the batter's visual field, which can recreate that feeling of being surrounded by the fielders as they might feel in a game. So by now, we've covered personal and task. It's time to talk about the environment. Here, we'll cover how coaches can be considered gardeners, tending to the garden of skill acquisition. As a coach, we are responsible for designing the right environment for skill acquisition and development, but there are many aspects of the environment that we cannot change, such as the weather or access to facilities. For the things we can change, though, what makes a good learning environment and how do we create one? Let's consider this quote. The gardener cannot actually grow tomatoes, squash, or beans. She can only foster an environment in which the plants do so. If we consider human beings to be a complex system who can adapt to changes in their task and the environment without any conscious thought, then we need to create the environment in which they learn to do so, but also support them in a way that makes them feel safe to do so. As such, we tend to the garden and the nutrients and sunlight available actually helps the plants to grow. A learning environment should provide a rich landscape of affordances, which just means that athletes have many opportunities to act in different ways. They may have a specific task goal, but that goal can be achieved in different ways. This is what the performance or game environment provides the athletes, so we want them to be able to make sense of it and even skillfully navigate it in such a way that helps them achieve their goals. We also need to ensure that the learning environment is all about the learner. If we are constantly feeding the learner instructions or describing and demonstrating actions that perhaps we can make and they cannot, we are not providing an environment to develop their skills, but rather giving them a lecture. As a learning designer, we place value in what the players want and perceive and ensure that our training design takes those things into consideration. But how do we know what to change or manipulate to create this helpful learning environment? We can consider the things that inform our actions and act as barriers to those actions. We call these things constraints. For example, I would probably stop playing a cover drive if the field placement changed and a short cover was brought in because to me, that is now a risky shot. I also wouldn't want to walk to work if it was raining outside. I also wouldn't try to dunk a basketball because I'm five foot three. There are elements of our tasks, our individual characteristics and the environment which constrain our actions and we can manipulate some of those things in our training. Personal characteristics include our height, weight and limb lengths, our fitness, our decision-making skills like patterns of play and anticipation, our personality factors like risk-taking behaviors. Task constraints can include the rules of the games, the equipment we use, boundary playing areas and markets, any nets or goals we set, the number of players involved and information present in the context of the task, like how many wickets we've taken or how many runs the batter is on. Environmental constraints can be sociocultural experiences like family support, cultural expectations and access to facilities as well as the physical environment like altitude, weather, terrain and auditory feedback either from the coach or from a crowd. There are some useful tools available which help us make sense of the constraints that exist within our sport and how to fit them back into our training design so that all of our actions as coaches contribute to skill acquisition. Here, in a book by Ian Renshaw, Keith Davids, Daniel Newcomb and Will Roberts, the session planning tool asks you to consider the task, individual and environmental constraints you want to design into your session so that you invite the desired behavior you and or your athletes have chosen. We also want to consider the purpose and the consequence of this task, how much the task represents the game just as we mentioned in the last section and how much variability there is. So after all that content, how do you know which constraints to manipulate? Well, sometimes you just have to try it out and reflect on how it goes. As long as you consistently present opportunities to acquire skills and support your athletes, there is no wrong session but it may not suit the athletes you're training or not suit the time. You can co-design with your athletes by asking them what they search for, where they might find helpful sources of information or ask what they feel like they need to work on. With a clear objective or goal in mind, you now have the right tools and questions to start thinking about whether you're creating a safe learning environment to help skill acquisition and how to design a session which supports that goal. Remember, it doesn't have to be something complicated or new. It's a matter of identifying what you're trying to do and what they need to know as an athlete to get there. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this talk and please reach out if you have any questions. If you do try to apply any of these concepts, I'd love to hear how it goes.