Welcome to the Play Developer Project podcast. My name is Dave Wright, co-founder and editor of the Play Developer Project. PDP is a website for coaches who are committed to learning and we provide a huge library of resources which consists of cutting edge insights from the world's most innovative play developers, coach educators and researchers. If you want to learn from the best and join a community of like minded coaches, then check out Play Developer Project.com.
Hi everyone, welcome to another Play Developer Project monthly wrap. My name is Dave Wright. Thanks for joining us and as always I am joined by PDP technical advisor Dan Wright. How are you mate?
Really good. Thank you. How are you mate? I'm pretty good looking forward to this conversation and as always on the monthly wrap we are going to work our way through Play Developer Project content.
It was published on the website in the last month so we're reviewing the month of May and we had plenty of video and written content coming out in May. We're going to kick things off this particular discussion with our review of our fantastic conversation with clinical psychologist Dr. Susie Brown on understanding identity. So here's the clip.
Really, I mean again as you're talking I've got a list of questions in front of me but with these ideas you're putting across tying them back to a coaching environment I can see so many benefits. So you alluded to the fact just to go off tangent a little bit around that peer-to-peer experience, learning how to win, learning how to lose and that sort of interaction socially. So from a coaching perspective if you start giving players ownership I mean I assume this basically means there's going to be a huge upside around ownership potentially play-alied sessions around decision-making and of course how they integrate who leads. I mean these social dynamics are now at play through play.
Is that kind of where we're going with this? Absolutely. So it's that idea of self-organization right? So particularly thinking about an academy or you're thinking about football environment a lot of things are for one of the better word imagine-entives.
So you attend this training session at this time you eat this. This is you know and that's all well and good but actually then you're really met with the contrast of asking children or adults and adolescents to be self-organizing, to be independent and then people are surprised when that doesn't happen but if you're not providing an opportunity and you're telling them what to do all the time then are we really surprised that they struggle with this? It is a skill. There's a really good study that shows if you allow children to play with objects or just everyday objects for a few minutes so just for free play for them to do whatever they want to do versus children that watch an adult play with the objects versus children that just draw.
The children that were allowed to play with the objects by themselves or amongst their peers are three times more likely to be able to do something creative with that and think about it as an alternative tool than the other children so it's this ability for them to be able to take ownership for them to be able to be accountable for their actions but you do learn all of that through play so you know we put that off. I think the other thing is we don't play when we don't feel safe so you know if you think about animals there is no way that you are going to prioritize playing if you're not safe and it's the same with children, adolescents and adults if you aren't feeling safe in your environment you're not going to play but we know that that has a huge impact on children's emotional and social capabilities so children that play are much more emotionally and socially competent than children today. So then a really interesting conversation with Dr. Susie Brown it was a fantastic interview really enjoyed it myself a great clip there what was some of the takeaways from the broader discussion and of course the clip that we've just seen?
Yeah I think this is one of the best masochastic discussions we've got I've actually listened to this one twice I thought there was so many nuggets in it and when working with young players as she was speaking every time she was explaining one of the theories I was thinking about a player that I've coached so she talked about attention seeking and attention needing players and where that comes from she talked about attachment theory and the role of the coach and she talked about kind of the social dynamics of the groups it was a really fascinating speech and really really enjoyed it what was the main sort of takeaways for you? I think the identity thing is obviously key and that's why we titled the conversation understanding identity and just recognizing that as young footballers or young sports people it's very easy for kids to attach their identity to the sport they do well so whether it's football cricket golf whatever it is you know it's very easy for a player to start defining themselves as I am a golfer I am a footballer as opposed to a person it's easy for coaches to forget that we're dealing with young people and children as opposed to that so that was a big one of course in the clip that we've just seen and heard there from Susie the idea of self-organization and how it sort of goes against so many of the structures that kids find themselves and whether it's through school or whether it's through clubs and those kind of micro environments that then affect the way they behave when we give them free license to go and self-organize so again a fascinating conversation highly recommend that the viewers and listeners out there check that one out on the website under the Masterclass discussions tab for the full conversation next we're going to head over to our research review which was really interesting and as Bill Harper our resident PDP professor said somewhat of a weird research paper which was quite nice it certainly challenged both of us and it was around how culture affects action and movement what were your sort of takeaways from this one mate? Yeah I found this one quite difficult to process at to read it a few times so basically I think it links into a lot of the messages that we've shared before through Jimmy Bourne's work around and does the culture impact kind of how we move and probably how we learn to move I suppose and so they looked at sort of four different areas so it's pottery making dancing, load carrying and posture and it was how those people interact with their kind of culture and their society and how they probably move differently or how they find different affordances I suppose so that was quite an interesting one and maybe how the western world is slightly different that the Leicester Valley world was also an interesting one and why that was how about for you Yeah look at some of the points for me were just while I was reading and thinking about multi-sport and I guess how physical literacy or the way athletes move in particular can cross over between codes that might be a westernian cricketer who has really good basketball skills might be an unbelievable catcher in the outfield or Zlatan is a great example again who Jimmy's written about his gregmial arts background who has finished in ways in front of goal and football that many other players are just not capable of doing because of that background of different movement patterns so again I highly recommend that research review and also checking out Jimmy Bourne's article in issue nine of the magazine Catch Me If You Can which talks about Brazil as a case study and that is fascinating so a really interesting review next up in terms of content last month we had a couple of different video session plans come out and I know you produced one obviously I produced one as well yours was on defending to force out wide so do you want to give us some insight into that practice and I guess the context around it yeah so it was kind of like a squad practice so using half a pitch basically we're splitting a pitch into kind of three thirds and looking at defending in wide areas with kind of fall back against winkers and then central areas with central defenders against forward to midfielders so kind of ramping it up from I suppose part practices into kind of unit practices and turning into a place that was one of you with my glazing and gave lots kind of repetition of pictures that fall backs and winkers are going to see in games so it's quite simple we're doing that before you kind of lead into maybe a phase of play or that lambda-level practice what was your practice about this month my mind was called breaking lines and it pretty much did what it said on the packet it was about looking for forward passes looking for those those passes but at the right time so working with a defensive team who was outnumbered and as you know I love and overload from a resilience and psychological perspective and I guess problem solving as well it was about the defensive team trying to solve the problem and prevent forward passes so we're not delivered this session I haven't explicitly said this is how you need to defend it can you go and work out a way to defend what you have to so there's progressions in there from a simple position practice in terms of forward passes and finding the right moment through to using the clock and goals as extra motivation for the defending team so one that I recommend if you're looking to encourage players to take risks in terms of their forward passing other content that was produced in May we had a number of blogs and of course our Q&A which came out last last couple weeks on statistics so before we get to that the other side of failure by Reed Moltby I mean this blog for me was one that was really based around how athletes recover how coaches recover from disappointments and building resilience highly recommend Reed's work and everyone checking that blog out Dan you had a good read of Todd Bean's latest work one way to improve technique which was a little bit of a clickbait you titled there and and one that grabbed attention to plenty of people and got lots of views what was your takeaway from that blog yeah I enjoy reading Todd's blogs because they're at the place where they're always quite clickbait you're always quite going the face of maybe other people's views so this one was a round improving technique which I think every coach is looking to do whatever a technique is but he was talking about how important space is in football how we manipulate space how we use space as an individual as a team to get success that was a main takeaway from that one and then the final blog this week was the Q&A about statistics yeah look I think that was a challenging question and again there's this video and podcast with this particular question but the question was what role do statistics play in youth development and we covered that one pretty comprehensively in the video conversation there in the podcast that we released but something that certainly divides opinion and there's a lot of things to weigh up when looking at where statistics and analysis fit in with youth development and how we can use those in a clever way and I guess with context so that pretty much brings us to the summary of all the content produced for May a really busy month and of course there's already been plenty of stuff come out in June which we look forward to reviewing Dan any final thoughts from you in terms of some of the key content that came out last month? yeah I think it's good another good mix of kind of the academic stuff but also the practical stuff I think Susie's a really good example of that somebody that clearly understands what they're talking about obviously working in an academy and working with kids kind of every week so that's kind of what we're all about you know connecting some of that research and putting it into real life so that'll be my main takeaway for this month.
Definitely well of course all of our lessons and viewers we recommend you head over to the website click on the join now page grab your membership and you can access all of the content that we produce every month including all of the videos research session and more so head over there get your membership Dan thanks for your time great to have you on board again for another wrap. No worries ma' well look forward to another Play Development Project monthly wrap very soon. Thanks for joining us on the Play Development Project podcast. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram have Play at the V or find us on Facebook don't forget to head over to Play at the Play at the Development Project.com where you can sign up for our procurement coaching community and gain access to our wide variety of resources to help you in your coaching.