Contributing to a Coaching Team’s Shared Mental Model of Player Game Understanding: An Intervention within High-Level Youth Soccer

Abstract

Judging soccer players’ game understanding can pose ambiguities for coaches and coaching teams, partly due to the many situational factors which can affect how a player thinks on field. Consequently, interdisciplinary coaching teams must have a shared and coherent view on what game understanding looks like and why. Therefore, initial purposes of this case study were to establish coaches’ views on levels of player understanding, and to check the coherence of these views between the coaching team. Importantly, a final purpose was to demonstrate the application of our process, to provide coaching teams with tools to measure and build Shared Mental Models (SMM’s). One team of high-level youth soccer coaches evaluated their players’ levels of understanding before and after a discussion-based workshop intervention. Findings indicated the importance of ongoing critical dialogue between coaches about game understanding. Conclusions highlighted the need for an interdisciplinary approach when building a SMM of game understanding, and in particular the skills and knowledge a psychology practitioner can bring to technical coaches facing these challenges.