Athletic Development + Skill Acquisition
How Trainees Can Get Better at Training AND Their Sport/Task
Skill acquisition has become a popular topic in human performance literature over the last decade. Credit to Dr. Rob Gray at Arizona State University for really bringing that concept to bear in the athletic development sphere.
Coaches abroad have understood skill acquisition for decades because there are systemized coaching development programs that don’t exist in the US. For example, to earn a UEFA soccer coaching license, a prospective coach needs to understand how a soccer athlete learns specific technical skills at different ages and levels of competition and how those skills correlate to performance. Similar to how a middle school algebra teacher has GLEs - grade level expectations - coaches have skill benchmarks to ensure athletes continue to develop as they play.
In the US, there are no systems of accreditation for coaches. So much of the technical skill development is haphazard or regurgitated. The majority of this skill development regurgitation is not rooted in research or in any form of systemization. Anecdotally, I remember as a sport coach having a conversation with a senior sport coach who had 10+ years of experience on me and asking him how we would be expected to periodize skill work throughout the season. He looked at me like I was speaking Mandarin and shook his head dismissively. Needless to say, an understanding of skill acquisition is lacking in American sports.
In my opinion, the area of development that would benefit the most from coaches working from a skill acquisition perspective is strength and conditioning. Starting in elementary school physical education and progressing through an S&C program in middle school and high school almost ensures a kid will develop athletic skills commensurately with sport skills, even if sport skill development isn’t systemized. Some schools function in this capacity and their athletes perform to their potential, rarely suffer a non-contact injury, and their sport participation is fulfilling.
However, these situations are few and far between and less than 2000 high schools in the US have a qualified strength and conditioning professional on staff. It is much more common to see high school athletes “chasing numbers” because of the social media peer pressure of seeing an athlete at a rival school maxing out on back squat with no context or understanding of how/why that program is performing their testing. It is equally common to see coaches implementing testing protocols that do not reflect the developmental process, but rather individual components - maximal strength or velocity, for example.
The solution to this traditionally outcome-oriented approach is to view strength and conditioning - in any setting - as an opportunity for skill development. For example, if athletes knew that during a testing week, their movement competency was being assessed and had a clear rubric of expectations, they would be much more likely to develop efficient movement skills than if they were only being assessed on their maximal strength. The same could be done with linear speed development: if an athlete’s mechanics fall outside the coach’s technical model for sprinting, then the assessment isn’t valid. Currently, many coaches are blindly timing fly 10s with little regard to the effects kinematics play in injury reduction. In these scenarios, athletes can be “graded” on their adherence to the process instead of simply being assessed on what their outcomes are and assuming that process is being assessed commensurately.
Is a skill acquisition approach easy to implement? No, of course not. It takes tons of groundwork by coaches, and more importantly, it forces coaches to subsume their ego and realize that process > outcome and neither is a reflection of their coaching or value as a human being. If we want athletes to embrace a “growth-mindset,” we need to start giving them a framework for what “growth” looks like instead of giving them unrealistic expectations and arbitrary numbers.