The Importance of Game Understanding

I’m delighted to welcome back Amy Price in this episode. Amy works as a coach developer for the FA working with coaches in the senior women’s professional game – women’s super league, women’s championship, first team and under 21’s. Prior to this, Amy was a lecturer at St Mary’s University, London in Physical and Sport Education and then Programme Director. Amy holds a Masters and DProf and is nearing completion of her PhD in game understanding within team sport.

We discuss a fascinating paper Amy has written alongside Prof Dave Collins entitled “Contributing to a Coaching Team’s Shared Mental Model of Player Game Understanding: An Intervention within High-Level Youth Soccer” which examines coaches’ views on levels of player understanding, checks the coherence of these views between the coaching team and provides coaching teams with tools to measure and build Shared Mental Models.