The Kids [could be] alright

There has been a lengthy debate on a certain website recently regarding junior development. Questions have arisen about the optimal ways to develop and motivate kids. While I have my own opinion on the subject (as in, "if they're not driven to not suck, no amount of coaching, team interaction, selection races, points system, or etc. will make a a lick of difference"), I thought I would look at a recent article that what are the most influential factors in an athlete's development. Perhaps this way once we identify the good kids, we'll have ways of making them great kids.

Identifying factors perceived to influence the development of elite youth football academy players, by Mills, A., Butt, J., Maynard, I., and Harwood, C. Journal of Sports Sciences, November 2012; 30(15): 1593–1604

Quick name drop here. The authors note that this study is building on, in part, one of the first studies looking at aspects of player development done by Nick Holt and John Dunn, both of whom I had the pleasure of taking classes from in University. They made sport psych cool. In short, they came up with a model that the major competencies that contributed to successfully transitioning to being a professional soccer player was discipline, commitment, and resilience, all of which is coupled with favourable social support.

The purpose of the present study was to build upon identifying the major factors, but from the perspective of expert coaches in the British FA system. I'll let the resultant chart do much of the talking:

Figure 1 from Mills, A., Butt, J., Maynard, I., and Harwood, C. Journal of Sports Sciences, November 2012; 30(15): 1593-1604

I think many of these are fairly self-explanatory, and make quite a bit of sense. Rather than go into detail, why don't we find out what conclusions the authors came up with? Most notably, their unique insight is regarding how "awareness" is the "fundamental agent of change that drives effective development". 

More specifically "the coaches felt it was imperative for young players to understand that adversity can facilitate development ... adversities were largely perceived as 'opportunities to grow' where by players must introspectively 'dig deep' to evolve ... the capacity to consciously reflect, assimilate and adapt was considered a key determinant in effectively translating one's potential into excellence" (page 1601).

Also it should be noted how "environmental factors" are an overarching factor. These are wide-ranging factors that often most notably include non-selection to a team and injury (which is an extensive sport psych topic in itself for another time!)

So, what does this have to do with orienteering?

I think that you could take cross out football, and put in orienteering. Its really that simple. Of all the aspects of the entire above chart, the only one I can think of that may not apply to orienteering are the "team-oriented" sport-specific attribute, since its not a team sport. But that's what make that section sport-specific?

In particular, I would argue that "resilience" is far more prevalent in individual sports, and even moreso in orienteering. In individual sport, you will lose. And you will lose a lot. Even the best in the world probably lose more often than not. The big question is whether you can take each loss as a way of being better for next time. More specifically, orienteering is the classic sport of dealing with adversity. The sport is built around agreeing to having adversity handed to you on a piece of paper. The way you handle that adversity directly affects your own outcome. When referring to self-awareness, the authors quoted once coach who said:

"The biggest thing for me about development is how young players experience disappointments. How did they feel in that game? Did they lose self control? Did they lose focus? Did they lose confidence? Next time that happens, how can I handle that better?"

Doesn't that sound awful relevant to orienteering? Do you do that after every disappointment?

Admittedly, in this case, the only thing that could have been done better is not having such a stupid timing system.

So what could those developing young orienteers take from this chart? I think in planning, it needs to be asked whether our plans encompass the many traits that apply to athlete development? What does a particular camp focus on? Unfortunately every athlete is different, so no one strategy will be assured to work for everyone. My impression has been that our country's approach has lacked a focus on athleticism and competitiveness, instead of focusing on technical proficiency, and leaving the former to each individual's athlete's devices. Its no wonder that there have been several highly successful orienteers that have transitioned from other endurances sports into orienteering - the athleticism aspect has been very strongly ingrained.

In the end, I'm not sure its possible to be more specific than extremely vague. One could spend pages upon pages theorizing different ways to develop each individual factor above in the context of orienteering, and it perhaps should even come to that. As the authors state:

"Nonetheless, we contend that a favourable combination of the factors identified in this study would serve to enhance a young player’s likelihood of successfully transitioning to the professional level."

So.... that's a lot of factors. What do you think you are lacking? Can you theorize how that might have been better developed?

And one day, with enough training, you may be as successful as this guy:

Practice makes... less errors.

Oof, its been a big gap since my last post. And I can only blame one thing, that's been a severe bane on all of my productivity: I re-activated my World of Warcraft account. See, they were having a promotion, and I got free new level 80 character, and the expansion for free, a week of free game time, and yeah... a moment of weakness. Worst idea ever. But I just can't stop.

However, I hope to make it up with a particularly interesting article I found a few months ago before I self-sabotaged my social life.

Error Reduction During Practice: A Novel Method for Learning to Kick Free-Kicks in Soccer, by Savelsbergh, G., Canal-Bruland, R., and van der Kamp, J. International Journal of Sports Sciene & Coaching, Vol. 7 (1), p. 47-57, 2012.

Error reduction. I don't like making mistakes. Presumably you don't either. The classic adage is that it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours to become truly an expert at a skill (which, I might add, was a concept long before Malcolm Gladwell said it). I'd say conventional wisdom for most tasks is that you become really, really good at something by doing it over and over and over and over and over again, until the mechanics of the skill are so ingrained in your brain and your muscles that you could rattle it off at any place, any where, any time.

Like..... on the wing of a plane.

This study looks at a practice protocol that reduces those errors using progressive task difficulty. When I think of practicing, especially in sports at a high level, it does seem like that we often find a skill difficulty that we want to achieve, and then practice it over and over again. In the sport discussed in this study, soccer, you could think of it like trying to take a sweet free kick that curls over the wall and into the goal. I think most people would envision the best way to practice is to just set up that scenario and do it over and over and over again. That pretty much sums up consistent task difficulty - where you set up a practice at one difficulty, and just do it over and over until you've got it down. The study asks whether that really promotes overall error reduction better than a different method:

"even elite players practice their free-kicks after regular training sessions and devoid of any evidence-based practice protocols. Typically soccer players adopt a practice protocol in which they produce endless reptitions from a constant distance to make the practice as specific as possible relative to the real game scenario. This type of practice, however, is accompanied by many errors."

Do you notice a parallel with orienteering in this statement?

The study used 40 soccer players. They would do a specific shooting test that would test the player's ability at 5 different shot locations, each of increasing difficulty, practice, then do a post-test, and finally a retention-test. The practice was split into four groups, one where they practices with increasing difficultly of shots, one with random difficulty, one with only the most difficult shot, and one where the practice got progressively easier. The results of each shot were used in a point system.

Oooh, decisive.

The results paint a pretty rosy picture of the study's hypothesis. The increasing difficult practice had the most significant improvement in performance, although its also worth noting that the constant difficulty group had improvement, and had an impressive jump in retention as well. The other two groups had no improvement or even negative improvement. So, the authors conclude, there is something to be said for this error reduction practice protocol. But, being scientists, they also hedge their bets, particularly because the traditional constant difficult practice did result in almost identical retention performance. Personally, I would also wonder if the parallels between the practice session and the test session, both being of progressively increasing difficulty style, affected a person's thoughts as well. Did testing the easy shots first make the harder shots easier? Another questions for another day, I digress.

"Nevertheless, the present findings also underscore that it is too premature to replace constant practice protocols."

So, what does this have to do with orienteering?

I think for most people, orienteering is a constant struggle with error reduction. Even for elites, 5 seconds left or 5 seconds right is an error. (Aside: I had a very insightful orienteering point out, also, that its not relevant if the error is 8 minutes long or 10 seconds long, if there is a loss of time, it is an error. Magnitude is irrelevant.) Its almost a case of who can make the least errors, since not winning every single leg could maybe be construed as an error. How do we reduce these errors?

Naturally, we all go out for training courses with the goal of repeatedly hitting each control error-free. Not every control is of the exact same difficultly, so you could probably guess its most similar to the random difficulty practice of the soccer study. Random difficulty actually decreased performance! I don't imagine most coaches would need to hear this, but it certainly seems like it is important to at least maintain as close to a constant difficulty as possible. 

Alternatively, you could also consider ramping up the difficult on training sessions. Say you were doing a corridor-O, you could make the first 1/4 quite easy, and then ramp up the difficulty so that the last 1/4 was the most difficult. No, it doesn't necessarily simulate a race situation, since races don't do that, but based on the above study it may improve all-around error reduction, and particularly at the highest difficulty tasks. 

I don't want to go without mentioning too, that I am aware that many coaches already often do this. I know of one coach that recommended to me once to run the easy easy courses by map memory before going out on my own. More progression!

A "new" idea from 25 years ago!

I'm not sure this is exactly mind-blowing stuff. Plenty of people already have the feeling that they like to "warm-up" for orienteering by doing easier stuff first. Hopefully, though, progressively increasing the difficulty of one's navigation training will now have a new appreciation as a purposeful way to reduce errors. As one noted sport psychologist said, "intention brings attention". You'll have more focus on your task if you have a reason for doing it.

As I was doing research for a side-project, I came across a mini article from the Scientific Journal of Orienteering from 1987. Its by someone from the Universite of Sherbrooke. He theorizes that the optimal way to become more proficient at navigating is to always maintain the running speed you aim to run at, and only introduce progressively more difficult navigation tasks. Only once a person is able to maintain that running speed at one difficulty may the progress to the next one. That's not unlike our study! Progressing the task difficult to become more and more difficult, but in this case maintaining another variable, the running, at an optimal speed. 

Check out the article here: http://orienteering.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Scientific-Journal-of-Orienteering-1987-Vol.31.pdf 

Scroll down to page 93.

Or don't, and be distracted by this, and consider whether they should work on some error-reduction techniques: