At the end of a game a few months ago, a coach turned and asked the rest of the group: “Why can the players repeat to me how we want to play, yet when it’s game-day they can’t do it?” 

More recently I was watching another coach lead a team meeting. He was questioning the group on their offensive principles: “What’s the way we want to move the ball?”

One kid was slouched in his chair, head tilted towards the ceiling, eyes shut, and, almost exasperatedly, said, “forward with flow.” It had been quite a few weeks of hearing this particular message.

“That’s it!” said the coach. The coach finished the meeting feeling pretty happy and comfortable that the players knew what to do. However, game day arrived and it didn’t show up.

Cue another coaching asking: “Why can the players repeat to me how we want to play, yet when it’s game-day they can’t do it?”

This isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. I have no doubt it is a question every coach has asked themselves at some point or another. We hear evidence from the players that they know and understand the concept. They can answer the questions and explain what we have covered, yet it does not show up when and where we want it. It’s worth asking what is happening that might help explain this disconnect and what can we do about it?

Cognitive Scientist Daniel T. Willingham unpacks two concepts in his book Why Don’t Children Like School? that might help us understand. He writes about the difference between shallow and deep knowledge.

Shallow knowledge is understanding that is tied to specific situations and limited to a small set of examples.  Deep knowledge goes further than just being able to describe a concept. It involves understanding a concept through a variety of examples, recognising the connections between them, and knowing how to adapt when circumstances change.

So when we ask, “why can the players repeat to me how we want to play, yet when it’s game-day they can’t do it?” one answer might be that their knowledge is shallow.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once wrote  “I don't know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” 

I like that wording - fragile knowledge.

That’s what shallow learning can feel like. As soon as you take the learning out of the specific context it was learnt in, or add more complexity, it begins to break down. I think back to the player, almost horizontal to the ground in his chair, repeating back the same phrase. Yes, he could repeat it back, but how robust was his understanding? Game day, with all its chaos and complexity, didn’t look like the examples he’d seen and he wasn’t able to adapt.

Training and the game be quite different environments. On game day the coach has very little control over what appears next. In the training environment, both on-field and off-field, the coach has much more control and can reduce the complexity players face. In some ways it shouldn’t surprise us if players develop knowledge that works perfectly in the environment it was taught, but becomes fragile when the game presents a different picture.

One of John Wooden’s famous quotes was “you haven’t taught it until they’ve learned.” I think we can add an extra layer to this – that they haven’t really learned unless it’s deep knowledge that holds up when the game changes.

If deep knowledge is the holy grail we are chasing, how do we do it?

I like the way Carl Hendrick has framed how to design instruction in an education setting. Instead of asking ourselves “can students follow this” we should be asking “what will they recognise when the next problem looks different?”

If training is meant to prepare players for the game, and games continually throw up weird and wonderful problems, then players need to recognise when an idea applies, what has changed and how they might adapt it. 

This means things can be messy at training. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing as the game is usually messy too. Here are a couple of ways to think about designing the learning experience to deepen the understanding for players:

These approaches may help move players from shallow to deep knowledge, but we also need to accept that deep knowledge is hard won. Willingham has one other bit of advice which I’d encourage everyone to take: “Don’t despair!”

If it was easy we’d all be experts at everything. Deep knowledge is the product of a lot of practice, which means it takes time. We might need to take a longer time horizon (the point in the future at which we decide to evaluate something) when judging whether players have developed deep knowledge.

Sport can pull us towards the “week-to-week” cycle. We expect something taught on Tuesday or Thursday to be there on the weekend. That is one of the traps we can fall into as coaches as learning is rarely that neat or linear. When a player can tell you exactly how you want to play but struggle to consistently show it, perhaps that's not a sign they haven't learnt. It may simply be a reminder that learning is still underway.

It’s up to us to rethink the way we approach player learning. It’s not about repeating the message louder or more often to give players another chance to remember the words. What we need to provide are more experiences, examples, comparisons and problems that help the idea survive when the game no longer looks like training. 

In this Learner Lab Podcast episode, host Trevor Ragan discusses how you can boost learning with desirable difficulties with Robert and Elizabeth Bjork.

Some great strategies you could take from this episode to help players gain deeper knowledge.

Want to discuss anything you’ve read? Email us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

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