“But I told them that!”: When feedback given isn’t feedback received.
“If I tried to throw you 10 tennis balls, you’d probably catch 2– 3. If I throw you 2–3 tennis balls, you’ll probably catch 2– 3. Players can only retain a certain amount of information.” - A high performance coach interviewed in this study.
Why is this topic important for coaches?
As coaches, we can sometimes assume that once we’ve told our athletes something, it’s been received, and will therefore have the desired effect on performance. It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that an important piece of feedback delivered at half time, or a detailed post-mortem delivered in the rooms after a loss, has ‘sunk in’ with our athletes.
Phrases like “but I told them that!”, or “why didn’t they listen?!” are heard from even the most experienced coach, when an athlete seems to go against an instruction or some earlier feedback.
The paper featured in this post provides some evidence about how athletes receive coach feedback, with a particular focus on a common practice at the higher levels of sport: the video review meeting.
What’s the paper about?
As is the case in many professional sports, AFL teams typically run a number of video review meetings or ‘film sessions’ with players each week, to analyse performance after a game. Some of these meetings will involve the entire team - the playing squad and coaches. Others will be specific to a positional group, such as forwards or midfielders. The focus of this paper, however, is on the 1:1 player reviews that coaches hold with each athlete weekly to evaluate individual performance.
The key ideas of interest in this paper are:
How much feedback do AFL coaches give in these weekly player review meetings?
How much feedback do players remember afterwards?
The paper also provides information about the types of feedback coaches give in these sessions, including the use of questioning. This will be explored in a later post.
What did the researchers do?
Six individual player reviews held during the 2017 AFL season were recorded. Each review consisted of a player sitting at a laptop with a coach, while the coach showed video clips from the most recent game on the screen and gave feedback on the player’s performance.
Here’s an example of a player review, with thanks to the brilliant social media team at the Hawthorn Football Club:
A week after the reviews, the researchers sat down with each player and asked them to recall as much as they could about what the coach had said. The feedback recalled by the players was then matched with the feedback given by the coach a week earlier, to determine how much had been remembered.
What did they find?
Player review meetings lasted about 20 minutes on average, but ranged between 10 and 30 minutes. In these meetings, the coach provided around 16 pieces of feedback for every 10 minutes of meeting. In a 20 minute meeting, that’s 32 feedback messages. For the 30 minute meeting, it’s about 48 feedback messages on average.
The amount of feedback recalled by the players depends on the way the coach feedback was analysed. Using a fairly fine-grained method, where every sentence is considered something worth remembering, players recalled about 6% of the feedback given to them by the coach a week earlier. Using a more realistic method, where the individual feedback messages are grouped into broader themes (e.g., every feedback message related to kicking gets grouped together), the recall rate was around 50%.
Regardless of the method of measuring recall, an optimistic estimate is that players remember half of the coach’s feedback, one week after receiving it.
So what?
Think about this result in the context of your own coaching. In a post-game debrief, how long do you spend dissecting the game for your players? How many points do you think you might cover? If the results above are anything to go by, your players might be expected to remember half of what you said by the time the next game comes around.
Now imagine a scenario where you give 6 ‘bits’ of information in a half-time address during an important game, and your players return to the field remembering maybe 3 or 4! Which 3 or 4 do you want them to remember?
The idea that our players don’t remember everything we tell them can be confronting. Thankfully, there are things we can put in place to get around this. Some strategies focus on the coach – what can coaches do to make feedback more readily received? Other strategies focus on the athlete – how can we create an environment where coach feedback can be relied on less, and athletes can become better at self-regulating or ‘finding their own solutions’?
Questions for coaches to reflect on:
How much feedback do I give my athletes - during a game, during training, and also during player review or team debrief meetings?
What evidence do I have of this? Have I recorded myself or asked a critical friend (or a coach developer) for their feedback on my feedback?
How much of my feedback do my athletes remember?
How do I know? If I don’t know, how can I find out?
Is it important that my athletes remember everything I say?
How can I create an environment that is more player-centred, or relies less on feedback from the coach?
Want to read more?
This post is a summary of the paper ‘An exploratory investigation into the reception of verbal and video feedback provided to players in an Australian Football League club’, which I co-authored along with Prof John Hattie and Prof Damian Farrow. The full article appears in International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, and was published in August 2020:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1747954120951080