Barrackers and strategists: The sounds of the coaches’ box
“For the coach… the professional role is to analyse and strategise at that precise moment when the fans react and scream ‘BALL’ (one of the identifying sounds of Australian football).” - Walsh and Jureidini.
Why is this topic important for coaches?
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that communication and language are seen as important tools for coaches at all levels. This post looks a little more closely at the emotional side of coach communication. Have you ever worked alongside a coach who sounds like a spectator in the stands, reacting to every passage of play with a cheer or a flurry of colourful language? Perhaps you’ve worked with a pessimistic coach, who negatively evaluates everything happening during a game? This post will help you to think about the purpose that your communication serves.
What’s the paper about?
The focus in this paper is on the communication that occurs in the coaches’ box in Australian rules football. While Blog 1 focussed purely on the messages given from coaches to players, the focus of this paper extends to include the talk among the coaching team in ‘the box’ as the game progresses. Some of the big ideas explored in this paper include: What do coaches say? What purpose does this communication serve? How does emotion impact game-day communication? The full paper also provides some highly detailed line-by-line analysis of interactions between coaches.
What did the researchers do?
The researchers followed one semi-professional Australian rules football team across three seasons. Over this time, two head coaches and six assistant coaches were observed. The researchers used a framework from the field of linguistics to help them describe and categorise the language used by coaches. The paper also presents some general observations on coach communication, such as the number of messages being given to players and the role of the assistant coaches.
What did they find?
Coaches sent an average of 10 messages to their players per quarter, at a rate of around one message every 3 minutes. This is lower than the 15 messages per quarter found at AFL level. As with the AFL environment, coaches delivered more messages when the margin was tight.
The authors noted some differences between the two senior coaches observed during the study. One head coach made most decisions independently, calling on their assistants mainly to provide position-specific information (e.g., about the forwards or defenders). The other, less experienced, head coach used a more collaborative approach when making decisions.
The authors present a unique way of categorising coach communication along a continuum. At one end of the continuum, communication is reactive and more emotional. At the other end, communication focuses on analysing and strategising, and is less emotional. A brief summary of each category is presented below:
Reacting: an instinctive reaction to the play. Example: “F**k no!”
Barracking: talking as though they are participating in the play. Example: “C’mon DJ, give it!”
Observing: describing what was happening on the field without necessarily seeking a response. Example: “He’s not with his man”
Evaluating: a single observation paired with a positive or negative judgement. Example: “That was poor from our mids”
Analysing: an evaluation of patterns over time, not just one specific incident. Example: “We’ve been getting killed at stoppages”
Strategising: making or suggesting a change to the way the team is playing. Example: “Could we try putting another player into the stoppage?”
So what?
This study provides a unique insight into how coaches communicate during a game – not just what they say, but how they say it. It’s rare to see this type of data in academic research, and it’s also not a common topic covered in coaching courses.
An observation made in the paper was that reacting and barracking from one coach can have an effect on the other coaches who hear it. It has the potential to be annoying or distracting. The authors conclude that communication categories are “not all of equal value or importance for in-game coaching”.
There are some clear take-aways from the communication continuum presented in the paper. If it’s true that not all communication is of equal value to the ultimate goal of winning a game, or helping athletes to learn, it seems important to spend time figuring out where your own communication falls on the continuum, and what purpose your communication serves. It is also probably important to recognise that coaching is at times emotionally intense - rather than stamping out every instance of reacting or barracking, perhaps making it a “sometimes food” (with apologies to Cookie Monster) is a more realistic goal in the short-term.
Questions for coaches to reflect on:
Which end of the communication continuum do I spend the most time in during a game?
What evidence do I have of this? Have I recorded myself coaching, or asked a critical friend/a colleague for their feedback?
What internal or external factors cause me to move from one end of the continuum to the other?
What is my tolerance for reacting or barracking in my environment? Does this match the tolerance of my coaching colleagues?
What is my ratio of evaluating to strategising? Do I simply note things that aren’t working, or do I proactively make suggestions for improvement?
What is the impact of my communication on my players?
How can I work on and refine my communication patterns over time?
Want to read more?
This post is a summary of a book chapter by John Walsh and Jon Jureidini, called Language as a Key Resource for the Football Coach. The full chapter appears in this book (not a sponsored link!), and contains far more detail than this blog format can convey.
Blog author’s note: I have been fortunate enough to meet John/Jon semi-regularly to pick their brains about this chapter and coaching more generally. They are happy to be contacted by blog readers who are interested in their work. Please message me via Twitter if you would like me to put you in touch!