Game Sense: Cricket

Now this, from the Drowning in the Shallows blog by @imsporticus, just might be the model for future coaching programmes. Strongly in the “game sense” mould, with the players taking a lot of responsibility for their own learning.

Not that the coach gets to sit down and do nothing for an hour – there will be a lot of obseqrvation and analysis, followed by questioning and appropriate feedback; there will be an increased need for imaginative game design, with appropriate progressions planned.

But the potential upside, of developing thinking cricketers, must surely be worth the effort.

drowningintheshallow


As a department we have over timed moved away from ‘sport as sports technique’ method of teaching sports within our curriculum to ‘sport as tactical concepts’. This is in the belief that:

  • The game sets the context of learning and gives that learning some meaning.
  • Play is the true environment within PE and results in improved and sustained motivation.
  • Technique cannot be separated from decision making if we want to help create confident and competent movers within sport.

This process started over 6 years ago and whilst buy in for rugby and football was immediate and has been slowly refined, cricket was resistant to any change. All of us had been taught and have taught cricket in the traditional way and found it difficult to conceptualise a very technical game taught through mainly through games. We were addicted to ‘Grip, Stance, Backlift’ and giving up seemed impossible. This year though…

View original post 1,107 more words

Published by Andrew Beaven

Cricket coach, fascinated by the possibilities offered by the game. More formally - ECB level 2 cricket coach; ECB National Programmes (All Stars & Dynamos Cricket) Activator Tutor; Chance to Shine & Team Up (cricket) deliverer; ECB ACO umpire.

Join the Conversation

1 Comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: