The Teesra

Category: Games sense

  • Where does the “meta-learning” & socialisation happen? Or — there has to be more to cricket coaching than hitting and bowling.

    Where does the “meta-learning” & socialisation happen? Or — there has to be more to cricket coaching than hitting and bowling.

    Back in the day, schoolboy cricketers (and it was, almost exclusively, boys, back then) played ay school, and were invited to play “adult” cricket, initially to make up the numbers and do the running around for the older players.

    But a lot of essential learning happened in the game, talking and watching, often in the bar after the game.

    Understanding how to win. How not to lose so often. Why a bowler might prefer an unorthodox field setting. How to get on with the rest of the team.

    But that learning opportunity has largely been lost.

    Partly because young players are not being led astray, into the bar, as used to happen. Probably not a bad thing!

    But also as the organised pathways develop, and more youth cricket is played, young players possibly get to play less with more experienced players.

    And I think that loss of exposure to more experienced players might need to be addressed.

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  • 360° Cricket…this time with words

    I posted a Teesra Talks podcast on this topic a a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t think it had many listens, and the format doesn’t really invite any responses. If you have listened, there is not much new in this blog post. But for everyone else — some thoughts on making a game more relevant.

    I do love playing games, but I worry that sometimes the skills developed don’t always transfer obviously to “the real thing”. And I want to enthuse youngsters (and anyone) to actually want to play cricket, in any of its formats.

    Hence my attempts to tweak cricket-based games and gamified drills to make them more like cricket (or, at least, to teach skills, tactics, or general awareness, that might transfer to the game of cricket), and less like games for the sake of games.

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  • Game sense — more than just “common sense”?

    I like games; I enjoy modifying games; I do believe in the power of cricket games based learning to develop cricketers who are technically competent, tactically wise and mentally prepared.

    But in truth, I do still struggle to understand the many different flavours of games-based coaching.

    So I was very interested to listen to a recent podcast* from Risto Marttinen & Stephen Harvey with Shane Pill, of Flinders University, in which Dr Pill explained some of the key features of the Games Sense Approach (GSA) to coaching, and how it differs from Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and the Tactical Games Approach.

    I won’t go into a detailed review of their conversation — listen to the podcast! — but there are a few points that have started to make (more) sense of the various approaches to games-based coaching, for me.

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