Game day feedback: What happens in the AFL coaches’ box?
Sports journalists in Victoria, Australia would have us believe that winning or losing a game of Australian Rules football depends almost entirely on what the coach says to players, and how it is said. - Madden (1995)
Why is this topic important for coaches?
How many times have you encouraged your players to reflect on their game day performance?
How many times have you sat down with a coaching colleague, mentor, or coach developer to formally review your game day coaching performance?
As coaches, we typically don’t spend much time evaluating what we say or do during a game. We might replay moments of missed opportunity in our heads, or second-guess our substitutions and rotations on a long drive home after a loss… but how often do you think about how you deliver messages on game day? Or how much you say to your players at all?
This paper provides some insight into exactly what happens in the pressure-cooker environment of the AFL coaches’ box, with a specific focus on the types of instruction and feedback given to players.
What’s the paper about?
During a game of AFL (Australian rules football), a team of 4-5 coaches watch the game from a room situated above the playing field known as the coaches’ box. In this room, the coaches discuss the play unfolding in front of them, suggest changes to strategy and personnel, and can send instructions and feedback to players via telephones connected to the interchange bench at ground level. It is the content of these messages to players that is at the heart of this research. What do the coaches say? How much do they say? What sort of feedback do they give? Does this change at different points of the game? These are the big ideas explored in the paper.
What did the researchers do?
The paper follows one AFL team over an entire season of football (20+ games), to analyse the messages sent from coaches to players. Specifically, the researchers wanted to know about the types of feedback given by coaches – for example, whether a message was positive or negative. Another statistic of interest was the outcome and margin for each quarter of football, and whether the scoreboard was related to the types of feedback given.
What did they find?
Coaches sent an average of 15 messages to their players every quarter – a quarter usually lasts about 25-30min of elapsed time, so this equates to a message every 2 minutes on average.
Rather than being overly positive or negative, coaches remained neutral for around 2/3rds of messages. In winning quarters, feedback was more positive. In losing quarters, negative feedback was given three times more frequently than positive feedback.
Instead of simply describing performance in their feedback (e.g., “your pressure has been down in the last 5 minutes”), coaches overwhelmingly prescribed future performance (e.g., “you need to lift your pressure”), at a rate of 4 prescriptive comments for every 1 descriptive comment.
Coaches tended to be controlling in their feedback, with very few messages supporting the player’s autonomy by providing choices of solutions or asking questions to the players. Coaches became even more controlling (over 80% of messages) during a losing quarter.
The number of messages sent by coaches increased in quarters where the margin was tight, and decreased when the margin suggested that the game was probably over (a “blowout” - either for a win, or a loss).
So what?
It seems clear that coaches change their feedback based on how the game is going. It’s likely that many coaches give more instruction to their players in the tense final moments of a close game, and that the content of these messages becomes fairly negative and controlling. Coaches want to do everything they can to maintain control of their team when the going gets tough.
The prescriptive and controlling nature of coach feedback could be interpreted in two ways. First, it could be a reaction to the high-pressure, time-sensitive environment that is an AFL game – the coaches have just adapted to these constraints. The other interpretation could be that this highly prescriptive approach does not allow players a choice of solutions, and doesn’t promote autonomy or self-regulatory processes – just fancy ways of saying that the players don’t get to think for themselves very often!
Questions for coaches to reflect on:
What sort of communication patterns do I adopt in my own game-day coaching?
What evidence do I have of this? Have I recorded myself or asked a critical friend (or a coach developer) for their feedback?
Are my patterns similar or different to what’s reported here? Why?
Do my patterns of communication change between training and competition? If so, does my communication during training adequately prepare players for the information and feedback they are likely to receive from me during a game?
What is the impact of my patterns of communication on my players?
What is my role as a coach on game day?
Is my coaching on game day for performance, or for learning?
Want to read more?
This post is a summary of the paper ‘An analysis of in-game feedback provided by coaches in an Australian Football League competition’, which I co-authored along with Prof John Hattie and Prof Damian Farrow. The full article appears in issue 25, volume 5 of Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17408989.2020.1734555