The importance of the technical and the tactical skills in Gaelic games

TECHNICAL SKILLS - Everyone involved in coaching hurling and Gaelic football knows the importance of technical skills.

The way a player fields a ball, kicks a score or hook’s a player has a big effect on the outcome of a game.

Technical skills are “the specific procedures to move one’s body to perform the task that needs to be accomplished.

The execution of technical skills, the capability to teach players how to perform them, the flair to detect errors and correct them and the ability to recognize when those skills come into play in a game are all things that you will develop over time with the accumulation of experience.

You may need years and hundreds of games to acquire the knowledge necessary to know instinctively what to do.

Tactical Skills - Although mastering the technical skills of the game is important, it is not enough.

Players need to know not only how to play the game technically but also how to choose the tactics necessary to achieve success. Many coaches overlook the tactical aspects of the game.

Coaches even omit tactical considerations from practice because they focus so intently on teaching technical skills. Teaching tactics is much harder and takes much more effort than teaching techniques, but the resulting dividends are substantial.

Tactical skills can best be defined as “the decisions and actions of players in the contest to gain an advantage over the opposing team or players. One way that coaches can approach teaching tactical skills is by focusing on three critical aspects, the “tactical triangle”: Reading the play or situation Acquiring the knowledge needed to make an appropriate tactical decision

Applying decision-making skills to the problem

Traditional Versus Games Approach to Coaching

As mentioned previously, transferring skills from practice to games can be difficult. A sound background of technical and tactical training prepares athletes for game situations.

But you can surpass this level by incorporating game like situations into daily training, further enhancing the likelihood that players will transfer skills from practices to games.

To understand how to accomplish this, you must be aware of two approaches to coaching: the traditional approach and the games approach.

Traditional Approach - Most coaches are comfortable with the traditional approach to coaching. This method often begins with a warm-up period followed by a set of drills, a game and finally a cool-down period.

This approach can be useful in teaching the technical skills of gaelic games, but unless coaches shape, focus and enhance the game or drills, the athletes may not successfully translate the skills to game situations, leaving coaches to ponder why their team practices better than it plays.

Games Approach - Using the tactical trian- gle in practice supplies players with the tools that they need to make appropriate and quick decisions. But unless they can employ these tools in game situations, they are of little value.

The best way to prevent this scenario is to use the games approach to coaching, which provides players with real-time, game like situations in training that allow them to practice and learn the skills at game speed.

This philosophy stresses the importance of putting technical skills rehearsed in drills into use in practice. When players make mistakes in game-speed situations, they learn.

You have to provide game like opportunities in which players can feel secure about making mistakes so that they can file those mistakes in the “softball sense” parts of their brains. By doing so, the chances of their making the same mistakes in games will lessen.

The games approach emphasizes the use of games to provide players with situations that are as close to a real game as possible.

Shaping play means modifying the game in a way that is conducive to learning the skills that you want to teach in that particular setting.

The games approach shapes play by modifying the rules, the environment (playing area), the objectives of the game and the number of players used. When play is shaped, for example, by reducing the number of players—players are put into positions where they will have more opportunities to play active roles.

But you cannot simply shape the play and expect miracles to happen. You need to focus your player’s attention on the specific objectives that you are trying to achieve with the game. Young players are more apt to learn, or at least to reduce their reluctance to learn, if they know why you are asking them to grasp new tactical information.

Knowing how the tactic fits into the team’s game plan or season plan also helps players buy into the tactic. You can assist your players with this phase by providing them with clear objectives and explaining how learning those objectives elevates their capability to play and help their team win games.

Shaping play and focusing players on objectives, however, cannot be successful unless you play an active role and work on enhancing their play.

You can enhance games by adding challenges to make the contests between the sides equal. You can also enhance play by encouraging your players and give them confidence by frequently pointing out their progress.

Small sided games also give you an opportunity to stop the game whenever you recognize an opportunity to teach something that will improve their play even further.

Most coaches have used aspects of the games approach one way or another in their training sessions. Both the traditional and the games approach are sound coaching practices. Although both approaches have value, the philosophy of this article slants toward the latter.

Providing athletes with game-speed, real-time situations that have clear objectives creates a productive, fun-filled learning environment.