Coached Match Play at BTA
One of the greatest assets we add to our everyday training is coached practice match play.
Our daily programme consists of 2 hours of match play in the afternoon. This provides plenty of opportunities to learn from matches every single day as our coaches offer feedback and guidelines to our players both in-between points and immediately after matches.
The approach ties in neatly with the idea of inattention blindness and the famous experiment of Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons called ‘the Invisible Gorilla Test’. In the experiment the subjects were asked to count various passes of a basketball during a match between two teams of players wearing black and white T-Shirts. In the middle of the match/experiment a person walks through the scene wearing a full gorilla suit. After the task, the subjects were asked if they saw anything out of ordinary. In the majority of experiment groups, 50% did not notice the gorilla man.
While being engaged in an absorbing task, perception depends largely on attention. Oftentimes we will only see what we have decided or have been taught to pay attention to. So referring back to our daily approach to coaching during practice matches, it is essential to point out to players guidelines and provide them with feedback as during effortful tasks numerous ideas and observations may skip their attention or become totally overlooked despite being obvious to other observers.