The Why Before the How Effect

Are your practice sessions built on drills first, game later, and are your athletes still struggling to make smart decisions when it counts? In this episode of Coaching Research To Results, the host, Beth Barz, breaks down a systematic review and meta-analysis of 25 studies and nearly 1,700 athletes examining Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and its impact on decision-making in sport. 

If you coach any sport at any level, from youth athletes to collegiate competitors, and you want practical, research-backed strategies for building game intelligence and tactical understanding, this episode delivers one research paper, three sticky ideas, and two actions you can use in your very next training session. Tune in to discover what the evidence really says about sequencing skill instruction and game-based learning, and why the answer might change how you plan your entire practice.

https://thecoachdeveloper.com/coaching-research-to-results-podcast-notes/ 

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Transcript

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Here's a thing coaches do a lot. We'll do the skills first, then we'll play the game. It makes complete sense. Get the pass right, get the footwork right, build the foundation. Then, when they've got it, we'll let them play. It's solid logic. The problem is that the research has been quietly dismantling that approach for years. It turns out that when you take the game away from the skill, you might also be taking away the exact thing that teaches players to think. And if decision making is what separates good players from great ones, you need to hear what a recent meta-analysis of 25 studies and nearly 1,700 athletes has to say, because the evidence is in. And it might be time to re-examine how we plan the main part of practice. Welcome to Coaching Research to Results. I'm Beth Barts, the coach developer. This is one paper, three ideas, and two actions for tomorrow in under 15 minutes. This is the podcast where coaching research gets off the shelf, out of your notes, and into your practice. Let's go. The paper is called Application of the Teaching Games for Understanding Model to Improve Decision Making in Sport Learning, a systematic review and meta-analysis published in BMC Psychology in 2024. The lead author is Gabriel Gonzalez Valero from the University of Granada in Spain, with co-authors from the University of Almiria. Here's what they did. They searched six major research databases, pulled together 25 high-quality studies from nine countries, and combined the results to get a single clear answer to one question. Does teaching games for understanding actually improve decision making in sport? The reason that they did this is that the previous reviews had touched on TGFU's benefits in general, but no one had drilled down specifically into decision making, and no one had asked whether the effect changed depending on the age of the athletes. This paper fills that gap. The big idea could be called the why before the how effect. Teaching games for understanding produced a moderate to large improvement in decision making compared to traditional, drill-based instruction. The effect size was significant. It's a meaningful, consistent, real-world difference in how well players read the game and make choices under pressure. Here's why that matters. TGFU is built on a simple but radical idea. Before you teach a player how to do something, put them in a game where they need to understand why they would do it. You play a modified game, you stop it, you ask a question, what were your options there? What made you choose that pass? And then you play again. The understanding comes from inside the game, not from a drill that sits outside it. And the coach becomes the question asker, which is the hardest shift of all. The coach's role in TGFU shifts from traditional demonstration and correction of technique to instead conducting small games, during which they're posing problems and asking questions that deepen tactical understanding. Drills teach players how to move. Games teach players when to move. TGFU is the bridge between how and when. Think about the last session you coached. How many decisions did your players make in the drills without being told what to do? Now, how many did they have to make in the game? If there's a gap, then this research is speaking directly to you. The second idea could be called effect size grows with the learner. The researchers broke down the results by educational stage, and here's what they found. Athletes typically 11 to 12 years old showed a statistically meaningful improvement. Athletes up to age 16, even more improvement. And then older and university-aged athletes, even more improvement. The pattern is clear. The older and more experienced the learner, the larger the benefit of game-based teaching for decision making. What that tells us is that TGFU is not just a strategy for young beginners. It's not a training wheels approach that you graduate out of. If anything, it might matter more as your athletes develop because they bring more tactical knowledge to the game context, and TGFU gives them a structure to apply that knowledge under real decision-making pressure. If you coach adult or semi-elite athletes and you've been told TGFU is only for kids, this is the data that pushes back on that assumption. The third idea is called the modified game is the teacher. In the studies that used traditional drill-based instruction as the control condition, there was no significant improvement in decision making. Players got more repetitions, they probably got more technically polished, but their ability to make better choices in the game did not improve like it did under TGFU conditions. The reason, the researchers argue, is this. When you isolate a skill from its game context, you remove the decision. A passing drill doesn't ask the players, should I pass? Instead, it asks them, can you pass? Those are completely different cognitive tasks. TGFU keeps the decision in the environment at all times, even in the modified or small-sided game format. The game context is not the reward at the end of the session, it's the teaching tool itself. Now, let's complicate the picture a bit here because that's how solid research works. The overall effect of TGFU is real and consistent, but the differences across studies are high, meaning individual studies vary quite a bit in how large an effect they found. Some primary education studies showed small or non-significant effects for specific decision types. For example, general decision making in Netball showed a very small effect size, and contact decision in badminton was close to zero. And in higher education, the small number of studies, just four, means we need to be cautious about how confidently we interpret the larger effect. A 2022 systematic review by Morales Belando, Kirk, and Arias Estero found that TGFU implementation quality, fidelity to the model's pedagogical principles, and the role of teacher training all significantly impact outcomes. In other words, TGFU done partially or inconsistently is not the same as TGFU done well. The approach requires a specific shift in how you facilitate, question, and structure the game environment, and that shift takes an intentional practice to develop as a coach. Here's a quick story that illustrates the why before the how effect. I worked with a youth soccer coach who ran technically excellent passing drills for several weeks. In games, the players could execute the pass under no pressure, but consistently made the wrong choice while under pressure. They would find themselves holding the ball too long or passing when they should have driven forward first. The turning point came when I suggested the coach simply stop one small-sided game mid-flow and ask the ball carrier, What were your options? rather than telling the athletes what the right pass was. The players correctly identified the potential options themselves, much to the coach's surprise. In the next game sequence, the same decision came up and the athlete made it correctly, without any prompting from the coach. The coach said afterward, I'd been teaching the pass for three weeks. I never once asked them why they would or wouldn't make it. The question, what were your options, allowed the athletes to understand all of the options available and further allowed conversation on why each of those options was good or not under certain circumstances. And that meant the coach finally got the outcome he'd been training for after weeks of frustration. So, how can you implement this in your own practice? Action one for this episode is to try what researchers call a game question game structure in your very next session. Here's how it works. You start with a modified small-sided game. Smaller space, fewer players, a rule that forces a particular decision. You let them play for five to eight minutes. You stop the game. You ask one question. Not what did you do wrong? One tactical question. What were your options when you had the ball near the edge? Or when your teammate was open and you didn't pass, what made you hold on to it? You give players 60 seconds to talk to each other. Then you play again. That's it. You don't need a new curriculum, a new facility, or a new training course to try this tomorrow. You need one game, one pause, and one question. If you do that in your next training session, you've started applying what the evidence says works. Notice what changes in the quality of your players' decisions in the second game. Action two is to design one modified game for your next training blot that deliberately exaggerates a tactical decision that you want your players to get better at. This is what the researchers call the modification exaggeration principle from TGFU. You change a rule to make a particular decision more frequent, more visible, or more practiced. For example, if you want players to make better decisions about when to switch the point of attack in an invasion game, you might restrict players to one side of the field for a set number of passes before they must switch. If you want to better decision making under pressure in a net game, you might shrink the court and increase the speed of play. Whatever the decision, ask yourself, what rule change would make players face this decision more often? Build that into a five to ten minute game at the start of your next session and debrief it with one question at the end. That's the kind of intentional game design that teaching games for understanding practitioners build over time, and you can start with just one. Three big ideas from today. Teaching games for understanding produces real, measurable improvements in decision making and sport, and the effect holds across primary school, secondary school, and university age groups. The effect is not about game-based learning being fun or engaging, though it often is, it's about the fact that when you put understanding before execution, players develop the cognitive map they need to navigate a real game. And the gap between drill-trained players and decision-trained players grows wider as the athletes get older. The sharp thing to carry with you. It's not the drill that's holding your players back, it's the absence of the question. Ask why before you teach how.com. If any idea from today lands for you, like, subscribe, and share it with another coach this week. That's how research actually travels. See you next time. This podcast was produced by Ann Reifenstein at RECETA sources. Original music created and recorded by Sean Patterson at Vinyl Safari Studio.