Episode 114 · Ed Coughlan and Alan Dunton (MTU) · The Constraints Collective Podcast

You have read the online social media clips on coaching practice. One coach online argues that practice should be representative and that the constraints will sort out the movement. Another posts a drill with a clear model of the technique and a tidy progression. Read separately, both make sense. Your practice sessions have a bit of both in them. You still think there is a big place for working on technique, but you also believe that you need to make the practice game like. Then it all goes wrong and you find yourself asking the question "can I really have it all, or do I have to pick one?"

Ed Coughlan and Alan Dunton teach skill acquisition at MTU, where, alongside their colleague Sam Jermyn they run a fully online master's programme that has just finished its first year. They joined Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids to talk about how that question looks from the front of a classroom, and why they have built the programme around it. First, they provided some context.

The Course Stays Small on Purpose

The first graduates finish on 30 October. The cohort is capped at 25 (20 full-time, five part-time), even though Ed says the numbers could have doubled or tripled, and even though the university would like them to. Enrolment makes no difference to his salary, he points out, which made the decision easier. The cap is there to keep the connection between staff and students.

The people who enrol are coaches, coach developers and applied scientists who work with the data athletes produce. This year's group includes police trainers, coaches from basketball, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Thai boxing, boxing and taekwondo alongside some from field and racket sports. Ed's reasoning is simple: fill the room with one sport and you get one way of thinking about it. Diversity was deliberate and allowed the programme to emerge based on the needs of the students.

"If in five years' time it's still running and it's the exact same it was in year four, three, two, and one, we're not doing a good job." - Ed Coughlan

A programme that expects to change every year needs a cohort that pushes back, and a cohort with mixed backgrounds does that without being asked.

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Am I Allowed to Live in the Middle?

Ed says one question comes up often enough that he can predict it. Students who have absorbed ideas from both a representation-based tradition and an ecological dynamics one ask whether they are allowed to sit between them.

"Am I allowed to live in the middle? Is that okay? Is that accepted?" - Ed Coughlan

Alan, who teaches the skill acquisition theory module, does not answer yes or no. He asks students to argue both sides to the point where they can appreciate the work and question it, and then say where they stand. He gives an example of why the detail matters: layering explicit instruction on top of implicit instruction can cancel the effect of the implicit. When a student replies that the athlete might not work it out alone, Alan's answer is about timing. Start with the implicit task, let the athlete work through it, and come in to guide afterwards.

"Can you honestly engage in both sides to the depth of appreciating the work and questioning the work and then come out and say, okay, well, this is now where I live?" - Alan Dunton

Keith adds that the online material helps and hinders. It can promote a curiosity about practice design and gets people asking questions, but it is uneven, and someone reading opposing positions that champion one approach over the other can lead to them going round in circles. A structured course, a forum and a podcast give those questions somewhere to land.

We Do Not Know It All

Alan's theory module walks students back through the history of the field. Ed says the difficult part of semester one is that students find authors who later wrote their own rebuttals, sometimes 15 or 20 years afterwards, saying they were not sure they had it right. People still cite the original paper and skip the revision. Being current means reading both.

Ed tells his students at the start that he and Alan are not the source of the answers.

"We are not the purveyors of knowledge here. We do not know it all." - Ed Coughlan

He adds that his own coaching improved when he made sure the people in the room thought differently to him, and that the point of having critical friends is that you keep your position only if it survives being challenged. Ian's contribution is that this is what science looks like in practice: ideas are tested, revised and tested again, and the field is always becoming.

Their Own Sessions Are the Assignment

A key message for future students was that the programme fits around working coaches. Everything is recorded and posted afterwards, and everything happens inside a fixed timetable, so a guest who cannot make the class time is recorded separately and shown in the slot. Students range from the west coast of America to the east coast of Australia, and some have been away at world championships. One arrived at a lecture from inside a velodrome.

Assessment uses the students' own coaching. Sessions get filmed, uploaded to Coach Logic and discussed in context.

"Show us your session, give me the context, and then let's discuss it from there." - Alan Dunton

Coach developers on the course who do not coach face the same test, so Ed tells them to record sessions now for use later. Alan says the team also takes a duty of care: the programme should not take over a student's life or put their wellbeing at risk. Keith agrees, and says that with passionate people, part of the job is protecting them from their own drive to do more.

A Recognised Route

Ed closes with the wider picture in Ireland. The Irish Sport and Exercise Sciences Association is now in its third year as a recognised national body, and last year it joined the International Confederation for Sport and Exercise Science Practice. Through the work Ed, Alan, Sam and colleagues do with the association, sport and exercise scientists can now be accredited in skill acquisition, which had not been possible in Ireland before. Some graduates will pursue it and some will not, but the option is there.

Put the pieces together and the conversation keeps returning to one idea. A small cohort, a theory module that includes the rebuttals, a course built on the students' own sessions and an accreditation route all treat skill acquisition as a field where the questions stay open, and where a coach is allowed to work out, in the open and with critical friends, where they live.

This episode is available now on Buzzsprout and all major podcast platforms. Listen at  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2354827]

- Ian Renshaw & Keith Davids, The Constraints Collective