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The Role of Ecological Dynamics in Analysing Performance in Team Sports

  • Current Opinion
  • Performance Analysis in Team Sports
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Abstract

Performance analysis is a subdiscipline of sports sciences and one-approach, notational analysis, has been used to objectively audit and describe behaviours of performers during different subphases of play, providing additional information for practitioners to improve future sports performance. Recent criticisms of these methods have suggested the need for a sound theoretical rationale to explain performance behaviours, not just describe them. The aim of this article was to show how ecological dynamics provides a valid theoretical explanation of performance in team sports by explaining the formation of successful and unsuccessful patterns of play, based on symmetrybreaking processes emerging from functional interactions between players and the performance environment. We offer the view that ecological dynamics is an upgrade to more operational methods of performance analysis that merely document statistics of competitive performance. In support of our arguments, we refer to exemplar data on competitive performance in team sports that have revealed functional interpersonal interactions between attackers and defenders, based on variations in the spatial positioning of performers relative to each other in critical performance areas, such as the scoring zones. Implications of this perspective are also considered for practice task design and sport development programmes.

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Notes

  1. The principle of ‘fixing’ dyadic systems is currently being researched in a programme of work on collective decision making at the Australian Institute of Sports from a team dynamics perspective.

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Acknowledgements

Luís Vilar was supported by a financial grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BD/43251/2008). The authors would like to acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are directly relevant to the content of this article. No funding was received by Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids and Chris Button to assist them in the preparation of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Human Kinetics, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Luís Vilar & Duarte Araújo

  2. Faculty of Physical Education and Sports, Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies, Campo Grande, 376, 1749-021, Lisbon, Portugal

    Luís Vilar

  3. School of Human Movement Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Keith Davids

  4. School of Physical Education, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Chris Button

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  1. Luís Vilar
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  2. Duarte Araújo
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  3. Keith Davids
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  4. Chris Button
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Correspondence to Luís Vilar.

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Vilar, L., Araújo, D., Davids, K. et al. The Role of Ecological Dynamics in Analysing Performance in Team Sports. Sports Med 42, 1–10 (2012). https://doi.org/10.2165/11596520-000000000-00000

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