AFM Home | Back Issues | May 2004 | The Mental Game

The Mental Game
Using Instructional Technology for Mental Training

By Dr. Peter Fadde

This article looks at ways that instructional technology and principles can be used to improve the mental performance of your football players. The focus is on decision-making. That breaks down into a player’s ability to recognize an opponent’s actions, to know his team’s schemes and his individual assignments, and to choose the correct response. It does not include executing the response. Coaches spend considerable practice time on execution. The focus of mental training is strictly on acquiring knowledge and applying it to decision-making.

The core instructional technologies in football are video and computer. When video and computer work together they can do for the mental preparation of players what has been done for game analysis; i.e., take it to another level. Instructional technology can be as high-tech as virtual reality simulators and as low-tech flashcards. I always think of the easiest, cheapest solution as the most elegant solution. Some of the ideas and suggestions to follow may be things you’ve done for years, some will be new ideas, and some are cutting-edge possibilities suggested by new technology.

What’s the use of even looking at the “pie in the sky” ideas? Often the core ideas can be hacked for little cost. The working formula, just like with building a deck on the back of your house, is “Good - Fast - Cheap: Pick Any Two.” If you have enough money, just pick a deck design and pay somebody to build it (good and fast, not cheap). If you have the skills and time you can build it yourself (good and cheap, not fast). If you’re willing to compromise on the bi-level, integrated bench design you can build a cheap and fast deck that may not be quite as impressive as your brother-in-law’s.

Whether you are working with an advanced video-based game analysis system and have a full-time video staff or you are working with a camcorder and a student assistant, there are things that you can do to improve the quality and effectiveness of your instruction.

Teaching and Training
Two aspects of instruction will be considered: teaching and training. Teaching primarily consists of presenting football content such as game plans, spring install, or coaches’ clinic. Tools like PowerPoint allow coaches to greatly improve the quality of their presentations. Teaching can be further improved by adding elements of interactivity. Mental training focuses on developing the decision-making skills involved in blocking and tackling as well as reading coverages. At its best, mental training adopts the approaches of strength training to incrementally improve decision-making skill.

Presentation
Video-based game analysis systems and stand-alone products have come to include numerous tools for improving the quality of multimedia presentations that you can make to your players. Many coaches have gotten comfortable creating PowerPoint presentations for coaches’ clinics. If this level of presentation is taken into a regular game-week meeting with position players it not only serves to clarify the content being presented but also tells the players how much you respect their time.

Multimedia presentations of football content often involve three media elements: text, graphics, and video. The coach will usually want to interact with these media. He may want to manipulate the video with his remote. He may want to put a diagram and a video clip side by side. He may want to illustrate over the video. How much of this multimedia menu can be used is subject to the Good/Fast/Cheap rule.

Organizing and presenting a variety of media is a challenge. Presentation software that permits seamless integration of video and computer-generated text and graphics exists, but can be expensive and hard to learn. However, coaches who are experienced with clinic sessions recognize that the video projector can be used as a switching source between a laptop computer with PowerPoint slides (connected to the RGB computer input) and football plays from a VCR (connected to the S-VHS or composite video input). The grease board and old-fashioned overhead projector are standing by for diagramming.

It is not as seamless as an integrated presentation tool, but can be effectively “hacked” for much less cost. Although the level of preparation of multimedia presentations is high, such materials are reusable. The key is to create presentations so that they can be adapted to later content.

Archiving Presentations
With the amount of time that goes into creating a multi-media presentation, it is important to be able to reuse it. Some high-tech game analysis systems allow “one button” recording of a multi-media presentation, either live or for later use. The low-tech way to archive a presentation is to videotape it. The key is to have the presentation actively videotaped. A camcorder on a tripod in the back of the room may be fast and cheap, but it is not good enough. The camera operator should be as close to the presenter as possible, ideally seated in the front row. The camcorder should be on a tripod and the operator should focus on the screen when relevant content is being presented and on the coach when he is talking or demonstrating something not directly related to the graphics or video on the screen.

The most important and sometimes most tricky aspect of videotaping a presentation is audio. It is good to use a separate microphone on the coach and plug it directly into the camcorder, inexpensive wireless microphones are ideal. If it is not possible to use an external mic than keep the camera operator close to the speaker – meaning the presenter or a PA speaker.

Teaching Tapes (Off Season)
Although in-season position or squad meetings can be improved by using some multimedia presentation elements, there are limits on the time to produce the instruction and the time to present the instruction. For off-season teaching tapes it is reasonable to give more time to both the preparation of the instruction and the length of it. Again, the high-tech game analysis systems sometimes include tools for creating and integrating voice-over, graphics, content slides, play diagrams, drawing-on-video, and plays. But many of these tools can also be put together ad-hoc to make a quality teaching tape.

The first step is to gather your materials. These can be PowerPoint slides on a laptop, play diagrams, titles created on in a word processing or graphics program and printed (landscape mode is best) on paper, and selected video plays. As with recording the live presentation, it is preferable to use a separate microphone on the coach and plug it into the recording VCR or camcorder. The easiest way is to use the camcorder pointed at the screen. It will get all of the various media, although the visual quality suffers somewhat. A better quality recording will be made on a VCR than with a camcorder.

With all of the elements of the teaching tape on hand, the coach starts working through his presentation as he would in a live setting. The difference is that the video (VCR or camcorder) can be paused to setup the next element or to re-do a mistake. If you are careful to allow two-seconds or so for the video recorder to go in and out of pause then the finished tape will appear to go seamlessly from one media element (title slide, video with voice-over, freeze frame with overlaid diagramming) to the next. The end result can be very good and quite cheap ... but requires some mental elbow grease to produce. It is easier if you have an assistant to help setup media elements and operate the video recorder. The key is to take the time to make a smooth, high quality teaching tape but not to be a perfectionist and re-record too often.

Study Tapes (In Season)
One of the ways that a coach can improve the mental preparation of players is to consolidate and organize video of the coming opponent into study tapes. Brock Spack, the Defensive Coordinator and linebackers coach at Purdue University, has provided his linebackers with study tapes as part of game-week preparation since 1997. The study tape is organized by personnel group, formation, backfield set, and specific run/pass plays. The goal is to concentrate the video to less than 30 minutes if possible. Sideline only is shown for most pass plays, endzone only for inside run plays, and SLEZ for wide runs, screens, and play action passes. The study tape has one or two examples of each play Spack wants his linebackers to be familiar with. “I try to use plays with the camera behind the defense,” says Spack. “It’s better for learning.”

Some of the other Purdue defensive coaches also produce position-specific study tapes of their own design. Although players can and do review opponent game tapes, the study tapes are the focus of meetings and of the players’ personal film study. The tapes require more time to prepare but Coach Spack feels that the extra time pays off. “It has become part of our process. I start marking plays for my linebacker study tape as the defensive staff watches game tapes and then finish later. It’s not really extra time because it helps me get a handle on the offense for game planning.” Spack uses the tape in pre-practice meetings. Players are allowed to borrow copies of the study tape and return them on Friday. Most players report that they watch the study tape repeatedly on their own time.

Training Tapes
On the offensive side of the ball, Coach Tommy Condell, quarterbacks and receivers coach for the Ottawa Renegades, uses a type of quarterback mental training tape that he developed as Offensive Coordinator/QB coach at Louisiana-Monroe. The purpose of the tapes is to help quarterbacks learn to recognize defensive coverages. “The most important thing,” says Condell, “is to be intricate, yet simplistic.”
The video has scout team players showing various coverages and blitzes and is shot from the quarterback’s point of view in both Wide and Tight angles. “The idea is to show the wide view first, scanning left to right to cue the contour of the coverage. Then the focus goes to the middle of the field”. And the video cuts to the tight end zone view. Condell shows the training videos on the largest “screen” he can find – actually a wall of the squad room. Quarterbacks verbalize their reads as the coach watches their heads move. The video is shown in flashes with different drops represented by different viewing durations, sometimes less than three seconds.

Although Coach Condell uses his QB training tapes during the season in addition to during “Quarterback School”, this type of training video is typically produced and watched in the off season or pre season. Training tapes build the general decision-making skills of players. And not just quarterbacks. It is fairly common for coaches to use videotapes to demonstrate proper techniques for blocking, tackling, kicking, and other specific skills. The best of these skill-teaching tapes may include recognition and response selection as well as execution of techniques. A defensive back needs to read the receivers hips to know when to break out of his back peddle and run with the receiver. An offensive lineman needs to read the plant foot of a pass rusher to anticipate what move he will make. Special teams players need to read the shakes and bakes of a returner to know when to break down.

The primary drawback to training tapes is that they almost always require that original video be shot rather than using existing high sideline or end zone footage of games or practices. The video must be field level and close-up to show techniques. To adequately show the reads that a player makes the video should show an opponent’s actions from the point-of-view of the specific playing position on the field. Making a good training video requires arranging for scout players, facilities, and audio-visual equipment.

The key question is if existing training videos can be found that meets the instructional need. Coaches are constantly watching for and trading technique-teaching tapes. The principle to apply here is Find/Adapt/Produce. If you can find existing material that does the job then that is the cheapest and easiest to use. If you can’t find what you want “off the self”, then see if there is some existing video and other materials that can be adapted for your teaching purpose. Only if necessary would you want to take on producing your own materials. But if you do a good job, you know that other coaches will be interested in your tape.

Interactive Video
Remember, the focus of this article is on improving the read-and-respond decision-making of your football players. As has been shown, that goal is furthered by high quality presentation of content, by concentrated and focused study tapes, and by training tapes that realistically demonstrate response selection.

But the real improvement in decision-making ability can be made when the instructional experience is made interactive. At the technologically advanced end of the spectrum an interactive video system is controlled by a computer that selects the video to present, quizzes the player (for example: to identify personnel group, formation, run/pass probability), takes the player’s response as input, judges it, gives corrective feedback, and branches to view new content or review content depending on the player’s performance. Some of the vendors of video-based game analysis systems are beginning to incorporate aspects of interactive video in their products in the form of quizzing programs.

Interactive video works best with computer control of the video instruction. Ultimately, computer and video working together can do for mental training of players what the computer-video combination has done for game analysis. At this point no products are available that adequately create instructionally sound interactive video. It is an important and overdue tool and coaches can push the development of interactive video features and products forward by becoming aware of the value of interactive video instruction. In the meantime (or if high-tech systems are not in your game plan) some of the key interactive elements, such as selecting plays, recording input, providing feedback, and keeping score, can be handled by a coach or - even better – by the players themselves.

The following section describes how interactive video can work in each of the instructional video aspects that have been covered here: presentation, teaching tapes, study tapes, and training tapes. The descriptions are made in terms of people, not a computer, managing the interactive video instruction. As you see products being developed and marketed, judge them in terms of how well they do the same functions that a person can.

Making Interactive Video Work
In a content presentation mode the key element of interactivity is simply directing questions at individual players. It’s not enough to ask the player if he understands the concept. You need to ask questions to see if the players understand, not so much to judge the individual player as to adjust your presentation. You may also want to have the players verbalize their reads and calls on selected plays, as they would on the field.

With teaching tapes (pre-recorded, off-season, self-instructional) the interactivity could include players being cued by the pre-recorded coach to identify formations or coverages or blitzes or types of motions ... whatever relates to the content being presented. An answer sheet (in a plastic sleeve that reveals one answer at a time) provided with the tape gives the correct answers. A player can quiz himself, but it is much better if players watch the tape in pairs or even in small groups and quiz each other. One of the players acts as the instructor. The instructor-player selects the particular tape to watch, plays the tape, tells the learner-player(s) when and what to identify on the tape, takes the input of learner-players, uses the answer sheet to judge correctness, gives corrective feedback, and keeps score. Then they switch roles.

Such peer tutoring has been proven to be at least as, and often more, effective than individual study. It is a good way to get more experienced players helping newer players.

Along with teaching the content of the tape more deeply than just “watching film”, the interactive approach also teaches players how to watch tape and engage their decision-making processes.

With study tapes the interactive aspect of the instruction will most likely come in the form of a quiz. This involves recording a quiz tape that has different instances of some of the plays that appeared on the study tape. Coach Spack can quiz his linebackers to recognize personnel, formation, backfield, run/pass probability, and play type. This can be done in a position meeting late in the week and conducted by the coach. In “quiz style” the players would write their answers on paper and grade them at the end of the session. The coach can also make it into a contest (good for the night before a game) by dividing the group into teams and having two players at a time compete to make the reads first. If the first player to respond is wrong, the other side gets a chance to “steal” the question. This is great review of the defensive “decision tree” and makes the players competitive and responsible to their teammates in making good recognition decisions.

 Training tapes, like those produced by Coach Condell, can also be greatly enhanced by being made interactive. Again, the coach or the players themselves can “run” the interactive session. Competition can be set up to make better and faster reads. The coach may produce different versions of the QB training tapes in which the same plays are used but with less video shown, forcing the players into faster and faster reads based on less and less visual information.   

These interactive video functions can be achieved manually, but it works best with the right computer program. The “pie in the sky” is when every play in the video database can be accessed for interactive quizzing. Then the mental training of players can be approached just like strength training and conditioning. In a truly interactive video program, the familiar and proven elements of Repetition, Feedback, and Progressive Difficulty will work to not only teach and quiz but to practice and progressively improve the speed and accuracy of football players’ read-and-respond decision-making. And that is a nice deck to add to any football house.