Among many skills, quick thinking, quickness in decision making and instant understanding with teammates are necessary on the field. Players cannot afford wasting time: if they're slow in communicating with a teammate, the opponent has already done his choice. If they hesitate, they've already lost the ball. If they waste time, the opponent has already got away. The same applies to the coach, who often (all too often!) gives directions during the match: they must be clear, precise and practical. If they spend a lot of seconds to think about what to say or use too many words to say it sentence, gameplay has already changed, and with too complicated sentences, the chance for the message to get through will lower strongly.

 

There are many factors that contribute to creating misunderstanding and slowdown to the game:

 

 

This means that we have to find out together a series of keywords which will have a clear and specific meaning for the group. To give an example from the world where I lived for many years, that is Water Polo, us girls with our coach had given the name “flower” to a defensive game plan, whose meaning was clear and unique for all of us, and each of us exactly knew what was required and what kind of movements had to be done.

Another example, this time from soccer, is the keyword “dam” that means, for coach and players (who kindly shared with me the meaning of it), pressing the ball to prevent the opponent maneuver.

 

The keyword is a key which opens the door of shared meanings. It is not important that a keyword makes sense, it’s important that it has a specific meaning for the team that uses it: pear, diamond, tree, square... whatever! All that matters is that players know exactly what it means. Sometimes, the stranger the word, the more effective it will be, because the kids have fun with it and are encouraged to use it.

Keywords must not have a shared meaning in the whole soccer world; if I use for example the word “pressing”, what I mean will be clear to my players, but also to the teammates whose will be favoured in this way because they will know what we’re going to do.

 

Explain a game plan during practice or a movement on the field, share its meaning and purpose and then summarize it all up into a single word; creating keywords results in speeding up the game, understanding what needs to be done quickly, accelerating choices, optimizing energies and cognitive load.

What about you? Did you create your keywords with your team? How long does it take to provide guidance during a game? How many words do you use? It's never too late to start...