In team sports, it is important to remember that to win, “The champion team beats a team of champions,” indicating that even an ideal team composed solely of champions must still integrate each individual’s skills effectively, despite possessing a superior qualitative potential at the individual level.
To integrate skills, it is necessary to distinguish between competence acquired through the experience of playing a specific sport and the experience of playing on a particular team.
The importance of this distinction has been highlighted by studies that have emphasized the significance of shared knowledge for team coordination, emphasizing the importance of sharing knowledge with other team members, both through playing the sport and playing on that specific team.
Shared knowledge is also acquired before a given match through explicit planning. Coaches typically provide players with information about the team’s planned actions, communicating action plans to face opponents. Planning can occur at different levels of team functioning.
At a more general level, the desired outcomes are established, such as “winning 2-0.” Planning at this level involves a decision on which result to pursue.
At the immediately lower level, the design refers to the overall behavioral approach adopted to manifest a specific attitude, such as “aggressive play,” and the decision on which approach to employ is termed a schema.
Subsequently, procedures constitute specific sequences of global actions, such as “attacking from the center.” Planning at this level involves a decision, called a strategy, on which procedure (or procedures) to employ.
At the lowest level, operations constitute micro-level actions, such as “player X should try, whenever possible, to pass to player Y.” A decision at this level on which operation to employ is called a tactic.
While planning can occur at any level of abstraction, the design, or the game plan involving only the highest levels, imposes few constraints on how that action plan might be implemented at lower levels. For example, in soccer, the plan of “playing in attack with high intensity” provides few specific constraints on the moment-to-moment player selections at the operational level during the game, allowing flexibility in the use of tactics to attack with high intensity.
