Rugby Coach Weekly Skill Acquisition Without the Noise and Coaching Through Mistakes with Job Fransen
In this episode, Dan Cottrell is joined once again by skill acquisition specialist Job Fransen, Associate Professor at Charles Sturt University and Managing Director of SkillACQ.
Together they explore what really matters in coaching practice design, feedback, and player development.
Job shares why elite coaches rarely need “disrupting,” why most coaches intervene too quickly, and why sometimes the best coaching decision is to step back and let players solve the problem.
They dig into:
- Coaching through mistakes rather than stopping at phase three
- When feedback helps learning… and when it creates dependency
- Why prescriptive feedback should be used sparingly
- How confidence and competence are not the same thing
- The controversial place for drills in developing short-term performance
- Why skill acquisition science cannot prescribe one “best” method
🔑 Key Takeaways
- Players often detect and correct errors themselves. Coaches may be over-intervening.
- Feedback is powerful. Use it deliberately, not habitually.
- Prescriptive feedback can create dependency if overused.
- Letting play continue through errors can enhance collective learning.
- Not all improvement is conscious. Players do not need to verbalise change to learn.
- Drills can build short-term confidence, but they do not equal long-term learning.
- The best coaches are obsessive about craft, but open to nudges, not disruption.
- There is no universal “best practice.” Context and coach intuition matter.
Find out more here:
www.skillacq.com/pathways/build
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