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I have been playing soccer since I was 4 years old and throughout my soccer career I have had upwards of 5 different coaches. One common thread among my coaches was the use of drills during practice. These drills commonly had a dribbling element, a trick move element, and a shooting element. For example we would dribble through a set of cones, cut the ball in front of another player and finally take a shot on goal. It seems as though my coaches understood the concept of practice variability, and the benefits of random practice. Instead of having the players dribble the ball up and down the field using blocked practice, the coaches instead mixed short bouts of dribbling in with other skills as a form random practice. Although there would be more mistakes in the skills practiced during drills, the performance of the skill during a game would be improved. This increase in performance using random practice can be explained by 2 hypotheses, the elaboration hypothesis and the action plan reconstruction hypothesis. The elaboration hypothesis suggests that a person is able to compare different skill variations in random practice and these task representations are kept in working memory making them more memorable. The action plan reconstruction hypothesis states that the previous action plan is abandoned and reconstructed again, the continuous reconstruction of task representations make them more memorable. This random practice technique helped me build my skills and was much more enjoyable than dribbling up and down the field over and over again! The image below shows part of a soccer drill that may be done during practice.

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The coach of my club soccer team when I was 14, Eric, had a very unique way of giving feedback during a game compared to other coaches. He would wait until after the game was over, and then sit the whole team down and ask what we did wrong. This worked to prompt us to think about what we did wrong, using task intrinsic feedback that is naturally available to us as players. We would then tell him what we thought we did wrong, and he would either confirm or deny our thoughts and tell us how we could improve in our performance. He was giving us augmented feedback, information provided about the task that is supplemental to inherent feedback. He chose to give us this feedback at the end of our performance, known as terminal augmented feedback. Terminal augmented feedback can be effective in any skill learning situation, unlike concurrent augmented feedback which occurs during the skill, which commonly leads to a negative learning effect due to the learner directing attention away from task-intrinsic feedback. I found his method to be very helpful because instead of turning and listening to my coach during the game, I could focus on the game itself, which ultimately improved my performance. I also had a chance to take in his feedback because it was given after the game and not during. The picture below shows Coach Eric giving us advice following a game.

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During the summer before 9th grade my soccer team was competing in a tournament in Minnesota. It was the semifinal game of the tournament and our goalie broke her arm right before halftime. Our coach was scrambling to find a replacement and decided to try out me and one of my teammates Taylor, as a goalie. We had our teammates shoot on us so we could practice and so our coach could decide who would go in as goalie for the second half. After a few shots on goal for each of us, it was clear the Taylor was a better goalie. This was not because she had more practice than I did, instead it was due to an ability that she had and I didn't, her height. At the time Taylor was 5'11" and I was only 5'2", this ability made it easier for her to jump up and save balls that I wouldn't be able to reach because of how short I was. An ability is defined as a general trait or capacity of the individual that is determinant of a person's achievement potential for the performance of specific skills. Taylor's height made her a better goalie than me, and because abilities are unmodifiable with practice no matter how hard I tried I wouldn't be able to grow to match her ability. Below is a depiction of our height difference!

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My dominant hand is my right hand and it is also the side I prefer to kick with. I have always preferred using my right foot while playing soccer, but was forced to use my left foot when I was moved to the left side of the field. I thought that this was going to be very difficult, because I usually didn't practice with my left foot. However I found the task to be easier than I expected. This is due to the positive transfer of learning where there is a beneficial effect of previous experience on learning or performance. What happened more specifically was bilateral transfer, the practice I had done with my right leg improved my performance with my left leg. This transfer can be explained by cognitive and motor factors, the cognitive problem solving in my right leg is useful when using my left leg. Another explanation is that the generalized motor program is strengthened in both limbs, when I send a command down to my right leg I also send a subthreshold copy of that command to my left leg, priming my left leg for that movement. This positive transfer of learning helped me become a better player because I was able to use both my right leg and left leg to pass, dribble and shoot, which opened up the field and expanded where I could play the ball. The picture below shows me playing on the left side of the field, about to pass with my left foot.

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In the summer of 2016 I helped coach a summer soccer camp for my old soccer club. This required me to teach skills to players who were around 8 years old. Teaching the skills, which included dribbling and shooting, was pretty easy because they can be taught by a simple demonstration. However when we started to teach the young players how to do different tricks, I found this very difficult. Many of these tricks involved a combination of moves that occurred rapidly. This meant that the skill could not as easily be taught using a simple demonstration, but instead required verbal directions. The move I found most difficult to teach is called the Marseille turn. Because I have had a lot of practice performing this move, I found it hard to explain step by step to the players. The reason I may have found explaining this skill to the players challenging is because the skill was in my procedural memory and not my declarative memory. Procedural memory is not associated with words whereas declarative knowledge is. Because I was an "expert" at the skill the move was now stored in my procedural memory instead of my declarative memory, making it really hard to explain how to do the move. I was eventually able to explain the move to the players after a lot of time had passed, but it was definitely still a struggle compared to just showing them how to do it. The gif below shows a player performing the marseille turn during a game.