Play Practice: the Games Approach to Teaching and Coaching Sports

Play Practice: The Games Approach to Teaching and Coaching Sports presents a clear alternative to traditional approaches that will revitalize your own teaching and coaching. It replaces mindless games and mechanistic training methods with creative and enjoyable practice that improves students' skills and enhances their tactical understanding.

This book focuses on teaching game play first instead of technique and skill—an approach that sets it apart from other games-approach texts. It provides answers to many of the problems that sports educators face, such as motivating reluctant or resistant students.

Developed by an internationally known authority on the subject, Play Practice: The Games Approach to Teaching and Coaching Sports provides both the theoretical basis and the practical plans for changing practice from drudgery to an educational experience young people look forward to. Part I introduces the innovative Play Practice approach and explains how it can lead to more effective coaching and teaching. Part II applies Play Practice to a great variety of games and describes specific approaches to improving technical ability and developing game sense. Part III discusses techniques the sports educator can use to make the Play Practice approach most effective.

The book's 50 illustrations and 20 photos demonstrate specific approaches to games as well as ideas that can work for multiple games. These features will help you visualize how to apply the Play Practice approach with beginners as well as elite players in sports as diverse as skiing and tennis.

This book will challenge your thinking about how sports should be taught, help you reassess your own methods, and provide a new and versatile model you can apply with great success—one practice, one game at a time.

Alan Launder has been deeply involved in sports for more than 50 years as a competitor, teacher and coach. In that time he has worked in Great Britain, the United States, and Australia. Since 1973, he has been a senior lecturer at the University of South Australia, where he helped to develop a four-year degree course in physical education—teacher education that became a model for programs in other countries. He won the 1992 Rothmans Prize in recognition of his ability to develop and communicate innovative ideas in sports education. The paper that won the prize, “Coach Education Towards the 21st Century,” has had a great influence on the coach education programs of many Australian sporting federations.

Alan holds senior coaching qualifications from Great Britain and Australia in soccer, cricket, basketball, track and field and table tennis. In 1984, he was a coach of the Australian track and field team at the Los Angeles Olympics. In 1986 and 1988, he was the head coach of the Australian team at the World Junior Championships. In 1991, 1993, and 1995, he was a coach of the track and field team at the World University Games. Most recently he has served as a consultant to the Australian Track and Field Coaches Association and to the Australian Lacrosse Association as they reinvented their coach education programs.

Alan regards his major career achievement to be the development of the philosophical and pedagogical principles that underpin the “Five Star Award,” an innovative approach to teaching track and field that has been adopted by more than 20 countries.

In his spare time, Alan's hobbies are sporting art, travel, snow skiing, and fine wine. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Salisbury East, South Australia. He has two sons, David and Richard, and three grandsons, James, Mitchell and Matthew.