Complex systems in nature are those with many interacting parts, all capable of influencing global system outcomes. There is a growing body of research that has modeled sport performance from a complexity sciences perspective, studying the behavior of individual athletes and sports teams as emergent phenomena which self-organise under interacting constraints. This book is the first to bring together experts studying complex systems in the context of sport from across the world to collate core theoretical ideas, current methodologies and existing data into one comprehensive resource. It offers new methods of analysis for investigating representative complex sport movements and actions at an individual and team level, exploring the application of methodologies from the complexity sciences in the context of sports performance and the organization of sport practice. Complex Systems in Sport is important reading for any advanced student or researcher working in sport and exercise science, sports coaching, kinesiology or human movement.
Complexity and Control in Team Sports is the first book to apply complex systems theory to 'soccer-like' team games (including basketball, handball and hockey) and to present a framework for understanding and managing the elite sports team as a multi-level complex system. It analyzes behaviour across five inter-connected levels: the team as a 'managed institution'; coaching staff controlling players via cybernetic flows; the team as a playing unit; the individual player as a complex dynamic system expressed through behaviour; and a player's complex physiological/biological system. Drawing these together, the book throws fascinating new light on the elite sports team and will be useful reading for all students, researchers or professionals with an interest in sport psychology, sport management, sport coaching, sport performance analysis or complex systems theory.
This book is the first to combine principles from analytics, complex systems theory, multi-disciplinary diagnostics and sport performance analysis. It considers athletes, teams, and sport organizations in individual and team games as complex systems, and demonstrates how complexity studies can enrich analytics and give us a more sophisticated understanding of the causalities of winning and losing in sports. Part I introduces the basic categories of analytics and their uses in elite sport. Part II presents an original conception of sport analytics both as a complex of different kinds of processes and as a complexity-adapted view of human systems acting in sport performance and management. Part III considers the main principles of complex sport analytics, expanding the prism of complexity to include all levels of a sport organization from athletes, coaches and trainers to top decision makers, and suggests practical applications and simulations for cases of both individual and team sports. This is illuminating reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner working in sport analytics, performance analysis, coaching science or sport management.
Team Sports Training: The Complexity Model presents a novel approach to team sports training, examining football (soccer), rugby, field hockey, basketball, handball and futsal through the paradigm of complexity. Under a traditional prism, these sports have been analyzed using a deterministic perspective, where the constituent dimensions of the sportsmen were independently examined and treated in isolation. It was expected that the body worked as a perfect machine and, once all the components were maximized, the sportsmen improved their performance. If the same closed recipe was applied to all the players that formed part of the squad, the global team performance was expected to be enhanced. As much as these reductionistic models seem coherent, when contrasted in practice we see that the reality of team sports is far more different from the closed conditions in which they were idealized. Team sports contain variable, heterogeneous and non-linear constrains which require the development of a different logic to organize their training. During the last years, ecological psychology, the dynamical systems theory or the constraints-led approach have opened interesting fields of research from which many conceptual foundations can be applied to team sports. Based in this contemporary framework, the current book presents the study of the players and the teams as complex systems, using coordination dynamics to explain the emergence of the self-organisation episodes that characterize them. In addition, this thinking line provides the reader with the ability to apply all these innovative concepts to their practical training scenarios. Altogether, it is intended to challenge the reader to re-think their training strategy and to develop an original theory and practice of training specific to team sports.
What are motor abilities of Olympic champions? What are essential psyc- logical characteristics of Mark Spitz, Carl Lewis and Roger Federer? How to discover and maximally develop motor intelligence? How to develop - domitable will power of Olympic champions? What are the secrets of sel- tion for the future Olympic champions? Does for every sport exist a unique model of an Olympic champion? This book gives a modern scienti?c answers to the above questions. Its purpose is to give you the answer to everything you ever wanted to ask about sport champions, but didn’t know who or how to ask. In particular, the purpose of this book is to give you the answer to eve- thing you ever wanted to ask about advanced tennis, but didn’t know who or how to ask. Its aim is to dispel classical myths of a “biomechanically sound” serve, forehand, and backhand, as well as provide methods for developing superior tennis weapons,a lightning–fast game,and unrivaled mental speed and strength – essential qualities of a future tennis champion.
"The emphasis on change at many levels of organization is critically important as is the first attempt to integrate sophisticated theory and research in organization psychology (e.g., Gersick, Hackman) with social psychological models of development such as Moreland and Levine." --Reuben M. Baron, Emeritus, University of Connecticut "Arrow, McGrath, and Berdahl′s ′Small Groups as Complex Systems′ will change the way you think about groups, the way you think about research, and even the way you think about science." --Donelson R. Forsyth, Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth U "The book is excellent, one of those very rare works that will have substantial impact on the field. I would use the book without hesitation in any advanced graduate seminar dealing with groups." --Donelson R. Forsyth, Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth U "A conceptually elegant analysis of groups as systems. Although the systems approach has been growing more influential in various fields of social psychology in the last ten years, no one has put forward a definitive analysis that applies with fidelity the general systems approach to group processes. McGrath and his colleagues fill that gap, not by paying lip service to popular scientific concepts such as recursive causality, open systems, attractors, and complexity theory, but by fully integrating these concepts into their no-nonsense analysis of such group level processes as formation, task performance, composition, development, and termination. Empirical work is folded into the theoretical mix along the way, but the focus is unrelentingly conceptual with the result that the authors deliver on their promise of developing a powerful, unified theory of group dynamics." --Donelson R. Forsyth, Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth U "Theirs is an ambitious book. They have profound ramifications for experimental social psychology. It is worth mentioning that AMD (Arrow, McGrarth, and Berdahl) list an ethnographic approach, which often implies the adoption of hermeneutic and semiotic methods (a hallmark of the anti-Enlightenment tradition in psychology), as a possible way forward." --Yoshihisa Kashima, American Journal of Psychology What are groups? How do they behave? Arrow, McGrath, and Berdahl answer these questions by developing a general theory of small groups as complex systems. Basing their theory on concepts distilled from general systems theory, dynamical systems theory, and complexity and chaos theory, they explore groups as adaptive, dynamic systems that are driven by interactions among group members as well as between the group and its embedding contexts. In addition, they consider not only the group′s members and their distribution of attributes, but also the group′s tasks and technology in order to understand how those members, tasks, and tools are intertwined, coordinated, and adjusted. Throughout the book, the authors focus our attention on relationships among people, tools, and tasks that are activated by a combination of individual and collective purposes and goals that change and evolve as the group interacts over time.
Complex Cases in Sport Psychology offers instructors and students a unique and novel approach to teaching and learning about sport psychology. The book consists of a series of character-driven narratives—set within the context of a university athletic department—which encourage discussion and critical thinking in order to find solutions to issues such as athletes lacking in motivation, introducing mental skills training programs and improving recruitment. The book begins with a section introducing the teaching cases approach (suggesting further reading and methods for its delivery), the university setting and the issues this context provides for the sport psychologist, and the cast of characters involved. It goes on to detail over twenty cases spread across four parts (organizational performance, team performance, individual performance, and injury and recovery), each based around a piece of theory and including clear learning outcomes, tasks and non-prescriptive guidance on reaching a solution. With online resources which include topical cases, further guidance on the teaching cases approach and an instructor’s manual, this is an essential supplementary resource for any instructor looking to provide experiential learning and encourage critical thinking in their sport psychology classrooms. Covering a full range of psychological issues in a relevant sporting context, it is also an important, hands-on guide to counselling for any upper-level student of sport psychology.
This book contains the proceedings as well as invited papers for the first annual conference of the UNESCO Unitwin Complex System Digital Campus (CSDC), which is an international initiative gathering 120 Universities on four continents, and structured in ten E-Departments. First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 features chapters from the latest research results on theoretical questions of complex systems and their experimental domains. The content contained bridges the gap between the individual and the collective within complex systems science and new integrative sciences on topics such as: genes to organisms to ecosystems, atoms to materials to products, and digital media to the Internet. The conference breaks new ground through a dedicated video-conferencing system – a concept at the heart of the international UNESCO UniTwin, embracing scientists from low-income and distant countries. This book promotes an integrated system of research, education, and training. It also aims at contributing to global development by taking into account its social, economic, and cultural dimensions. First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 will appeal to students and researchers working in the fields of complex systems, statistical physics, computational intelligence, and biological physics.
Sport is an integral part of society, playing a key role in human health and well-being, and cultural, political and economic development. As sport is becoming more complex, competitive, diverse, and increasingly reliant on technology, HFE theories, methods, and principles are progressively being applied to help understand and optimize sports systems. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Sport: Applications and Future Directions showcases the latest in sports HFE research and practice. Including contributions from both HFE and sports science researchers, it provides a collection of state-of-the-art studies, reviews and commentaries covering a diverse set of sports and sporting issues. "This book is an excellent resource for all academics and students in general. It provides updated theoretical foundations and applications that conceive a world where everything is connected and embedded in technology that allows us to capture, process and visualise actions and interactions, also at transdisciplinary levels." Professor Jaime Sampaio, Head of the Research Center in Sports Sciences, Health and Human Development (CIDESD), University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal "With the changing nature of work comes an ever-greater focus on leisure. Sport is a major dimension of this crucial form of human activity. Now comes Salmon and his colleagues who have assembled a panoply of world leaders who each provide their own individual perspectives on this intriguing world. Their emphasis on the human factors and ergonomics of these activities brings us new and exciting insights. A great read for the specialist and generalist alike." Professor Peter Hancock, Pegasus Professor, Provost Distinguished Research Professor and Trustee Chair, University of Central Florida, USA. "Finally, the complexity of sports and health is being considered in full. This book challenges contemporary thinking toward the prevention of injuries in sports, and provides tangible solutions to help our field into a new decade." Professor Evert Verhagen, Amsterdam Collaboration on Health and Safety in Sports & Department of Public and Occupational Health, VU University Medical Center
Sport performance analysis techniques help coaches, athletes and sport scientists develop an objective understanding of actual sport performance, as opposed to self-report, fitness tests or laboratory based experiments. For example, contemporary performance analysis enables elite sports people and coaches to obtain live feedback of match statistics and video sequences using flexible internet systems, systems that have become an indispensible tool for all those involved in high performance sport. The Routledge Handbook of Sports Performance Analysis is the most comprehensive guide to this exciting and dynamic branch of sport science ever to be published. The book explores performance analysis across the four main contexts in which it is commonly used: support for coaches and athletes; the media; judging sport contests, and academic research. It offers an up-to-date account of methodological advances in PA research, assesses the evidence underpinning contemporary theories of sport performance, and reviews developments in applied PA across a wide range of sports, from soccer to track and field athletics. Covering every important aspect of PA, including tactics, strategy, mechanical aspects of technique, physical aspects of performance such as work-rate, coach behaviour and referee behaviour, this is an essential reference for any serious student, researcher or practitioner working in sport performance analysis, sport coaching or high performance sport.
