ABSTRACT
In coaching, play and practice are the variables that have the most influence on skill acquisition. However, there are many unanswered questions regarding how much and what type of play and practice activities are necessary at different stages of an athlete’s development. Much of the experimental work on the relationship between learning and performance has been conducted using laboratory tasks in which changes in performance are recorded over a relatively small number of trials using novices as participants in the experiments; however, studying the development of expertise in sport is much more complex. From a coaching perspective it is often easy to focus on the factors that are most influential in the development of motor skills (i.e., specialized practice and training time), with little consideration for physical (i.e., injury, health) or psycho-social (i.e., enjoyment, drop-out, burn-out) costs; however, it is important also to consider the potential costs throughout development associated with a sole focus on practice and motor skill acquisition.
