ABSTRACT
If you can understand how a game works, its shape, then your opportunity to enjoy and participate, technically and tactically, is greatly enhanced. Hence, teaching game shape is an important first step for engaging novices in sports. Cricket and netball are two sports where their shape is typically taught to novices along very traditional lines of direct instruction. In cricket the coach puts the fielders into positions (sets the field) and in netball, players don bibs that denote their position and the coach explains the constraints and the tactical roles for players in those set positions. In this chapter Dennis Slade suggests an alternative to the traditional approach to reaching shape in these two sports by adopting a Game Sense approach. In both of these examples the coach adopts a facilitator role to learning through helping the players answer the questions, both implicit and explicit, posed by the modifications to the games.
