Felix Lebed - Böcker

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.

Shedding new light on sport pedagogy and the teaching and coaching of games, this book shows how complexity theory can be used to improve team sport performance, coach education, and young player development. The book draws together insights from both the humanities and behavioural sciences, including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, and play theory into a new educational methodology for team sports. It shows how concepts from complexity theory underpin and inform team sport dynamics, including the uncontrolled nature of live human systems; the nature of complex systems and how this shapes student and young athlete learning; self-organization and its relation to decision-making in play; and mental self-regulation and motivation. It presents an innovative and sophisticated definition of sport pedagogy that can help teachers and coaches deepen their understanding of teaching and learning in team sports and help them develop more motivated, more effective, and more creative athletes.

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. Conventional organizational studies have tended to define team sports as a set of highly heterogeneous physical, mental and cognitive activities within which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find common behavioural playing regularities or universal pedagogies for controlling those activities. Adopting a whole system approach, and exploring the concepts of control, regulation and self-organization, this book argues that it is possible for coaches, managers and psychologists to develop a better understanding of how a complex system works, and therefore, to more successfully manage and influence a team’s performance.This book draws on literature from the biological, behavioural and social sciences, including, psychology, sociology and sports performance analysis, to develop a detailed, interdisciplinary and multi-level picture of the elite sports team. 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.

Shedding new light on sport pedagogy and the teaching and coaching of games, this book shows how complexity theory can be used to improve team sport performance, coach education, and young player development. The book draws together insights from both the humanities and behavioural sciences, including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, and play theory into a new educational methodology for team sports. It shows how concepts from complexity theory underpin and inform team sport dynamics, including the uncontrolled nature of live human systems; the nature of complex systems and how this shapes student and young athlete learning; self-organization and its relation to decision-making in play; and mental self-regulation and motivation. It presents an innovative and sophisticated definition of sport pedagogy that can help teachers and coaches deepen their understanding of teaching and learning in team sports and help them develop more motivated, more effective, and more creative athletes.

The psychological dependence of humanity on playing is huge. Its nature and functional utility are unclear. These linked yet contradictory issues have created the intrigue that has fed philosophical thought for more than two hundred years. During this period, philosophy transferred many of the subjects of its analysis to the aegis of the humanities that it spawned. Each of them pays close attention to human play and studies it with its own methods of theoretical and experimental research. Thus, what was once a general philosophical comprehension of human play has branched out into different directions, definitions, and theories. This new book represents a renewed general view of human play. The unique quality of the volume lies in its fairly rare interdisciplinary methodology, encompassing a broad spectrum of the humanities: philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and the history of play, and behavioral analysis of playing, which have been done by the author. As a result, the volume ends with the proposition of a new general approach to human play that is named by the author “play field theory”. Such an approach makes reflections on play, sport, and culture a source for all scholars studying play, by widening their knowledge through both a new general view and their familiarization with notions from neighboring fields and disciplines.

The psychological dependence of humanity on playing is huge. Its nature and functional utility are unclear. These linked yet contradictory issues have created the intrigue that has fed philosophical thought for more than two hundred years. During this period, philosophy transferred many of the subjects of its analysis to the aegis of the humanities that it spawned. Each of them pays close attention to human play and studies it with its own methods of theoretical and experimental research. Thus, what was once a general philosophical comprehension of human play has branched out into different directions, definitions, and theories. This new book represents a renewed general view of human play. The unique quality of the volume lies in its fairly rare interdisciplinary methodology, encompassing a broad spectrum of the humanities: philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and the history of play, and behavioral analysis of playing, which have been done by the author. As a result, the volume ends with the proposition of a new general approach to human play that is named by the author “play field theory”. Such an approach makes reflections on play, sport, and culture a source for all scholars studying play, by widening their knowledge through both a new general view and their familiarization with notions from neighboring fields and disciplines.

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. Conventional organizational studies have tended to define team sports as a set of highly heterogeneous physical, mental and cognitive activities within which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find common behavioural playing regularities or universal pedagogies for controlling those activities. Adopting a whole system approach, and exploring the concepts of control, regulation and self-organization, this book argues that it is possible for coaches, managers and psychologists to develop a better understanding of how a complex system works, and therefore, to more successfully manage and influence a team’s performance.This book draws on literature from the biological, behavioural and social sciences, including, psychology, sociology and sports performance analysis, to develop a detailed, interdisciplinary and multi-level picture of the elite sports team. 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.