The girl at the start of the video (Visualisation) new before the event where the scoreboard was, where the coach would be standing and everything that was going to happen during the event.

In our sport girls who have played a particular style of game with each other for many years, know where each other are on the field without even looking. This is fine, but in our case where we are developing a new style of Hockey, to suit rule changes, we do not have 10 years to develop the required understanding between all players.

We do not just want to know what our team-mates will do during a game, we want it to be reflex knowledge. Everything we do must fit into the actions of the rest of the team. We must develop our game. ie not throw the ball away too early, not hold the ball too long (these skills are related to how soon our team-mates make position). Every action on the field must give us a sense of "déjà vu". In other words we must be prepared, knowing what is going to happen before it happens.

To achieve this we practice set plays and patterns at training. Furthermore I fax/net/mail-out diagrams to help us all absorb what we are going to make happen on the field. It would be great to have enough "Turf Time" to go over and over all the strategies we will use in a game, but unfortunately we do not have this luxury. So we can use visualisation to further prepare ourselves for the game.

Visualisation involves running through the strategies, in our mind, that we want to occur during a match. Visualisation is another form of repetition learning. So let us use it to improve our performance.

Ross Smale