You are a professional sports coach: you teach a variety of sports to a mixed range (7-14yrs, boys and girls). To understand, how to teach them properly you need to define and apply skill and abilities required to play these sports.

Ability

Skill is the learned ability to bring about predetermined results with maximum certainty often with minimum outlay of time, energy, or both, skill can be learned and changed, it can be improved.

Different types of examples of ability;

Limb coordination - ability to coordinate a limb or number of limbs simultaneously.

Control precision - ability to control muscular adjustments where large muscle are involved.

Response orientation - ability to select rapidly where a choice should be made in a choice time situation.

Reaction time - ability to respond rapidly to a stimulus when it appears.

Speed of arm movement - ability to make rapid, gross arm movements.

Rate control - ability to change speed and direction of response with precise timing, as in following a continuously moving target.

Manual dexterity - ability to make skillful well directed arm, hand movements when manipulating objects under speed conditions.

Finger dexterity - ability to perform skillful controlled manipulations of objects primarily the fingers.

Arm hand steadiness - ability to make precise arm hand positioning movements where strength and speed are minimally used.

Wrist finger speed - ability to move the wrist and fingers rapidly, as in tapping task .

Aiming - ability to aim precisely at a small object

3 points on ability

, ability's are innate enduring qualities or capacities

2, abilities are task specific. Specific skills need different abilities

3, abilities underpin task development

A skillful performance usually entails both skill and inherited skill, a player needs a certain amount of inherited ability to be able to learn and execute a skill,

Skill is a learned ability, Ability is your inherited ability that you are born with, they are both main parts of any part of sport, as you need to be able to have the inherited ability to perform the skill, and you need to of learned the skill, so they are both main parts of any movement in sport, but they are both different as one can be learned, and improved, and the other is set from when you are born.

Open and Closed skill

The difference between closed and open skills are as an example , if you was a weightlifter this would be a closed skill because its inside and not much can affect it but a tennis player its outside so the environment affects it so does the playing surface and who you are playing against so this is an open skill

Skills and Sports

Drop kick Penalty Kick Volleyball Darts

Open ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Closed

Tackling & passing in rugby Martalarts Weightlifting

In rugby, most skills that are used are Open skills, because the game is played outside and open to the riggers of the environment e.g. rain, snow and wind etc. And you have many different parts of the game that can effect the effectiveness and completion of a skill, such as the weather, the pitch condition, the positioning of the opposing players, for example, if you was playing fly half and was attempting to kick to touch there are several factors that may affect e.g. the pass from the scrum half maybe be bad, the wind might move the ball in the air while going for touch, a opposition player might tackle you or block the kick

.

But in a sport like Karate, when you are performing for an examination on your skills, you may sometimes work alone going through a routine; this will most likely be indoors with no outside interference

Gross and fine skills

Gross and fine motor skills are used to asses the degree of bodily involvement or the precision of movement , Gross skills consist of large muscle involvement in movement , major bodily movement skills associated with strength , endurance and power for instance walking, running , jumping and kicking a football . Fine skills on the other hand is its opposite it involves small muscle movements, small body movements skill associated with speed, accuracy and efficiency associated more with industrial motor skill such as writing , painting and sewing

Gross and Fine skill continuum

Playing Rugby Sprinting Archery Painting

Gross---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Fine

Running with ball in basket ball Darts

Discrete, serial and continuous

Discrete, serial and continuous skills are a classification on how clearly defined the beginning and the finish of skill is performed. Discrete skills have well defined starts and finishes they are usually short and of a single specific skill and if the skill is repeated you usually have to start from the beginning again for example a basket ball free-throw , kicking a ball , hitting , catching , diving , vaulting . Serial skills usually entail a number of discrete skills put together to make a sequence but the order of how the skills are put together is very important and each movement has a stimulus and a response for example a gymnastics routine , triple and high jump . Continuous skills have a poorly defined beginning and end and have unspecific time for which the activity goes on for and the end of one movement is the start of the other some good examples of this would be swimming, running, cycling

Hitting a ball Triple jump Swimming

Discrete---------------------------------Serial----------------------------Continuous

Punching High jump Running

The Pacing continuum

The pacing continuum is classified on the degree of control a performer has over his/her movement and skill this classification is linked with the open/closed continuum on this continuum there is two points self paced/internal paced skills and external paced skill . A self paced skill is when the performer has complete control and the rate on how the skill is carried out , also the performer decides when to start the movement , and involves a pro action most likely an closed skill for example shot put or an forward roll . An externally paced skill is when the action is determined by an external force which would mean the performer would be using a reaction skill this is usually an open skill for example white water canoeing and receiving a serve in tennis

Intellectual &Cognitive skills - Skills which involve the use of a persons mental and physiological skills for example Problem solving, tactics, verbal reasoning, chess and batting in cricket

Perceptive skills - interpreting and making sense of information coming in via the senses

Motor skills - Smoothly executing physical movements and responses

How knowing this information can assist you in a practice

Knowing all of the information above can help you spot skill, ability and a skilled performer also you can now see instances where all of the different types of skills are being used and from this you can see where professional performers are doing the skills and learn from watching them and maybe bring what they are doing in to your own practices so basically if you know what to do and how to improve on it you can develop more as a sports performer

Learning and Teaching a skill

When learning a skill you must understand fully what you are doing and and / or how you must improve it and you must practice the skill lots of times to get better at it , but you must listen to instructions to understand how to make yourself better at the skill . When teaching a skill firstly you must understand the skill yourself and 2 nd you must be able to transfer your knowledge of the skill over to the learner so that he/she understands it, depending on the learners age, sex etc you may need to teach in a different way for example for a child you must not overload them with information and must get and keep there attention