Comprehending Learning Styles of Your Athletes by Craig Owens

Coaches are responsible for maximizing individual athlete's performance. Understanding team members' physical, emotional, social, and cognitive needs is one of the more demanding challenges facing a coach.

Understanding your athlete's learning styles will assist a coach in preparing players and teams to their maximum potential. Not only can a coach challenge their athletes mentally in practice, but it can assist them in providing practice sessions that will translate into improved performance and success on the field, court, mat, or pool.

Learning Styles

Visual Learners - The visual learner leans best by watching a demonstration or model. Seeing another player demonstrate a movement or technique, noting visual cues that reinforce key concepts of skill performance, and looking for visual reference points are helpful tools for the enhancement of learning.

Coaches using visual aids to supplement their instruction, feedback, and discussions will enhance the visual learning athlete's ability to process information. Studying pictures, analyzing videotape, viewing charts, and accessing diagrams are all useful tools to enhance the learning process of visual learning athletes. However, a coach cannot assume that a player, especially a beginner, will automatically know what to watch, much less be able to know the difference between what she/he the beginners attempt looked like and what the model actually did. The coach's role, especially with the beginner, is to assist or cue the young athlete as to what input is important.

Auditory Leaners - An athlete who is an auditory learner focuses on sounds and rhythms to learn movement patterns along with verbal descriptions of the movement.

Auditory learners learn best through the use of language including lectures, group discussions and audiotape.

To enhance understanding of athletes who are auditory learners, coaches should provide opportunities for athletes to talk through plays, movements, skill cues, and game strategies with other team members and/or coaches. Coaches can also tape record team talks, instructional cues, and keys to enhanced performance so that their auditory learners could listen repeatedly over time.

Kinesthetic Learners - Kinesthetic learners learn by doing. Information is actually processed and learned when the performer is provided an opportunity to move.

Coaches have been instructed historically to get their players into game like situations as soon as possible. All learners have a need to touch things and try new skills. But, the athlete who is a kinesthetic learner needs to know what the movement feels like. Eventually the correct feeling becomes the frame of reference with which to compare all subsequent performances.

In order to accommodate this learning style, coaches need to provide game and skill simulations along with the opportunities for repeated practice. Recognizing that repeated movements are the key for the kinesthetic learner, coaches should pay careful attention to both the accuracy and form of the movement. The coaching cliche, "Practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent" has a basis in scientific theory.

Through repeated practicing a skill, play, and movement sequence, the kinesthetic learner is developing a frame of reference based on what the movement feels like. It is the coach's responsibility to ensure that the correct movements are emphasized and reinforced while incorrect ones are identified and eliminated.

Coaching Points

Within any team there will be athletes with various learning styles. To maximize the team potential coaches need to both understand these styles and accommodate them in their instruction and feedback during both practice and game situations.

A coach who is a visual learner will use more visual cues than one who is an auditory learner. Therefore, it is suggested that coaches identify their own learning style first. Examples of simple inventories can be found at this website.

Coaches are suggested using specific language terms to accommodate all types of learners.