Learning design to facilitate interactive behaviours in team sports

This opinion piece aims to describe the process of learning in team sports, with a rationale in ecological dynamics sustained on the interactive nature of performance in that context. The first part of this article focuses on the information variables that discriminate affordances (invitations for action), supporting the emergence of anticipatory behaviours. Here we note that affordances emerge at different time scales of performance, with clear implications for planning and designing practice sessions. Acquiring interactive skills in team sports and perceiving information variables of relevance during performance is strictly connected to the concept of representative task design. In the applied section of this paper we show how the constraints-based approach is a suitable tool to create representative learning environments that produce changes in players' interactive behaviours over short and long time scales.