The aim of the present study was to identify basketball game performance indicators which best discriminate winners and losers in regular season and playoffs. The sample used was composed by 323 games of ACB Spanish Basketball League from the regular season (n=306) and from the playoffs (n=17). A previous cluster analysis allowed splitting the sample in balanced (equal or below 12 points), unbalanced (between 13 and 28 points) and very unbalanced games (above 28 points). A discriminant analysis was used to identify the performance indicators either in regular season and playoff games. In regular season games, the winning teams dominated in assists, defensive rebounds, successful 2 and 3-point field-goals. However, in playoff games the winning teams’ superiority was only in defensive rebounding. In practical applications, these results may help the coaches to accurately design training programs to reflect the importance of having different offensive set plays and also have specific conditioning programs to prepare for defensive rebounding.

The aim of this study was to quantify the seasonal perceived respiratory and muscular training loads (i.e., sRPEres-TL and sRPEmus-TL) completed by elite-oriented young professional soccer players. Twentyfour players (20.3 ± 2.0 years) belonging to the same reserve team of a Spanish La Liga club...

Unlike Dickens’s novel, this is not a tale of light and darkness, order and chaos, good and evil…It is, though, a story worth to be told about two standpoints about games and sports, teaching and research, physical education simply put, that have pursued similar interests on parallel tracks for too long, despite their apparent closeness and shared cultural grounds. The objective of this conceptual analysis is to try and reconcile two perspectives, namely motor praxeology and teaching games for understanding (TGfU), born in the last third of the XX century in France and England with the intention to rethink the foundations of physical education (PE) and sports teaching. Pierre Parlebas, from the French side of the English Channel, claimed in 1967 that sports make part of PE, that team sports must be considered from a specific, sociomotor point of view, and that motor conducts (i.e., the significative organisation of motor behaviour), not sports techniques, are the corner-stone of PE and sports coaching. In the early 1980s, from the English side of La Manche, Almond, Thorpe, and Bunker made a plea for a shift in the way to teach games (sporting collective duels mostly), deeply concerned by the negative impact of the traditional technics-centred approach on motivation, competence and attained level of the least able in school situations. Our conclusion is that TGfU, or game-based approaches to sports coaching and teaching, can take great advantage of the motor-praxeological rationale for three reasons: firstly, because concepts like understanding, game sense and action principles are operatively, semiotically linked to the reality of the playing process; secondly, because the inner structures of the games that constrain players and guide their motor conducts, permit to integrate games in the general system of sporting games, no matter their level of institutionalisation; finally, because any motor intervention process is better thought of and more systematically developed upon the operational concepts of internal logic and expected practical effects of game playing. This time, Paris could be the place to go to in search of solutions, not the city to run away from in hope of consolation.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to assess the respiratory and muscular session ratings of perceived exertion (PE) after official soccer matches over an extended period of time (ie, 2 competition seasons) in relation to playing time (>20, 20–45, 45–70, and >70 min) and to determine the between-matches variability of both scores in young professional soccer players.Methods: Forty players belonging to the same reserve team of a Spanish La Liga club participated in this study. Respiratory and muscular PE were collected 10 min after every game. A total of 841 individual PE ratings were undertaken on outfield players.Results: The differences between match respiratory and muscular load differ depending on the playing time, the respiratory PE being greater for the players that competed less than 45 min (effect size = –0.45 ± 0.45 for the 20- to 45-min group) and the muscular PE greater for players that played more than 45 min (effect size = 0.23 ± 0.30, for the 45- to 70-min group). Match-to-match PE variability was considerable (CV = 14–54%) for all levels of participation, but it was lower the longer the players participated.Conclusions: Playing time influenced the relative exertion that players’ respiratory and leg musculature were exposed to during a game, suggesting that differential PE scores might provide a more accurate evaluation of match-imposed internal load. However, the small-magnitude differences between respiratory and muscular session ratings of PE observed in the current study might question the practical relevance of assessing both scores.

The aims of this study are (a) to describe the evolution of neuromuscular performance over an 18 year period within a Spanish elite reserve team; (b) to check if there were any relation between the playing position and sprint and jump performances and (c) to look into the alleged impact of this factor on the top playing level attained by the soccer players. We considered the physical tests (5 m and 15 m sprint times and countermovement jump (CMJ) height) made by 235 players enrolled in the reserve team of the Club from 1994 to 2012 and the highest competitive-level they achieved: Spanish first (n = 39) and second divisions (n = 36) and semi-professional (n = 160). Furthermore, the players were classified according to their playing positions. The main findings were a very-likely/most-likely lower neuromuscular performance (ES = 0.48–0.68, small to moderate) in the last six-season term (2006–2012) than in the first term (1994–2000); possibly/very-likely lower performances in sprinting and CMJ (ES = 0.22–0.55, small) by central defenders (CDs) and midfielders than by other playing positions; very-likely better performances in sprinting and jumping by first and second divisions central defenders than by semi-professional central defenders (ES = 0.90–1.02, moderate). Sprint and jump performances are not a relevant physical parameter to promote to the top level of soccer in Spain except for one in six of the playing positions: CDs.