Teaching Players to Think: What Football Research Can Tell Us About Developing Better Squash Players

At Squash Tigers, we spend a lot of time thinking about what actually makes a young player better.

Technique matters. Fitness matters. Repetition definitely matters. But ultimately, squash is a decision-making sport.

You can have great technique, move beautifully and hit every shot in the book, but if you can't work out what your opponent is doing and adapt to it, you're eventually going to hit a ceiling.

That's why some recent research from youth football caught our attention.

A new paper by Alejandro Sanchez-Buitrago Morales, Howie Carson, Ali Pearson and Dave Collins, “Reconceptualising game understanding in youth football: implications for applied research and practice,” looks at how young players actually develop an understanding of the game.

It's about football, but a lot of it feels very relevant to squash.

Good players aren't just reacting

One of the really interesting ideas in the paper is predictive processing.

That sounds complicated. In reality, the basic idea is pretty simple.

Good players are constantly trying to work out what's going to happen next.

What is my opponent trying to do?

What have they done from this position before?

Where are they likely to hit the next ball?

If I play this shot, what response am I likely to get?

And perhaps most importantly:

What happens when I'm wrong?

The research suggests that game understanding develops through a mixture of previous experience, preparation and the information players pick up while they're actually competing.

That's incredibly relevant to squash.

Maybe you've worked out that your opponent likes to boast when they're stretched into the front corner. You start anticipating it and adjusting your position.

Great.

Then they change.

Now what?

The better player notices, adjusts and finds another solution.

That's game understanding.

Teaching players how to think

This links nicely with earlier research by Amy Price and Dave Collins looking at the development of game understanding in high-level youth football.

They followed U13–14 academy players using a metacognitive coaching approach over 18 months and found improvements in how players understood and strategised around the game.

Metacognition is another complicated-sounding word for something fairly straightforward:

Thinking about your own thinking.

For a young squash player, there's a big difference between:

"I hit a drop and lost the rally."

and:

"Why did I choose the drop? Where was my opponent? What did I see? What other options did I have? Would I make the same decision next time?"

That's the bit we're interested in.

We don't just want players who can hit shots.

We want players who understand when and why to hit them.

Coaches don't always need to give the answer

This is probably where things get particularly interesting for coaching.

As coaches, it's incredibly tempting to solve every problem.

Player loses a rally:

"You should have hit straight."

Player makes another mistake:

"You should have volleyed that."

Sometimes that's exactly what a player needs.

But if we provide the answer every single time, we run the risk of developing players who are very good at following instructions rather than players who are very good at solving problems.

Sometimes a better response might simply be:

"What did you see?"

Or:

"What were you trying to do there?"

Or:

"What do you think they're going to do next time?"

Now the player has to engage with the problem rather than wait for the coach to solve it.

Practice needs problems

If we want players who can adapt, training can't always be predictable.

They need problems to solve.

That might mean conditioned games. It might mean changing one player's tactical instructions without telling their opponent. It might mean giving players responsibility for identifying patterns during a match and finding their own solution.

And it doesn't have to stop when they leave the court.

Before a match:

What do we know about this player? What are we expecting? What's our initial plan?

During the match:

Is that actually happening? What's changed? What do we need to adjust?

Afterwards:

What did we learn? What would we do differently next time?

Those conversations are every bit as much a part of developing a squash player as hitting another hundred drives.

The goal is independence

Ultimately, this is where we think the research really connects with junior squash.

At 10 years old, it's completely normal for a coach to provide a lot of the answers.

As players get older, we'd like them to start contributing more of those answers themselves.

Eventually, whether they're playing college squash, tournaments or simply competing as adults, they need to be able to figure things out on their own.

Because once the court door closes, the coach can't play the rally for them.

The best players aren't just building a library of technically good shots.

They're building a library of experiences.

They recognise patterns. They make predictions. Sometimes they're wrong. They adjust. And over time, they get better and better at figuring the game out.

Our job isn't just to develop players who know how to hit a squash ball.

It's to develop players who know how to play squash.

And eventually, players who don't need us to tell them how.

Acknowledgement & Further Reading

This post was inspired by the work of Alejandro Sanchez-Buitrago Morales, Howie Carson, Ali Pearson and Dave Collins, Reconceptualising game understanding in youth football: implications for applied research and practice, published in Science and Medicine in Football.

It also connects with the earlier work of Amy Price and Dave Collins, Exploring the development of ‘understanding’ in high-level youth soccer players, examining game understanding and metacognition in academy footballers.

Both papers are well worth a read, particularly for coaches working with developing athletes.