The Importance of Player Engagement

Most people would agree that a highly engaged athlete off the field will have a greater chance at being a better player on the field. But what does it really mean to be engaged and as a coach, how can you design environments that encourage it?

For the purposes of this post, and in the specific context of athletics, I operationally define engagement as the active state of seeking out a challenge where challenge is operationally defined as cognitive load. Note that engagement does not refer to physical challenges, but instead it relates to one’s mental state.

In other words, engagement is a function of the amount of mental energy a person willingly desires. However, a willingness to simply participate is not enough for a player to be considered engaged in an activity that requires growth and development.

As a coach, just because your players are working hard, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are developing new skills and techniques.

Think of it this way, even if a player willingly participates in practice, if they are cognitively underloaded, they are likely to become bored and disengage. They may go through the motions, but are they really developing? Conversely, if cognitively overloaded, that same player may become frustrated and disengage.

When designing your practices, think about ways to balance the amount of cognitive load your athletes experience so they can fall in that sweet spot of engagement.

The desire to be challenged — i.e., to experience a meaningful level of cognitive load — can fluctuate throughout a practice depending on the amount of intrinsic cognitive load that a player experiences. However, no matter how engaged in a practice a player may be, they are likely to eventually reach a point of disengagement due to cognitive or physiological fatigue or even external interruptions. At the macro level this creates larger cycles of engagement and disengagement. This is not a bad thing, in fact this knowledge can help you create more robust practices.

When planning out your practices, you may want to consider building in natural points of disengagement to allow players to accommodate these natural cycles.

In order to fully optimize your team, you will need to consider not just the physical but also the mental — and one of the best ways to do that is through keeping your players engaged.