Amazing practice design. Now count the kids in line.
Why "Amazing Practice Design" is limiting transfer when most kids are waiting in line instead of activity participating.
Job Fransen
You walk into training and the session looks incredible. Everything looks perfect: the coach designed the practice session just right. All progressions are logically sequenced, the activity has structure, intent, and a clear skill focus. You can see the coaching philosophy in every detail.
And then you count the kids standing in line.
Not one or two. Six. Eight. Ten. Waiting their turn while one or two of the athletes are working.
This is one of the most common, costly mismatches in sport coaching. The practice design is genuinely good. The problem isn't the practice activity itself, but that most of the athletes in the session are watching it happen rather than doing it. They are not benefiting from your well-designed practice as much as they could be.
Repetitions are a transfer moderator, not a training detail
In skill acquisition research, practice repetitions aren't just about practice volume. They're a key moderator of transfer likelihood, which is the degree to which what an athlete practises in training actually shows up in competition. You can read about it here.
Transfer doesn't happen just from exposure to practice, and definitely not just from watching others practice. Instead, it happens from repeated problem-solving within an appropriately designed task. And the minimum effective dose for that process is far higher than most coaching sessions actually deliver, especially when athletes are spending significant portions of training time in a queue.
This matters because transfer likelihood is one of the few variables an intentional coach has meaningful control over. You can't always control the quality of competition or the perceptual demands of the environment. But you can control how many times each athlete engages with the learning task in a given session. And right now, in so many programs I've observed, that number is much lower than coaches realise.
The line is the learning leak
When eight athletes are waiting while one works, seven athletes are not really engaging in the learning of a skill. Sure, they may be observing, and observational learning has a role, but unless observational learning is intentionally designed into practice, the learners are likely not as engaged as they could be. Ultimately, none of the players waiting in line are generating the movement solutions, the decision errors, and the self-correction cycles that drive learning adaptations.
This creates a structural problem: a session with excellent task design but poor repetition distribution is a session where transfer likelihood is limited before the session even starts. Your task was designed the right way, but you haven't controlled one of the most crucial practice constraints: exposure.
The intentional coach who is designing and running practice should ask two questions:
Is this task representative of the demands the athlete will face in competition?
How many times will each athlete actually engage with that task in this session?
The first question gets a lot of attention in modern coaching education, and over my time visiting practice sessions from coaches all over the globe, from grassroots to high performance, . the second almost never does. And it's the one that determines whether the first question ever translates into adaptation in the first place. Failing to control the practice reps, means undoing the hard work you did on designing an amazing practice activity in the first place.
What changes when you become more intentional about practice reps?
If instead of asking yourself "is this a good drill?", you ask "what is the per-athlete repetition rate in this drill?", you've made the first step to maximising the transfer likelihood of your practice session. A technically sound task run with twelve athletes and one ball might deliver three or four meaningful engagements per athlete in a twenty-minute block. A simpler task, restructured into smaller groups with higher individual contact rates, might deliver fifteen. You tell me which one you think is more likely to drive learning adaptations. If you're still unsure, consider it across a training week, or even a season.
If you are ready to be a more intentional practice designer, and control both the quality AND the quantity of practice, here are a few things you can do:
Small groups over large groups. If your drill can run in groups of three instead of groups of eight, run it in groups of three. The task quality doesn't change, but the rep counts will.
Parallel stations over serial queues. Multiple simultaneous versions of the same task beat a single demonstration station with a waiting line. The environment becomes noisier and harder to monitor but it is worth the tradeoff.
Count the dead time. In your next session, track how long each athlete spends actively engaged versus waiting or observing. Most coaches find the ratio more uncomfortable than they expected. If you can't do it, ask a friend, a colleague or a partner. It is often the first thing I do and it can be really confronting, so get ready.
Amazing practice design isn't just about the task
Applied skill acquisition has made significant progress on task representativeness - on designing drills that preserve the perceptual and decision-making demands of competition. That progress is real and it matters, and its translation into practice is meaningful.
However, a representative task with low per-athlete repetition rates is still a session that underdelivers on transfer. The task creates the conditions for learning but ultimately the repetitions are what make learning happen.
If you're designing intentional practice, count the line. That queue is where your transfer might be leaking.
If you are interested in having your practice session reviewed or observed, get in touch on info@skillacq.com or check out the consulting work we do here.
Fransen, J., McCall, A., Nimphius, S., & Impellizzeri, F. M. (2026). A taxonomy for the transfer of skills in sport [Preprint]. SportRxiv. https://doi.org/10.51224/SportRxiv.1003
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