Not Your Average Baller: Exploring the Macro- and Microstructure of Creative Practice in Interactive Team Sports
摘要
This chapter explores the complex and multifaceted nature of creativity and its development within interactive team sports. It examines creativity across multiple levels of analysis, beginning with contrasting perspectives on its emergence—whether as a function of accumulating domain-specific knowledge or arising from more generalized and diverse experiences. We then consider research into the macrostructure of practice, including the roles of deliberate practice, deliberate play and early multisport participation in shaping creative potential. The discussion progresses to the microstructure of practice, focusing on how game forms (e.g., small-sided and conditioned games) and training forms (e.g., technical and functional drills) can foster creative behaviour in sport-specific contexts. Importantly, the chapter acknowledges that creativity does not occur in a vacuum but is shaped by the wider socio-cultural environment—including the norms, values and expectations embedded within sport systems, coaching practices and youth development contexts. Adopting a pragmatic stance, we draw on approaches that support creative development through both explicit, structured knowledge acquisition and implicit, unconscious processes. In doing so, the chapter offers a nuanced, context-sensitive account of creativity aligned with the dynamic demands of interactive team sports.