This study examines the coordination that takes place between basket-ball players during an official match. It was conducted within the course-of-action semiological framework, which was originally developed in the French language for research into ergonomics (Theureau, 2006). Numerous recent empirical studies in the field of sports expertise have demonstrated its capacity. A major advantage of this framework is that it allows researchers to arrive at the meaning constructed by individuals during the course of their activity. We analyzed the various forms of concerns (i.e., preoccupations at a given moment) shared by basket-ball players during a match.
Five national basket-ball players volunteered to participate in the study. The match was videotaped, and players? verbalizations were collected a posteriori. The data were processed according to the methodological principles of the course-of-action framework, in order to identify the different forms of sharing of the players? concerns in a match situation, and to analyze these forms of sharing.
Our results highlighted four typical individual concerns relating to basket-ball players: ?Perform a team routine,? ?Exploit opportunities offered by play flow,? ?Search for maximal individual effectiveness,? and ?Strengthen team spirit.? Players alternate between these typical concerns during a match. Analysis of typical individual concern articulations highlighted three forms of articulation: divergence, convergence, and partial convergence. Our analysis revealed few moments of convergence during matches. Convergence could appear in two ways: as a progressive, or a simultaneous adoption of similar typical concerns.
Our results suggested that the convergence of individual concerns is not always a necessary condition for effective basketball team coordination. Temporal and local linkages seem to be sufficient to obtain collective effectiveness. Underlining the importance of dyadics in interpersonal coordination, our study leads us to propose other patterns of shared understanding. Each player has his own interpretation and understanding of the present situation, and interactions between players permits some collective phenomena, such as interpersonal coordination.