After my pretest and lack of winning, I devised a PIP to improve my specific skill development, tactical awareness and fitness over 10 weeks. Having the perfect anatomical/ biomechanical movement does not make you a good player. Factors such as the environment you train in, time you dedicate to training, skills retained from other sports, all play a part in the success and level of your performance. For example you may not have any time to dedicate to practice or have a venue to train in. This all adds to the success and improvement of your skills, whether it be in squash, cricket, rugby etc. Time is a definite factor which I can relate to as if you don’t train enough during the week you won’t improve as much as wanted or needed. We trained one to two 50 minute sessions each week, as well as the venue in which we trained in was not big enough for all of us to practice at the same time, this lead to people having to sit out. The level of coaching we got is another factor impacting my/our improvement. We did not get any coach, leading us to learn from experience and internet, these methods were very vague and didn’t help very much. This lead to us using ‘trial and error’ and ‘problem solving’ to fix our poor technique. This isn’t very effective when wanting to improve. A coach would have been more beneficial. Using ‘drill learning’ to teach us would be the most effective way, for example do the line drive 50 times in a row correctly. This would have at least created the habit to perform the line drive, despite it being a boring way to train. This is because associative learners have the basic skill and level to perform a shot but not effectively 10 out of 10 times and so doing ‘drill learning’ builds positive habits and helps improve our shot ability. Not having a proper coach lead to us not improving as much as we could have. I noticed many students try "part learning" during their serve, breaking the serve down into several parts to help improve their game. This is effective for some as many in my class were cognitive learners and still learning to play each shot effectively. I found I would perfect one part and then forget about the rest of the movement, I turned to ‘whole learning’ to fix this. I used the repetition of whole learning to help me improve in the minimal time I did get to train. I used this because I believe I’m in the associative learning stage and this is the most effective way to train a specific shot. We only worked on 3 specific shots (boast, line drive and serve). This meant we could allocate single sessions to a one of the 3 shots. This meant the little amount of time we got to train we could allocate to a single cause and so we can improve in that department. This also meant keeping logs of sessions were easier and beneficial because we could either log down improvements and or difficulties we found. My PIP consisted of sessions improving only Boast, line drive, serve, tactical gameplay and fitness. This I found were the basic shots of squash and basics are always the winner, as well as knowing a bit more of shot selection, shot direction and staying on top of my opponent. Also fitness plays a big part as getting tired after your first rally meant you can easily lose concentration and get on top of. After the 10 weeks I noticed minor improvements but there were some and so when versing other class mates I noticed the improvement as I would win close games instead of just losing. The main reason for my PIP and improvement was the hate I have for losing as I have a big competitive nature and so every time I lose inside I felt hurt, this built a fire in me and helped me gain that improvement to beat fellow class mates.

In comparison to other students in the class I have scored my shots in the pre-test fairly high because my execution seemed to be better than most. When it came to the post test I have found minimal improvements. I believe my shot quality has stayed the same or had minimal improvements