Player Role Cards

"What am I supposed to be doing?"

If you have ever run an invasion game with young students, you have heard that question. Usually from a student standing very still in the middle of a great deal of movement, watching everybody else and waiting for somebody to tell them where to put themselves.

I ran into it again while wrapping up my Primary and Grade One games units. My students had been exploring the purpose of a game's rules, what it means to work towards a collective goal, and how to play your part in helping your team get there. That last piece is where things fell apart. Positions in most invasion games carry a lot of baggage, and the names we inherit from the adult version of the sport tell a six year old almost nothing about what to actually do with their body.

So I threw the positions out and simplified the whole thing down to three roles:

⚔️ Forwards attack. Their job is to move the play towards the goal and to score.

🛡️ Backs protect. Their job is to defend their own goal and to slow the other team down.

🔗 Middles help. Their job is to connect the two, supporting whoever needs them at either end.

Three words, three jobs. That was enough for my students to stop asking where to stand and start making decisions about what their team needed from them.

I built these cards to make each role easy to see and easy to remember. In my gym they work alongside numbered pinnies and a magnet-based system, so that at any point in the game a student can look up and find out exactly who is playing what. I made them for a Benchball unit, but there is nothing Benchball-specific about them. They will adapt to just about any invasion game you play. If you want to dig further into the thinking behind teaching games this way, my breakdown of the Teaching Games for Understanding model is a good place to start.

Happy Teaching!