To win in sports competitions, in addition to excellent sports skills, coping strategies in the face of various competition situations are also critical for success. Therefore, cultivating students' diverse, creative and flexible tactical application abilities is an important educational goal in sports training. However, in the online component of blended training in sports, conventional instructional approaches are teacher-centred and hardly ever adopt the consolidated approaches to creative problem solving used in other fields. This results in limited opportunities for students to discover the problems and apply their creative thinking tendencies for problem solving. Hence, the present study proposed applying a consolidated creative problem-solving approach in the online phase of blended training initiatives in order to cultivate students' higher-order thinking skills. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, a convenience grouping-based quasi-experiment design was adopted. A 10-week teaching experiment was conducted in a billiards training course. A total of 79 students were recruited in this study; they were divided into one CPS-BL group with 41 students and one conventional blended learning (C-BL) group with 38 students. The results showed that the CPS-BL approach could significantly enhance students' billiards striking strategies, creative thinking tendencies and problem-solving skills.