Here is a second part of my talk at the Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group. This part centers on task complexity as it relates to jump landings and ultimately the prevention of non-contact ACL injuries in female athletes. Read the rest of this entry »
Task Constraints and Jump Landing
June 15th, 2011A Coach’s Effect on Youth Athlete’s Development
June 9th, 2011Originally published in Los Angeles Sports & Fitness.
My friend – a father of five and a good youth basketball coach – sent me this email:
“Here’s a stupid story. My son is playing minors baseball (with actual pitching) this year. He’s always been a real confident player (almost cocky), and he’s an above-average player at his park and easily the best player on his sorry team. Anyway, he swings at a lot of bad pitches. His coach yells at him and threatens to move him back in the order every time he grounds out or pops up on a bad pitch. I stayed out of the way until I realized he was so nervous at the plate that he was striking out. I finally got it out of him that he was trying to walk because he was afraid of swinging at bad pitches and he wouldn’t swing until he had at least two strikes and then he would swing at ANYTHING. I told him to stop listening to his stupid coach and swing at anything he thought he could hit. Anyway, he ended up making the All-Star team and is doing OK again.” Read the rest of this entry »
Learning Skills & Small-Sided Games
May 26th, 2011Here are the notes from my presentation at the Boston University Sports Psychology for Coaches Conference presented by BU’s Institute for Coach Education.
Thaddeus Young, Jrue Holiday and the Adaptability of Learning
December 10th, 2010Last night’s Boston Celtics’ game-winner against the 76ers has to be the most analyzed NBA play of the early season. Sebastian Pruiti does a great job breaking down the action. The Celtics run a horns-set for Rondo with KG and Pierce as the screeners. Rondo uses the KG screen, Young switches and Rondo lobs the ball to the rim for KG to dunk.
Learn More by Making More Mistakes
November 19th, 2009I read a quote by Piggy Lambert, John Wooden’s coach at Purdue University, that said, “The team who makes the most mistakes will win the game. Doers make mistakes, and I want doers on my team.”
Many coaches scoff at the comment or attempt to rationalize it, as everyone knows that making mistakes leads to losses. After all, a coach’s job is to limit mistakes, right? Isn’t that why the coach yells at the tall girl to pass the ball after a rebound rather than dribbling or why he runs the same play to get the same shot for his best player over and over rather than taking the chance of another player shooting?
The problem with avoiding mistakes is that players never develop. You cannot learn a skill perfectly. You have to make mistakes in the process of learning to do something new.
A new research paper by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork at UCLA published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition promotes the idea as a necessary part of learning:
People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It’s an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind.
Coaches tend to be in the habit of providing answers, rather than challenging players to find the answers. When I work with a new player or team, they are taken aback when I ask questions and try to get them to discover the answer rather than simply providing the answer to them.
Coaches often assume that players who make mistake after mistake are not listening. However, they may listen without processing or retaining the information. As this paper illustrates, by struggling to answer questions, rather than being told the answer, players retain more information.
By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League