We play a Mon/Wed schedule, which is less than ideal. We won our Monday game though we played without four guys who missed Saturday’s practice. We scored one point in our first six possessions even though we shot five wide-open shots and a lay-up which results in the foul and the free throws. Once we started to hit shots, we jumped out to a 20-point lead and eventually pushed the lead to 30. Then it was like we forgot how to play basketball. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘feedback’
Coaching Frosh Basketball – Week 9
Saturday, January 28th, 2012Specialization and Training Volumes: What does it all mean?
Monday, May 9th, 2011Originally published in Los Angeles Sports & Fitness, May/June 2011.
A recent article from the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports titled “Late specialization: the key to success in centimeters, grams, or seconds (cgs) sports” concluded that athletes who specialized later (mid to late teens) fared better than those who specialized in a sport at an earlier age. In truth, the study focused more on training volume, than specialization. (more…)
Feedback for Teachers and Coaches
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011Last week, I did a presentation on teacher feedback, but I used coaching concepts and an article by Ronald Gallimore and Roland Tharp titled “What a Coach Can Teach a Teacher, 1975-2004: Reflections and Reanalysis of John Wooden’s Teaching Practices.”
Here are the slides for the presentation: (more…)
The Intellectual and Moral Virtue of Coaching Basketball
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010Last week, I saw Shop Class as Soulcraft recommended for incoming college students. As I prepare to re-enter academia, I picked up a copy. Author, philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford includes an extended excerpt from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The excerpt starts with Pirsig taking his motorcycle to a shop. He sets the scene and says that the mechanic barely listens to the piston slap before diagnosing a problem. When Pirsig returns to pick up his motorcycle, now he hears a bigger problem. He points out the problem to the mechanic who manages to create a bigger problem. When he eventually gets on to the road, “the shop had neglected to bolt the engine back into frame; it was hanging on by a single bolt.”
Pirsig writes:
I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil delivery system that had been sheared…
Why did they butcher it so?…They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it.
…But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easy-going – and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, ‘I am a mechanic.’
In reflecting upon Pirsig’s tale, Crwaford points out that the problem (the sheared-off pin) was the same for any mechanic.
But finding this truth requires a certain disposition in the individual: attentiveness, enlivened by a sense of responsibility to the motorcycle. He has to internalize the well working of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.
A coach is, in a sense, a craftsmen. Unfortunately, many coaches and trainers are like Pirsig’s mechanic: idle spectators. They are inattentive. I watched one trainer this summer run a workout and commented to him that he could record his instructions and feedback and simply hit play before each drill or workout because his feedback was impersonal and unspecific.
He touched on simple generalizations: faster, harder, lower, etc. It’s not that his comments were incorrect; most players need to work faster, harder and in a better body position. However, his feedback was ineffectual: it became like white noise in the background of the workout as it lacked meaning to any individual.
Before a coach or trainer can reach a player, he has to understand the player. He has to pay attention. There are some vague generalities that any coach or trainer can utter to sound knowledgeable: bend your knees, hold your follow-through, etc.
However, to impact the player, the feedback must be specific and meaningful. If a player bends his knees, and the trainer sees a shot missed short and instructs the player to bend his knees, is he identifying the problem or is he making an idle assumption based on the result, like Pirsig’s mechanic who barely listened to his motorcycle before reaching his (incorrect) conclusion?
Coaching is more than pontificating to illustrate one’s mastery of basketball terms and concepts. Coaching is a personal profession that depends heavily on one’s ability to analyze and assess an individual’s psyche as much as his biomechanics or sport-skill technique. Once one understands the player (or team), he must have the ability to communicate with the player in a way that impacts the player.
By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League
Join the forum discussion on this post - (3) Posts Examining Traditional Coaching Truths
Saturday, January 30th, 2010Even if you do not coach volleyball, I recommend John Kessel’s blog, as it is as good as anything that you will find on the Internet for coaches. In December, he posted an article titled, “No More Drills, Feedback or Technical Training.” Now, to some, this might eliminate the need for a coach, as those are three primary tools of coaches. However, he makes some great points in regards to all three.
Lately…I have come to the drill development chapter and asked those listening…to simply stop saying the word drill, and start saying the word game, for any exercise they have opted to teach their athletes.
I use this strategy with my players. Rather than do a passing drill, we play an advantage passing game like 6v5 with one player as an all-time offensive player and two teams of five. We play to 100 completed passes. Of course, recently I had to explain the purpose of the game because players were starting to play the game rather than develop skills to transfer to the real game. As Kessel writes:
The best way to do this is to simply listen to your kids, and stop doing drills and start doing games. There is a mind shift you will have to make when you step in front of your athletes and say “OK this is a game with a focus on ‘insert skill/skill combo here’ and the scoring is….”
Nearly my entire practice is games. We play ball handling games (tag), passing games, small-sided full court games to practice defensive and offensive transition, small-sided half-court games to practice ball and player movement and 5v5 scrimmages.
The goal, of course, is not to eliminate improvement or deliberate practice, but to make it more meaningful and game-like. After all, we practice to improve game performance, not for the sake of practicing. Again, as Kessel writes:
Deliberate practice is important. Many of you then should continue to do drills, and not make the change – but you still must make them more gamelike, with more scoring and competitive cauldron tracking, and follow the principles of motor learning….so keep saying drills if you want, just do them better so the kids have success in competition.
As for feedback, Kessel stresses proactive rather than reactive coaching. You see this a lot in games, where coaches try to teach and correct things after they happened in the game, rather than during practice or prior to their occurrence. As Kessel writes:
Coaches spend way too much time talking about what cannot be controlled at all – a past skill performance – and nowhere near enough time focusing on the only thing that athlete can control – the point being played right now. This change I am asking in your teaching to take place, is working to guide your players to focus on what is ahead, mentally and physically.
Dead-balls are a great time to coach during the game. Rather than call over a player and discuss or critique the previous play, prepare the player for the next play. For instance, if a player made a bad pass that led to a turnover and a foul on the lay-up attempt, rather than focus on the past mistake, prepare her for the next possession. What does she need to do next?
Kessel explains this in terms of practice, too:
Why can you, the coach, walk out and get the tip, from your spot sitting on the team bench, yet your players who are much closer right there on the court, cannot save the ball? You are seeing the opponent’s actions BEFORE contact, better than your players can is why. You are reading the CONTEXT of the developing play…your expertise starts to shout “SHE IS TIPPING THE BALL” well before the contact…Yet kids, trained by just “tipping drills” with a coach standing on a box, never get the incredibly important prelim information in real time – they just see a coach tipping over and over…So we must get better at teaching the game between contacts, teaching them why you KNEW that was coming, and teaching them to look wider, through the net, and see the flow of the game. Then give them feedforward when appropriate, so they can learn from you experience and make it their own.
This is so important. Issue 4.5 of the Hard2Guard Player Development Newsletter discusses spatial orientation, analytical thinking and zone offenses. I see spaces in opponent’s zones. I also see players on my team preparing to make a pass and know that we are about to commit a turnover and I cannot change the play in the moment. However, in the next practice, we will discuss why I knew that their was going to be a turnover. I need to teach my players to see and exploit the openings that I see. This is a process, and one that will not be completed this season. It takes time to teach players to see and think the game, but if the coach never puts them in these situation, this learning gets delayed longer and longer.
This goes along with Kessel’s comments about technical training:
In impact this is “seen” even in the webinars, when I ask for the feedforward you would give a player spiking a ball down by their ear, not reaching at all. Clearly bad technique. The coaches provide these most common feedback comments – “Reach;” “Extend:” “Get on top of the ball:” “Keep your elbow up;” and the negative coaches say “Don’t drop your elbow!” They first forget to check for understanding by asking the player to show them the skill without the ball. If they did, my bet is the athlete would show good technique, reaching high, for they understand the technique. The problem is they are not at the right place and time, and simply will not fully extend and hit the ball off their elbow to show the reach you are expecting. The answer is not more technique, it is to come up with ways to guide them to be in the right place and time – in this case earlier and/or faster, which, by making that timing adjustment, will result in the ball being at a higher point in time for contact.
Basically, he says that the player knows the proper way to hit the ball just like most experienced players understand and can demonstrate the proper shooting technique. Missed shots for experienced players are not caused by lack of knowledge about the proper shooting technique, but by poor timing or shot selection: the player stops and never gets balanced or he is late to find his target or he shoots flat-footed because he isn’t ready to shoot on the catch.
Similarly, many players excel in 1v1 moves when going through drills without defense, but when they have to read the defense and make the correct move, suddenly their handle is not as tight and they are less effective. Rather than spending more time engaged in ball handling drills, they need more practice against defenders in the different situations that they face during a game.
Kessel outlines and evolved approach to coaching which focuses on preparing players for game situations and teaching skills based on the players’ true needs and weaknesses, not the easy instructions. By being more judicious and precise with corrections and feedback and centering practice drills in the game, we can develop more well-rounded and skilled players with a greater awareness on the court.
By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts Great Coaching: A Classroom Lesson
Friday, October 16th, 2009Last December, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker titled “Most Likely to Succeed” which compared teacher performance to NFL quarterbacks, because both are nearly impossible to predict in advance.
The article describes several commonalities used to identify great teachers.
“Among them is ‘regard for student perspective’; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. ..’These are three and four-year-olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement, it’s not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They’re leaning forward and wriggling. That’s their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn’t interpret it as bad behavior.”
The first lesson is to allow the freedom to engage with the learning without automatically dismissing the players’ behavior as “goofing off.” Kinesthetic learners, for instance, tend to stand in the back and mimic the action of the coach.
Many see this as disruptive or even disrespectful. However, a good coach understands his players’ learning styles and knows who needs to feel their way through the learning, rather than just hearing instructions or seeing a demonstration.
“Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia group, feedback – a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student – seems to be most closely linked to academic success.”
The second lesson is that making a specific, individual response to a player’s action enhances the player’s learning.
Finally, anchoring the instruction around the children enhances their learning. Rather than randomly instructing a skill, anchor the skill in terms of their performance. If you want to practice help defense, show a small bit of film covering help defense in a previous game to illustrate the need for the instruction and personalize it.
A coach’s ability to instruct and meet the players’ learning needs has a great impact on a coach’s success, and these three ideas should enhance a coach’s effectiveness.
By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League