A Coach's Diary

This comment comes from Brian McCormmick and a post of his on the debate between which comes first: teaching the skill or playing the game.   The gist of the argument is that only recently and only in sports do we teach the skill first before the play.  Growing up, we just played.  We would play countless basketball games at the park and at recess before we ever played in our first league.  We learned the game by playing. Today, we teach and give skills before we let the kids play.  We teach and rep skills and techniques, then we have them practice the skills in controlled, game-like situations.  As Brian states in his comment, we don't learn by teaching the technique first in any non-adult led activity.  We didn't learn how to crawl, walk or run by receiving explicit instructions - we learn by doing.  Once we learn, we refine our technique to improve our performance.   Two questions that he asked below was, " Is throwing a bal...

The popularization of the 10,000 hours idea has had a real affect on the sports training industry and youth sports in general; both positive and negative.  Athletes now are getting much more personal and individualized instruction at younger ages, and parents are shelling anywhere from $30 - $100 per hour for specialized and individual instruction.  While practice and repetition is important to growth and skill development, the article here from Brian McCormick on the importance of deliberate play uses studies to show that 10,000 hours of deliberate playing time is a better way to create better basketball players than 10,000 hours of deliberate practice time. Jean Cote defines deliberate play as unstructured, play-oriented situations: basically, going to the park and playing in your pick-up games.  As the article states, deliberate play is the most effective way to improve as a basketball player.  There is nothing like seeing new moves from your favorite p...

The video above from Brian McCormick emphasizes the benefits of playing more 3 on 3 to develop your players.  This video focuses on developing youth basketball players, but the benefits can definitely be seen with your more experienced varsity and college players as well.  Geno Auriemma once said that basketball is just a game of 1 on 1, 2 on 2, and 3 on 3 situations.  Creating 3 on 3 games in your practices and part of your skill development gets players more meaningful touches helping them stay more engaged, thus helping them improve quicker. We like to incorporate different actions that we use in our offense and different actions of the teams that we will play against when we play 3 on 3 in practice.  If we are playing a team that uses the UCLA hi-post action, we will play 3 on 3 and start with a pass to the wing, UCLA cut and then play live, emphasizing guarding the actions how we plan to guard it in games.  We like to use DHO into ball-screens, so we ...