To Teach or To Play

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 ball a fundamental skill like running or jumping or is it a sport-specific that must be trained differently? Do we suffer so many arm injuries because we treat it as a special skill and not a fundamental skill?"

His full comments are after the jump and you can read the original article here.

Deliberate Play > Deliberate Practice

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 players, working on them alone or even with a trainer if you would like, and then working on them in real-game like situations that are unstructured - like pick-up games, 3 on 3, or open gym runs.

The quote below talks about a study done comparing the results of 18 weeks of deliberate practice vs 18 weeks of deliberate games:

Greco, Memmert and Morales (2010) studied the difference in tactical performance improvement in 18 60-minute sessions of deliberate play versus traditional basketball practice in 10 to 12-year-olds. The deliberate play group played small-sided games and advantage/disadvantage games, whereas the traditional group engaged in a more typical practice which included a “large amount of structured game exercises with exact guidelines…and more isolated activities of skill training (e.g. dribbling, passing)” (Greco et al. 2010; p.851). 

Whereas the traditional group showed no improvement, the deliberate play group showed significant improvement in tactical intelligence and tactical creativity. Tactical intelligence referred to the ability to find the ideal solution to a given problem and is referred to as tactical decision-making or game skill. Tactical creativity referred to varying, rare, and flexible decisions in different situations. Tactical intelligence was knowing where to pass the ball, when or where to drive, and when to shoot: good decision making. Tactical creativity referred to the special plays: instead of seeing the obvious open player, the player created a better opportunity for a different player. These skills developed through deliberate play in 18 weeks, but not traditional practices.

Its important to get repetition to learn and for motor learning purposes, but the game is about decision making, choices and feel.  Its about spacing, movement and making very quick decision on the fly.  As state in the quote below, deliberate playing helps improve skill at the same rate as deliberate practice:  

Greco et al. (2010) noted that motor skill development was not measured, and one could surmise that the traditional practice led to improved shooting or dribbling. However, they cited Magill (1998) who found that implicit learning (i.e. deliberate play) improved motor skill execution as well or better than explicit instruction (i.e. traditional practice). Greco et al. (2010) discounted the likelihood of greater improvement in motor skill execution by the traditional group, although it was not measured.

Teach the skills, give them opportunities to get their 'reps,' but the real learning and growth comes from the playing.  Make sure that they hit the 10,000 hours of the 'playing reps.'

3 on 3 - Small Sided Game to Grow the Game

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 play a lot of 3 on 3 games using that action into live.  It really teaches our kids how to get open when the defense knows what they are going to do, and how to read the defense to turn small advantages into big advantages.

Whether you are a youth coach trying to teach the game and getting kids to fall in love with this great sport, or a varsity high school coach competing for a state championship, incorporating 3 on 3 games into your practices can really help your players and teams grow.