Practice. How do you use it? How do your players view it? Hopefully, they don’t disparage it like Allen Iverson did in this famous interview. As coaches, we understand the importance of it. Some of us may even prefer practice to games. The question I constantly ask is, “Am I getting the most out of practice and what can I improve on?” With “time” constantly being a barrier, I want to make sure my players are being taught efficiently and that the learning sticks. Over the past few summers I have tried to improve my coaching by reading books that deal with time management and teaching techniques that will make my coaching more effective.
This summer I ran across a book that deals with teaching strategies. This book is different than other educational books I have read. Rather than speaking in philosophical terms and broad strokes, the authors give concrete rules and activities that can be incorporated into any educational setting. Now before you tune out, the authors draw many examples from how coaches conduct practice and use video to improve student and teacher results. Because Coach John Wooden is the main focus of their coaching analogies, I found many parts of the book to be applicable.
“Practice Perfect – 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better” by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi provides the teacher/coach with 42 distinct rules to make learning more efficient, lasting, and intentional. The six chapters of the book look at practice and its components in depth and use practical applications to increase the efficiency of teachers/coaches. The main topics of the book include – common assumptions about practice and why to rethink some of them, design of practice and how we can increase its effectiveness, the different forms of modeling, how we give our players feedback and how soon we should do it, the culture that practice represents and creates in our overall program, and the process of making these skills stick.
Once I started reading, I soon found a rule that caused me to rethink the direction of our practices. Rule 2 describes the “80/20” principle. If I were to apply this rule to our offensive practice, I would identify the 20% of the skills that will deliver 80% of our success. We would practice these high priority skills (20%) more than everything else combined. Rather than spend equal amounts of time on all skills, we want to become great at those few things that give us the best results. For example, if the inside zone scheme was our 20% (high priority), we would practice it more than anything else. We would use the same drills until mastery was achieved and then add variations to the same drill, not new drills. We would work double teams and proper hand/eye placements until this was mastered. Once this was accomplished, we would then move on to a double team with movement from the defensive lineman and linebacker. Each week a different variation would be added to the drill depending on the team we faced. We do not want to be efficient in our high priority 20%, but exceptional.
Another offering the book has is how it relates to the hierarchy within a coaching staff. I found “Perfect Practice” to be useful on three levels. First, the head coach or coordinator that is in charge of practice design can benefit personally from chapters one and two. Secondly, many coaching staffs will have younger less experienced coaches. Many of these rules can be used to help or give feedback so their teaching can be better received. Lastly, the coach to player relationship is definitely benefited by these rules. Players want to be successful. If they are correctly instructed and become successful, they will develop a trust for practice and the process. This then creates a belief that practice and not innate ability is the key to success. Practice is not drudgery but becomes important and is a means to a goal.
While many of these rules are not earth shattering revelations, they do provide simple ways of enhancing practice and, therefore, the end result. We have heard that small things often make the biggest differences. Often, it is through a book such as “Perfect Practice” that a coach has the reason to step back and look at how and why he does certain things. In asking these questions, we can tweak practice and obtain great improvement. By adapting one or two of these techniques, we hope to do this and increase our wins in 2014. Hopefully, you can do the same.