Your Practice Makes My Practice Better

I meant to post this over the weekend, but got in a bit of a funk and just really fell into doing nothing but some soul searching and the like.  Soul searching may be too intense a word, but there was a lot of thinking about how I've managed my team this winter.  In a better mood, so back to posting.

A few weeks ago I decided to take Coach D up on his offer to come sit in on one of his college practices.  The intent of my visit was to get a better way to practice.  I knew I couldn't really use any of the drills with my team at this point in the season, so my focus was on the flow and how practice is run for a nationally competitive team.

Well worth the couple of hours that afternoon.  I did see a drill I could use in a few weeks, but more importantly I saw little things that can be used at any level.  There was no goofing off, but it wasn't completely militaristic either.  Just guys putting in work.  If a pass was supposed to be a bounce pass because that's how the coach said it should be - it had to be a bounce pass or they did it again.  If they missed a lay up or caused a turnover, they had to run baseline to baseline.  But it had flow, which is the most important part.  It made sense.

So I've taken that stuff into my practices.  Missed lay ups and turnovers now result in sprints.  One player did ask me why and I just told him to think about what happens in games - if you turn the ball over you have to get back on defense, so think of it as sprinting back and getting a stop to try again.  He was satisfied, and now I don't even have to say it.  The players tell each other to run, unless the player realizes it first and just takes off on his own.  I was surprised to see one player throw a bad pass to his teammate who bobbled it out of bounds run with no one telling him to.  When he got back, he must have seen the confusion on his teammates faces, and just said, "I threw him a bad pass so it was my fault too." Accountability is a good little side effect to have!  I've also made sure that my practices are more structured.  It's not at the level as the practice I visited, but it definitely feels like it flows better. There's less time transitioning and more time working.  If I say I want bounce passes, and some one throws a chest pass, it gets corrected and we redo the rep.  If it's still not done correctly, it's considered a turnover, and that has helped to improve the attention to detail.

Seems players aren't the only ones who need to go to practice.  You can learn a lot watching other practices. I need to find a few more opportunities to check out Coach D's practices.