Learning is problem solving
In his discussion of practice and problems with coach education with Stuart Armstrong, Dr. Bailey said that all "learning is problem solving", and isolated technique practice often lacks a problem to solve. He differentiated learning and practice: Learning is the acquisition of new or novel behaviors; practice is automating those behaviors. Much of what we do is practice, but not necessarily learning, and often this appears to be intentional. Many coaches appear to believe that practice is a time to eliminate mistakes and narrow potential actions; for instance, many coaches argue that shooters should use one method of footwork because it reduces mistakes. Many believe that the permanent pivot foot is the best method because they believe that it reduces traveling violations. Therefore, practice is not directed toward learning new actions, but refining old actions.
In games, players solve problems. If I want to pass, I decide to whom I will pass, when I will pass, and which type of pass I will use. I may have to adjust for my defender or my teammate's defender or potentially a help defender. My pass is not pre-determined; it is a solution to the problem of passing to a teammate in a constantly changing environment.
In practice, I practice a two-hand chest pass in a stationary partner passing drill, and I refine this skill until my technique is perfect, but I am not learning to solve the problem that I will face in a game. Practicing the technique does not help me decide when or how or to whom to pass. Ultimately, these decisions change the technique, and most passes require a different technique than the perfect technique that I mastered in the two-line partner passing drill.
We often discuss progressions of drills, and common methods progress in a linear fashion: stationary chest pass; stationary bounce pass; stationary overhead pass; stationary pass with on-ball defender and stationary target (monkey in the middle); undefended chest pass with movement (two-person shuffle passing); undefended chest pass with patterned movement (three-person weave); etc. Each progression adds something new and builds on the previous drill in a progressive manner. Once we have learned these passes, we practice these passes in the same drills to refine the techniques rather than moving to more contextual environments to solve problems.
In addition to progressions, one thing that is lost in the games vs drills argument is the ability to regress. I may start with an advantage passing drill rather than a stationary partner passing drill. An advantage drill does not replicate a game perfectly, but it incorporates some game context: defenders, movement, anticipation, decision-making, etc. The game creates problems to solve, and these solutions ultimately require the use of various techniques.
As I watch the players solve these problems, I may notice a technical issue. Often, the problem is a lack of pivoting; players twist at the waists rather than pivoting or, when pressured, they lean back onto their back foot. Either solution likely leads to a turnover, but the issue is not passing, but pivoting. More passing drills are unlikely to solve these mistakes, despite the mistakes manifesting themselves when the players pass.
Therefore, I regress and use a pivoting drill. This may or may not include passing. After completing this drill or drills, I return to the game to see if they have improved in their abilities to solve the problems. There is a chance that they now excel; if so, I may have to add to the game to create more difficult and more complex problems to continue their learning. There also is a chance that improved pivoting has highlighted another problem, and I use a new regression to address the new problem.
Too often, we teach counters and fakes to players without a defender to fake or a reason to counter. In a stationary partner passing drill, why use a wrap-around bounce pass? In a game where the objective is to get the ball to the block, I see the utility of a wrap-around bounce pass. Now I understand. As a coach, if the players struggle to make that pass to the post player, I regress and demonstrate the pass. Because they understand its purpose, the learning generally is quicker than if I teach this pass in my linear progression without any defense or reason to use the pass.
Refining skills is not wrong. Players should spend time refining and improving their techniques and movements. However, success in games is determined by the skills, and the coupling of the perception and action. Techniques change when a player is confronted with different problems: Faster speeds, defenders, reduce spacing, reduced time, etc. Because these techniques change under game constraints, more time should be invested in learning and practicing the skills in the game context.
Purposeless Training
A coach posted this video of young girls jumping over a 12-inch hurdle before shooting. Before I interjected, other coaches or trainers had supported this coach for teaching the proper fundamentals of shooting. There is nothing proper or fundamental about the shooting in this video. This is a major problem with coaches and trainers in the Instagram generation. Therefore is nothing to support in this video.
First, last week, I listened to Dr. Mike Young describe his categorization of plyometrics. Generally, people use height as a measure of intensity, but jumping onto a box, regardless of its height, is less intense than jumping and landing on the same level or landing from a box. As Dr. Young described, when there is movement —horizontal or lateral — the demands increase. Similarly, when repeating jumps, rather than performing single jumps, the demands increase.
In this instance, the girls jump laterally and presumably attempt to repeat their jump, as they jump over the hurdle and into a shot. Whereas the hurdle is only 12 inches, which is not particularly high, the combination of demands is clearly too much for these girls. Their landing techniques from the initial jumps are atrocious, potentially predisposing the girls to injury, and the landings do not put the girls in a position from which they can shoot competently. The entire purpose of shooting footwork is to prepare a player to shoot with balance; in this case, the footwork prevents this.
Second, the hurdle changes the girls' attentional focus. Rather than looking at the basket, where they attempt to shoot, they look down at the hurdle as they jump. With their eyes focused on the ground, their posture changes. The demands change the desired attentional focus and posture of shooting. Sure, the drill may be hard, but what are the players learning? They practice something that they would not want to replicate in the game. If this attentional focus and posture transfers to the game, this would be referred to as negative transfer; in that sense, the best case scenario is that this drill does not transfer at all. If the best case scenario is no transfer of the drill to the game, what are we doing?
Third, the coach identified this as a drill to teach "the turn" in shooting. Regardless of one's views on turning before or during one's shot, or what "square" means, this drill has nothing to do with the turn. Tom Nordland is the first shooting coach who I heard advocate for a severe turn, and he started this instruction with feet on the ground in a typical form shooting drill. Jumping over a hurdle, or jumping in general, has nothing to do with turning one's body or squaring one's body to shoot. The turn refers to the direction that one faces as she starts her shot, and the motion involved after one leaves the ground to shoot. These girls are practicing pre-shot movement; in reality, the girls are practicing what is referred to as "the hop" (which is incorrect terminology, as shooters land on two feet, and a two-foot landing is a "jump"). A young girl (or anyone really) should not jump 12 inches off the ground to "hop" into her shot, and these girls clearly cannot utilize the elastic or plyometric benefits of the "hop" because they lack the requisite strength. To teach these girls to use the "hop" in their shots, the first step would be to teach them to land from a jump correctly, and the second step would be to add strength to utilize the elasticity in the "hop". Otherwise, they are shooting with less balance and producing less force on a shot that is already beyond their strength levels because of the height of the basket relative to their size and strength.
When I replied on Twitter because I could not bite my tongue at this ludicrousness that put these young girls at risk of injury, the poster asked for a better way to teach the turn. Again, regardless of one's perspective on the turn, if you want to see the turn occur naturally, ask players to run and stop quickly; the turn is the same basic movement as Lee Taft's hockey stop. It is natural. When moving forward, and stopping quickly, athletes turn toward perpendicular to their movement to brake. Taft's hockey stop tends to be a full perpendicular turn or a 90-degree turn compared to the pre-stop movement; the 90-degree turn facilitates a quicker change of direction if one is transitioning from a sprint in one direction to a sprint in the other direction (picture a 5-10-5 shuttle or a suicide drill). Because nobody has advocated a full 90-degree turn in relation to the basket when shooting, the "turn" for shooting is somewhere between a normal jump stop where the player faces in the same direction as the pre-stop movement and a hockey stop. Again, this is not something that has to be taught; every player turns to some degree when stopping their forward movement unless directed to do something else. In a suicide drill, ask players to sprint to the line and back pedal to the baseline, and unless they have been taught a good lunge stop, they will turn.
When players turn to shoot in games, much of this turn is due to the deceleration. If you watch many shooters, they turn more on jump shots than free throws? Why? If it was because of elbow alignment or whatever the various systems teach, why would their turn differ? Shouldn't they align their elbow on free throws too? I believe that players turn more due to deceleration; the better players actually turn more, as their impulse is less when decelerating prior to initiating their shots because they have better strength and body control. A young player who lacks strength, such as these girls, cannot possibly shoot with the quickness of a player such as Steph Curry because they cannot control that amount of speed and force (if they could generate it).
Finally, the coaches and trainers praising this coach on Twitter are ignorant or irresponsible. If they do not understand that this is useless and potentially dangerous training for these girls, they are ignorant. If they understand that it is potentially dangerous, and praise the coach anyway because he is following their "shooting system", they are irresponsible. One of the major problems in coaching, training, and sports today is the Instagram culture; training is based on getting likes on Instagram. We are not training the client in front of us as much as we are promoting ourselves or our business to the masses. Every drill is an advertisement, not a carefully designed activity to solve a problem for the player or players. In this self-marketing world, boring drills do not grab attention. We have to make the boring drills look hard; rather than having these girls do a basic form shooting drill, which would be more appropriate, although probably beyond their level because of the basket height, we have them jump over a hurdle in order to post on Instagram. Parents, players, and coaches need to be more discerning when they look at these videos and realize the complete uselessness of many of these drills, and, in this and similar cases, the irresponsibility of the drill.
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