Practice Like You Play, Play Like You Practice
by John Mietus
There is no avoiding pressure in sports, whether you want to avoid it or not. Coaches of losing teams feel pressure to win and to build success within a program. Coaches of winning teams feel pressure to maintain their success and to live up to the expectations of what they have built. Parents and administrators apply pressure to coaches to perform and to demonstrate exceptional leadership ability. Players are under pressure to perform their best when faced with difficult opposition. Pressure exists, and it is a constant.
The way to teach your players (and yourself) how to deal well with pressure is to operate under it constantly. This allows the players to recognize the difficulty upon them, internalize it, and then find ways to cope with it. Practicing like you play is a supremely effective way to prepare athletes for the rigors of competition. Here are some ideas on how to implement game-like practice:
1. Make Everything Competitive
This works on a number of levels. First and foremost, it is a lot of fun. Athletes love to compete and see where they stand in the pecking order. Practice is the perfect place to develop your pecking order and manage it throughout the season. Players want to win and coaches want an easy time deciding who belongs on the court. Whenever a practice game has a winner or loser, players learn where they stand.
2. Make Practice Game-Like, Not Just Scrimmaging
Game-like practice can take many shapes and forms, but it is critical that all practice involves an offense and a defense, game-like scoring (2 points or 3 points for shots, 1 point for a free throw, etc.), and the objective of winning. There are many ways to formulate small-sided or standard 5v5 games to implement your teaching objectives, but there should never be a drill that does not represent the basic conditions of basketball. This does not mean scrimmage for the entirety of practice. It means set up various types of games and types of conditions to meet your coaching objectives, while the players operate under game-like conditions.
3. Determine What You Value
Whatever you value as a coach, your players will need many repetitions at in game-like practice before they understand how to perform under game conditions. The only way players can achieve this knowledge is if you have a clear, precise set of values that players must operate under every day. It is no good to have players perform a skill a certain way on Tuesday, if by Friday you are not enforcing the same parameters. As the exceptional wrestling coach Dan Gable once said, “If it is important, do it everyday. If it’s not important, don’t do it at all.” Figure out what you value and make sure your players do it every day under game-like practice conditions. This will help them retain and transfer the knowledge to game days.
4. Avoid Drills That Look Perfect
The more a drill looks sharp in practice, the less likely it is teaching players to improve at basketball. Basketball is a chaos sport, full of mistakes and bad decisions on the part of both teams. Your job as a coach is to expose as many of these mistakes and poor decisions as possible in practice so your players can improve their decision making ability. As soon as they master a specific drill, that drill must be tweaked and made more difficult. If the drill cannot be made more difficult, it is not a good drill for your players. As John Wooden once said, “The team that makes the most mistakes usually wins.”
A good example of this theory is the Three Man Weave. This drill has been done as long as basketball has been around and it belongs in the dumpster. No pressure is applied to the players. They simply complete various passes while moving up and down the court in neat patterns. It looks sharp and beautiful, but no learning is taking place. There is no pressure on the athlete to perform any skill against a hostile defense. It occurs under conditions that are not game-like. A coach of the Three Man Weave can only shout at his players to “work harder”, “run faster”, etc. Run faster than they can run? If you are running a drill in practice that does not have clear “next steps”, either figure out how to make it more difficult, or scrap it altogether.
Coaching practices ought to be the absolute greatest joy of coaching. You are the leader of putting young men and women in positions to improve. Every single day you can reinforce the standards that you set and raise them as the team begins to achieve them. Through this method you will gradually raise the ability level of your team and make your team as competitive as it can possibly be.
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