Coaching year 1, a reflection, pt. 2: Practices/msc.

Anri and I spent an entire afternoon crafting a detailed season plan. What we would teach, the order we would teach it in, how long we would spend on each concept. Obviously, it didn't go quite this way, but I still think the process was important. It was kind of beautiful to watch the ideas click together into modules of learning, even if they didn't work or click for our players as easily as we would like.

Practices started with a lot of coach participation, which we ramped back as the players started to be able to challenge each other.  For this section, I'd like to talk about how we go from learning concepts in drills to applying concepts, I'll wonder why it's so hard, and who knows, by the time I finish writing this, maybe I'll have an idea.

Concept: Open Side Defensive Footwork

Introduction: Hollywood squares
We spent the first few practices doing hollywood squares, trying to teach them how to turn differently on offense and defense, and just show the muscles how to turn in an athletic way. These started to look good pretty quickly, and we didn't actually have to spend as many weeks doing them as we thought we would for them to look good.

Bridge drill: Triangle defense (see: schmearing drill but without the focus on schmearing).
The effect with this drill was similar, the first few times it was rough, but eventually they started to get it.  The footwork improved and we did this drill on repeat for weeks.

Adding Variance: When they started to just go through the motions, we added a wrinkle, the offensive player could change direction whenever they wanted. They still had to run the triangle but not at the exact angle anymore. This slight reduction in predicability made all the difference, the quick adjustment that happened to the first two iterations of footwork just didn't come. Eventually we could tell that they were bored, even if they weren't good at it yet, so we had to move on.

After our first tournament, it was clear that the application to the field was not happening. We tried revisiting the triangle drill but with the people in line set up like a vert stack, trying to bring their attention to what this looked like. I'm not sure that we accomplished what we wanted with this, but they definitely understand the concept.

Applying concepts is hard. All I can really hope for with this is that they understand what it means to play defense on the open side. We tried to really hammer this home. I wanted to focus on it partially because I didn't understand it until partly through my sophomore year. It just wasn't explained. People would say "wrong side" and I didn't get it.  I hope that is not the case for any of this year's players.

For the rest of this I want to focus on some questions/thoughts I heard from players throughout the season:

The usual frustrations were there. "We don't have enough people to scrimmage so how can we really apply the concepts?". This is perennial, B team struggles with numbers, it sucks.

We didn't really do much conditioning at practice due to field space, so they only ran 300s during practice 2x. After the second time: "Why is A team so much better at these than we are?". This is an accurate observation. Only one B teamer was close to the front of the pack, and everyone else was behind almost everyone on A team.  We talked about the footwork of turning for 300s, and then about athleticism.

"What is wrong with my flick?" "why can't I get this to go flat?" etc.
These questions were hard because for the first few months I thought I could answer them. It felt like "hm if maybe you change your elbow angle, shift your weight, etc., there would be some magic click." I realized a tad too late, that while I can help prevent bad habits with corrections, a lot of the time the real answer is that you just need to throw it 500 more times, 5000 more times, making your own corrections based on what you see. When I think back to learning different throws, I remember getting a few corrections, from coaches, but what I remember a lot more was reps. Reps and reps and reps. Reps until the throw did exactly what I wanted it to from a standstill, reps until it also did what I wanted after catching a strike, or a dishy, or an around.  One thing i'd like to try if I coach next year is to give throwing corrections when something looks "wrong", but not when it just "doesn't look quite right".