Are You Any Good at Player Development?

A Workout Tool - Plan but Stay in the Pocket

Have a plan, but know that no plan survives first contact.

On any given day, a player may be feeling confident, shooting well and locked in. They may also be failing, frustrated and feeling bad. They may have something else going on in their lives. And so you've got to be willing to adjust the plan so that they always leave the workout with the knowledge, the deep belief, that the training was good for them. They must know they got better and have a deep commitment to do it again tomorrow.

So if your training plan is getting them so frustrated and so down that they actually leave thinking - I got worse - then you’ve got to change your plan. If they're crushing it, and not making mistakes, then the plan’s not challenging enough for them. In either case, you’re not in the pocket. The great trainers find the pocket and stay in it the most. The majority have no feel for the pocket and just do drills without teaching or intent. Get in the pocket.

Because when you do, players leave knowing they got better at something. I’ll share a few progressions we do as an example.

We started with BONES ball handling and movement. You can find it in our Drill Book in the SAVI Coaching App.

I’m working with Camille. She's a pro player. Our plan is to improve balance and posture while moving with the ball. We're going to progress into trying to get better at balance and posture into shooting. But, for this session, we're going be doing it all off the dribble. She plays FIBA 3×3 and has to do a lot off the dribble.

We begin working on starts and stops. We’re working on different types of movement into our balance and posture. We're working on activating our eyes and our hands as we’re pocketing the dribble, eyes for our shot, hands for protection or pass. She improves the posture and movement, we need to add challenge to stay in the pocket.

Even as I add challenge, we stay locked into one theme for the workout. Our training key is I’m tying every piece of feedback to the same theme, posture, movement and balance. So once she’s activating her off hand, gets sharp with start - stops & forceful with her movement. Then we move the pocket and start going into our finishes. We add in our stretch finishes, because we needed more challenge to stay in the pocket. Focus is the same thing, we're just hitting it from a different more challenging way now.

We achieve a goal, a make streak or a score for time. It’s hard to get it the first time, there’s challenge, but its achievable. We’re in the pocket.

She get’s the target, so next we're adding an adversary, Here’s the key, if we progress too fast, they get frustrated and we lose them. If we progress too slow, they get bored and we lose them.

Principle: Have a plan, but adjust to stay in the pocket. The pocket of appropriate challenge.

Once we added D, we had to stop, it was too much, we lost footwork, we lost our balance. So we backed off the adversary and did some more slow technique, we got it dialed. We got back in the pocket.

This part’s hard, when we fail and have to teach again, we lost energy in the technical stuff. We needed to get the energy back up, we were out of the pocket.

HOW?

COMPETE! Whenever you need energy you compete, so we went into live one on one. Still on plan, balance, posture from starts and stops. But we just go live out of it. With a focus on ONE THING!

Now that we have the energy up, we’re betting better, we’re in the pocket. We have 10 minutes left. I wanted us to get 100 shots each when I made the plan. But because we had to backtrack there wasn’t enough time, so we adjust the plan, we lower the target and re-focus our shooting to balance, posture out of starts and stops.

They get it, they improve, we have high energy and we achieve the plan.

Here’s the lesson, the plan isn’t your notes, your times or the amount of reps. The plan is improve the thing you want to focus on. The best way to acheive the plan is to stay in the challenge pocket. Simple, and simplicity wins.

High energy. High clarity. High standards.

That’s SAVI

I’m Tyler and I’m here to help

My friend Edward and I did a podcast breaking down lessons from the NBA, check it out here.