As a teacher one of the things I open up each semester with is that all students are guaranteed two things. The first is that they will die at some point. That usually gets their attention. It’s a fact of life and one which there’s nothing you can do about it. Because of advances in medicine we can do amazing things today but at some point life will run its course. The second is that in life each of us will make way more mistakes than we get things right. I follow this up by saying the key is to make less mistakes and that each person ends up should be a far stretch from where they start. In basketball, we can dissect our team’s mistakes endlessly. Any coach who has ever watched film could spend days listing all the things that went wrong. When preparing a scouting report, a coach can list off an endless number of things to be prepared for. This information is great but it can be overwhelming for players. Rather than trying to cover every aspect and angle in a scouting report or when breaking down a film, it is much more effective to limit your points of emphasis to 3 points. At three points players can absorb the information and can work with it. Its also a lot easier for them to remember. Sticking to three points is more likely to lead to greater success because it’s a viable amount of information to apply.
Whenever I, as a coach am working with a player’s skill development I try to apply the same philosophy. As a technician I find this difficult because I see each mistake being made and want to identify and correct each one but I know that divides a player’s focus and if I want them to improve they need to narrow their focus to a couple of key ideas, ones that will make the biggest difference or need the most work. When working to help develop a player’s shooting form I will comment after every shot about the three things. Players will notice as time goes by that they hear less instructional comments with one or more of the points of emphasis and more celebration. These positive comments are equally as important to reinforce the behaviors we are trying to instill as the instructional ones. When a player first starts working on their follow through for example, I might tell them “hold your follow through in place” but as they improve this ability they will hear me say something like “great job holding your follow through in place”.
When it comes to scouting reports and game preparation I take the same approach. Before the game we identify the three points of emphasis we feel are key to our success and our long term development goals. As the game goes on I will coach everything that is happening in the game but during timeouts or between quarters or halves, I will come back to how well we’re taking care of our three points of emphasis. Keeping it simple by not inundating players with information allows them to absorb it much more easily. We are not saying they should ignore anything beyond the three points of emphasis but rather that these are what we are working or focusing on and once they are in place we will worry about other things. On our website we try to provide you with the information in this form so that anyone using this information has a roadmap for development.
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