In my first 2 years as a head coach, I made one mistake after another.
In reading The Coach’s Guide to Teaching by Doug Lemov, one really stands out.
Doug makes an assumption that most coach’s think week to week during the season. He was right about me.
After a game or weekend of games, I would sit down alone or with my assistant and go through the video. We would both have notes from the game(what we saw live) and compare them to what we saw on the video.
Doesn’t sound so bad? This part wasn’t the mistake.
Short-Term Thinking= Short Term Results
The issue is we were too short term in our thinking and teaching. We would talk about 1-3 issues in our game that we needed to address the next week at practice.
We would execute on that. The team would improve the next weekend in what we worked on. It was reactive. It was unintentional. Two qualities we don’t want in our players. So why are we coaching from this place of lack?
Short-term “performance” does not equal long-term memory consolidation and therefore long-term development. Development is intentional, it’s a proactive process.
Do you ever read information that just kicks you in the teeth? You can’t believe you were doing things a certain way with such certainty for so long, then a few sentences come along in a book and you question why the hell you never thought of doing it that way.
Long Term Teaching= Long Term Retention
Instead of this short-sided thinking that corrects the problem for the next weekend of games, he suggests teaching those concepts over the course of a “unit.” (4-6 week period of intentional teaching)
Where Short Term Goes Wrong
If I were to go back and look at my game cards or would have journaled my notes from watching games live and watching the corresponding video, I would have noticed a trend.
Note to Self: Start writing and then save your journal about live and taped games. Your story would be way better right now.
Let’s say we struggled with our forechecking principles on the first weekend of the year. The second weekend of the year, forechecking would not have been a noticeable weakness because we addressed it hard in the short term. This creates a “performance improvement” for the following weekend. Everything “looks” good.
But then we don’t address forechecking in Week 3 because Week 2 presented different issues that we hammered at practice. Without making players retrieve forechecking information for that week, it starts to decay in their memory.
All of a sudden forechecking is on my game card again in Week 4 as a weakness. And I’m mad at the players because we just worked on it 2 weeks ago…
Adjust
This isn’t how learning works Drew. Be mad at yourself next time for not teaching it as part of a unit over a 4 week period.
That is what I would have told my former self.
The lesson is about “teaching” the game. Longer more intentional “unit teaching” over the short term “we sucked at this, hammer it until it looks better teaching.”
Edit: 8/9/2023- There’s also a lesson in the paradox of all this:
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