Measure Your Success By Your Effort

Footwork Makes You Smarter

Monday, May 24, 2010

The Importance Of Measurable Tasks In Tryouts.

I witnessed an excellent tryout this week for the U17 Provincial Team. After a few warm up drills where players were being accessed for their basic movement, skill, athleticism the structure of the Try-Out began.
The Tryout was set up with an initial footwork drill. The players were shown an offensive move driving from the perimeter to the paint. The footwork was finishing with a 2-step, outside inside foot, pivot back for the reverse jumper creating space on the finish. The footwork was demonstrated, the separation was demonstrated, but the reasoning was not explained. It’s a Tryout, so the details of why are not as important as determining if the players are at the stage that they can pick up on the nuances and perform the skill. There was a series of progression drills that followed with 2 players based on that move, then three players incorporating proper rotations and spacing. Again the reasoning was not explained and I agree with that stance in a Tryout.

The next series went to 2 on 2 drills, where the players if they understood what was going on would then try to incorporate the skills learned in the previous drills into the 2 on 2 games. The Tryout then progressed to 3 on 3 games and eventually 5 on 5 games.

Now truly you can’t expect to see those concepts being applied in the 5 on 5 situations. You can only hope you’ll find a few players that get it. The rest think it’s about them scoring.

At each station there were coaches with clip-boards assessing the situation and taking notes. My hat goes off to that group of coaches.

Brad Rootes - Head Coach
Chris Cheng - Assistant Coach
Fatih Akser - Assistant Coach


Coach Paul

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