For the first time since mid-August (save the two weeks around Christmas) I have no athletic practices in the coming week, or weeks, or months. Not sure what I'm going to do with all that spare time....
Oh, how my attitude towards practices has changed over the years. As a young athlete, I looked at practices as something to fill the days between games. I tolerated them. Always showed up and worked pretty hard, but never really poured myself into them. I did the same as a young coach - threw together practice plans that more often than not were a collection of random drills that would bridge the gap between the beginning of practice and the end. In these years games were my passion, the time to really let my skills shine while giving a maximum effort.
Twenty five years of coaching has taught me many things (such as the topic I wrote about yesterday), but none more important than the value of practice time. In fact, I've done a complete paradigm shift with my feelings towards practices and games. I now love going to practice and, many times, despise game days. This mindset kind of began as a senior in high school - except for the games, 'cause I still loved those as a player - when I began to acquire a deeper understanding of how connected my practice performances were to my game performance. After losing sight of that connection in my early years of coaching I have developed an appreciation for practice days that I wish I'd had as a player. And, in turn, my practice appreciation has led to a stronger, even renewed, passion for coaching that I nearly lost not too long ago.
When I view coaching through the lens of my teacher-self, I look at practice time as classroom time, a time for teaching and learning, lessons and skills practice, experiments, trials, and errors. Game days are like test days; when a classroom teacher hands out a test all teaching comes to a halt. I feel the same about games - they are fun for the players, but as a coach, a teacher, games are more like an interruption in the teaching process. A teacher gives a test to students to find out what they have learned and what still needs to be mastered. When a team plays a game the team is being tested - the coach can find out how a group "measures up" to another group, what skills have been improved or mastered, and where the work still needs to be done. Very little teaching gets done during a game - the action is too hard to interrupt, emotions are high, and the chance for reps on any one skill is nonexistent. My biggest advancement as a coach has been my improved ability to use what I see in games to drive the following practices and increase the rate of improvement in my players and teams.
So while the philosophy of improving through game play commonly exists, I strive for player development a very different way - through practices developed using observational data collected in games. Every minute of every practice is planned. Every drill has a purpose, a featured skill. Several skills practiced early will be featured together in a drill later. "Game speed" is a common term. Communication about the "why" of drills and the "how" of skills is nearly constant. Opportunities to use practice skills in game-like scenarios are provided.
Am I a terrific coach? Heavens, no. Are my practice plans perfect? Rarely. Do my teams improve? Always. As do I. Not too many years ago I was ready to hang up my whistle, stop putting myself through the daily grind of two extra hours of teaching. But as my passion for teaching in a classroom has dwindled my passion for teaching in a gymnasium has rekindled. I went from coaching one team a year for two months to this year coaching five different teams in two different sports for eight months. And loved every bit of it. Eight months of planning practices gets a bit draining, but walking onto that practice court and finding ways to help players improve never ages. Already looking forward to draping that whistle around my neck for the start of season 26.
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