Since Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Coyle and others popularized the research of K. Anders Ericsson and others, 10,000 has become the number which most quickly grabs one’s attention. Seemingly everyone has heard of the 10,000-hour rule, and many see it as “The Way” or “The Answer.”
10,000 hours has been applied most often to skill development in sports or music. However, can the rule (or at least the concept behind the rule) be applied to coaching? Is coaching a skill?
Perusing articles and message boards, people appear to value experience as much as anything else when evaluating a coach. If experience is vitally important, that suggests that coaching is something learned (a skill) and not just a talent or aspect of one’s personality (innate).
Therefore, if we agree that one learns to coach, it is safe to assume that the 10,000-rule applies to coaching as well as it does to shooting or any other skill (note: I do not believe that there really is a magic number, and once you pass the threshold, you are a master at the skill; however, I believe in the general concept that it takes lots of deliberate practice to develop a skill).
If it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert coach, what is the best way to accumulate those hours? I recently wrote about summer camps, and my experience with the average summer-camp coach. When a young coach asks me how to improve as a coach, I recommend working summer camps. I do not believe that summer camps are the best learning environment for players. I also do not believe that a coach is going to learn much from the other coaches or even the Head Coach at the camp; if they do, it is a bonus.
Instead, I recommend coaching at camps because it is deliberate practice. Where else can a coach get so much practice in such a short amount of time? When I worked the Oklahoma University camp, it differed from many camps. We had try-outs, drafted players and had practice time with our team. I felt that I should use the practice time to develop the players’ skills, as they attended camp to improve, not to learn my fancy offense. However, I wanted to have some kind of organization. I instituted a Sacramento Kings-like mini-offense. We spent almost no time practicing the offense; instead, like with Blitz Basketball, I designed drills that practiced basic skills – lay-ups, shooting, cutting, passing, dribble hand-offs, etc – that taught the pattern of the offense. Most of the drills were two or three-person drills, and every drill focused on passing and finishing with some kind of shot, all done at a game tempo.
From a coaching standpoint, that type of practice is invaluable. I taught a very basic, stripped-down offense; created drills to teach the offense and develop skills; instructed during the practices; and provided feedback during games.
At other camps, like the Stanford University, University of Arizona and Sly Park camps where I essentially ran individual workouts at lunchtime, I taught basic skills to different players. I devised new drills and new progressions of drills. I gave feedback. I communicated with athletes. I thought about ways to help a player who did not understand the drill or understand my explanation.
At the Superstar Camp, I coached a player who was deaf. I had to change my coaching to accommodate her, and it made me more aware of my instruction and communication skills. When I coached a Nike Camp in China, none of the players spoke English, so I had to teach primarily through demonstrations, which forced me to understand the way that they saw me and be very precise with every movement.
This is the same type of deliberate practice that we preach to our players. Are there other ways to develop or to accumulate the requisite practice?
Dan Coyle also writes about the importance of staring, which I wrote about in relation to shooting. He suggests that staring provides the opportunity for mimicry, feedback and motivation.
Some coaches take this route to develop their coaching expertise. They train under a master coach and learn by watching the coach. However, is learning by watching enough?
Many assistants do very little actual coaching. I have watched Division 1 practices where the assistants barely utter a word during the entire practice or workout. They learn by watching the coach, but how far does that learning go? Is learning by staring as effective as deliberate practice?
Aspiring coaches need both. Watching a great coach or working for a great coach provides a great learning opportunity. However, nothing replaces finding one’s own voice as a coach. A college program has roughly 480 hours of practice time during a season (6 months x 4 weeks per month x 20 hours per week by rule). How much deliberate practice does an assistant coach get during those 480 hours?
In back-to-back summers, I worked between 8 and 10 camps per summer. The camps lasted between 6 hours and 12 hours per day and usually run for 4 days. That’s somewhere between 192 hours and 480 hours of deliberate practice.
Working one summer of camps provides a similar or better opportunity for deliberate practice than a season as a college assistant coach, as well as the possibility to get lucky and work a camp where you can watch a great coach teach, as with Rick Majerus at the University of Utah camps.
During my first two seasons as a college assistant, I coached AAU teams during the off-season (not allowed at the Division 1 level). Rather than settling for the two hours of off-season on-court time allowed by NCAA rules, I coached youth teams, ran practices, coached games, devised drills, etc. Blitz Basketball is based on the spring that I spent coaching a Hoop Masters AAU team after spending the winter as an assistant at U.C. Santa Cruz.
NCAA rules for basketball make it more difficult for assistant coaches to accumulate the deliberate practice necessary to reach expertise. In other sports, coaches are allowed to coach youth club teams, train youth players and more. I know a D1 volleyball coach who spends his summer coaching an AVP beach volleyball team. Think of the extra hours of deliberate practice that he accumulates working with a pro team that practices 3-4 hours a day, every day or plays 2+ matches a day in a tournament. Compare that to a basketball coach confined to his office making recruiting calls and assisting with 2 hours of workouts per week.
I talked to a player last week who said that his college coach – a coach who just received a hefty pay raise and is considered a great, knowledgeable coach – did not teach. If a player made a mistake, the coach substituted the player and told the player that he made a mistake, but never offered instruction, never explained the correct response and never devised practice drills to correct the error. The coach didn’t teach.
Is this a surprise? The coach spent his entire career at the Division 1 level. In 10 years or so as an assistant, how much deliberate practice has the coach acquired? The coach learned from a Hall of Fame-caliber mentor, so there is significant learning from the view of staring, but the coach is short on practice, especially compared to someone like the volleyball coach who spends his entire off-season coaching other athletes, continually informing his coaching through continued deliberate practice.
Is it any wonder that the coaches who are considered the best teachers are either older or untraditional? NCAA Women’s champion Gary Blair started as a high school coach and worked his way up the proverbial ladder. However, he was a head coach at each stop, meaning that he was the one accumulating the deliberate practice. University of Michigan Head Coach John Beilein worked up from the D3 to D2 to D1 level as a Head Coach. Even a famed assistant coach like St. John’s University’s Mike Dunlap has spent a great deal of time during his off-seasons coaching at camps, like directing the Pete Newell Big Man Camp or working at Tim Grgurich’s camp in addition to head coaching stops at the D2 and D3 levels and in Australia.
If we believe that coaching is a skill (learned) and not a talent (innate), and we believe in the 10,000-hour rule for our players’ skill development, it stands to reason that we should believe in the 10,000-hour rule in terms of our development of coaching expertise, which means seeking out opportunities for deliberate practice (it also means that we need to have patience with new head coaches, as they likely are far short of the hours required to reach mastery or expertise as a coach).
10,000 hours and Coaching Expertise http://t.co/bMrhzvB
10,000 hours and Coaching Expertise http://t.co/d4BcqKB (REALLy good!)
Coaching is definitely learned, but at the high school level, almost none of what really needs to be learned involves Xs and Os — or even skill development.
The most important thing a high school team must do is play hard. A team that plays hard for 32 minutes will get much closer to its potential than one that doesn’t, but it’s not easy to get every year’s team to play as hard as possible. For example, getting an undertalented team that is going to lose 20 games to play hard takes a different set of adjustments by the coach than getting a supertalented team that will win 20 games by just showing up to play hard.
The more teams coached, as long as the coach pays attention, is honest and admits mistakes, the better the coach should be.
I did not mean to imply, if I did, that the X’s and O’s is everything. In fact, it’s probably easier to learn X’s and O’s through staring than it is to learn other important skills like motivating athletes, preparing teams, communicating with different types of athletes, etc.
IMO you need both. I believe part of it is innate, as you are saying in the above reply, such as motivation. Some coaches are just better at this because of the personality they have. And to a degree you can learn motivational techniques, but some people are just better “used care salesmen” than others. As far as the teaching part, you are absolutely correct that until you are teaching practice (and if you have to plan practice as well and then deviate from it) it will be hard for you to understand how to teach the skills to each individual players need. This is what seperates an average coach from a very good coach. Alot of coaches can get players to play hard, but until you can teach them how to play IMO you are just an average coach. In HS, getting a team to play hard is a huge part of the game, but IMO what I have witnessed and heard and read over and over from websites to other coaches is that a coach is a good coach if he can get his players to play hard. I dont know if this is just coaches patting each other on the back or if they really believe it. But I disagree, it is simple to get a team to play hard. If you cant get a group to play hard, they shouldnt be there or you shouldnt be there. The best coaches will be good teachers, that know how to break down skills into appropriate drills that the player can practice over and over. I do have to disagree as well that a HS coach dosent need to be good with X and O’s, that is another part of the game that seperates the great from the good IMO. Most HS games are 10-12 point game differential (5-6 baskets), and I believe a coach can have this much impact on a game such as good BLOBS, SLOBS, and Special Situations. At one of the HS coaches I coached at we scored between 6-10 points a game on layups off of BLOBS and SLOBS. I also think some of the best coaching is in youth basketball, if the coach actually has some basketball knowledge and is not out there to just be there. That may be funny to some, but you have to break down everything and understand exactly what they are thinking, where they are coming from mentally, physically, and emotionally. You have so many different levels at the youth age as well. Youth coaches get blasted, but I applaud a good youth coach that is actually coaching and teaching fundamentals. For a coach to be able to do this with young players, he have a wide skills set. I have coached at many different levels, and coaching youth is the most challenging IMO.
First, I do believe part of coaching is innate and depends upon one’s personality. I mention that to a certain extent at the beginning of “The Coaching Process.”: http://developyourbballiq.com/the-coaching-process/
Second, I do not believe that motivation is a “used car salesman.” Actually, I think children and teenagers see through people who are faking it pretty quickly. They tend to have pretty keen B.S. detectors. The ability to motivate has more to do with the ability to relate to the players and understand the player’s perspective and their purpose: http://learntocoachbasketball.com/free-play-the-ins-and-outs-of-motivation
Finally, I don’t want to discount all the elements of coaching at any level. However, at the high school level, talent wins. I’m a pretty fare high school coach. Last season, in all honesty, we probably beat 2-3 teams who had more talent than us and lost to 1 team who we probably would have beaten 8 times out of 10. That’s 3-4 games where you could argue coaching played a role (out of 25 games). My bigger effect, I believe, was in the every day mundane situations at practice. The environment that I created, the drills that we did, the confidence that the girls developed through the practices, the mindsets that I tried to develop, etc. – that was evident, I think, in our improvement throughout the season, as there was a noticeable difference when we played teams for a second time. We ran one offense, one defense, no SLOBS and only 4-5 BLOBS, and we were not very good at any of them. We had no press break and no zone offense. We certainly did not win because of our X’s and O’s, and we won the league championship (we were honestly the third most talented team). In probably 19/25 games, I could have told you the outcome before the tip based solely on talent levels. X’s and O’s had very little to do with the variation between teams; however, I believe the practice environment – from the structure to expectations to communication to feedback – accounted for a good deal of the variation between teams, but not as much as the talent levels. We lost our second game of the year by 25 points and our team thought we did a great job because the previous season, they lost by 40+. No amount of coaching genius was going to account for that talent discrepancy. It is what it is at the high school level where you coach the players who register for your school and sign up for basketball.
The comment about used car salsmen was tounge in cheek. It was more of a joke. A coach I worked for was the best motivator I have ever seen and we would joke that he was a used car salesman. It was a joke, I guess I should have put lol at the end. I only know what I have witnessed and I have witnessed that some coaches have a better personality or congeniality for motivating kids. I was agreeing with what you had said in your comment above. As far as X and O’s, practice definetly has a lot to do, and the order and manner in which you conduct practice and teach has the most effect on what you do, but I do know that over the course of 5-6 seasons and just about every game our team would get wide open layups for 6-10 points on BLOBS and it worked against the highest and lowest classifications. Your book Championships plays has alot of good X and O’s in it, that I can guarantee will get points in a game. You can call it what you want, but I witnessed that first hand the ability that QH, BLOBS, SLOBS, and Special Situations. So I know that if you have good BLOBS for a game you can make an impact. John O Stephens, a great Division 1 college coach in the past thought that a coach could make a difference in a game once it started by 4-8 points and this was 30-40 years back. He thought a coach could make an even bigger difference in practice by teaching players. I wasnt arguing with you or disagreeing with you, I was actually disagreeing with the guy above you. There is no doubt that practice, and the way you practice is the best way to influence any game. I love to practice more than I like to coach games, practice is the fun part to me, I love to teach in practice.
In HS talent plays a big role, heck, at every level talent plays a huge role, but you can counter this with motivation and the way you teach and the strategy you use and how well that team is gelling at that point, and too many other factors to list. I have witnessed this and been a part of this. I dont disagree that teaching is most important, I know it is the most important skill a coach can bring. I coached a team that was out-talented every game, we finished the year 19-11 and 2nd in a very tough district. This team had never had a winning season in its entire past. IMO talent does not always rule out in HS. The best example I can give you is the HS team I played on, we were ranked 1 in the State all year. We were a small school and had a 6’7′ post that played at a Major University for 4 years and is now playing overseas professionally, I played Division 2 ball and I was the PG, we had another 6’4 post, a 6’3 shooting guard who could fill it up. We got upset in the Regional Finals. If we would have played that team 10 more times we would have beat them every time HS ball has alot more elements to it, when the playoffs are 1 and done. A team can get hot at the right time and play way beyond their talent level. IMO, teaching is the most important skill a coach can bring to the court, but their are alot of other factors that contribute to a HS game. Not just talent.
Josh:
I understand the “used car salesman” idea, I just don’t see that as motivation. No coach has struck me as more of a “used car salesman” that Steve Lavin, and his teams at UCLA were notorious for their lack of motivation. I just don’t see it as an effective long-term approach. Players see through fake, and a “used car salesman” is fake. I believe that a coach who is genuine has a better opportunity to be a good motivator. I also believe strongly in the importance of internal motivation and think external motivators can work only for so long.
I am not disagreeing that good OB plays can have an effect on a game. I just think they only affect a game if the teams are similarly talented, and at the high school level, the vast majority of games are played between teams of varying talent levels.
However, to play devil’s advocate to the 6-8 points from OB plays, some teams that we destroyed ran great OB plays. They probably practiced them every day (I worked for a J.C. coach who started the season by practicing OB plays – first practice was OB plays and the pre-game routine; in the first tournament, the team committed 50 turnovers in a game. Were the 6 points from the OB plays worth the complete lack of fundamental execution in every other facet of the game?). By ignoring OB plays during practice, maybe we shot free throws better or passed better or rotated on defense better and maybe those skills more than made up for the 6-8 points on OB plays.
There is more than one way to do it. As the talent differential gets smaller, things like OB plays and special situations matter more and more, which is why they affect games much more in the NBA than in high school, as the talent discrepancies between teams is much smaller, especially in the play-offs were the lesser talented teams are weeded out. In my league, we had two games decided by less than 10 points and 6 games decided by more than 30 points. The talent levels were inequitable. However, if we moved into the play-offs, and we eliminated all the teams that were losing by 30+ points, the the X’s and O’s would start to have a greater effect.
Is coaching a learned skill? If so, coaching expertise requires deliberate practice & "10,000 hours," right? http://bit.ly/h0kIFJ
Brian,
I wonder how much better one would get as a coach if in their preparation they imagined all their players were deaf. If you did that good chances are you would set up games/drills/etc that would put people in positions to learn rather than depending on cues and annoying chatter. Hmmmm….. you got me thinking. thanks for the next blog post idea.
Casey:
As I read your post (http://cwheel.blogspot.com/2011/04/coaching-deaf.html), I remembered another important point from my original article. I actually ended up coaching at a high school that is the magnet for students who are deaf and had a girl who was deaf on my team. However, it was no big deal because I had the experience with coaching the deaf at a camp. I had practiced coaching the deaf.
The biggest thing that working with the players who are deaf taught me was to wait for eye contact before saying something. I use that with all players now. Why yell at a player as she is running back on defense? She’s trying to do what you teach (forget about the mistake and stay in the present), while the coach is yelling about the mistake (the past). With a player who is deaf, you can yell at her back, but you’re just yelling into the wind because she’s not hearing you. Incidentally, they were two of my favorite players to coach.
Freakin awesome…..
In my limited youth coaching experience it is clear that coaches who know the game are far superior to those who are just coaching to give a great experience to the kids. I have been beaten consistently by knowledgeable coaches who also make the most of their talent.
But all the great coaching tips and input I have received reinforce that you are of course correct. Turning knowledge of basketball into success as a coach still requires that connection with the players. Your approach to learning and teaching are terrific. It seems that if you can wait until the end of the season the bigger payoff comes when all of your players are a part of the team as opposed to those teams that just make it all work around their star players. Everybody can catch up by making the average a little above average and then beat the greatly talented teams.
Mark,
If your talking about youth sports in regards to ages 5-12(puberty age) than it almost doesn’t matter if you have experience in the sport before. The only advantage is that you can demonstrate the skill better which gives the kids a better idea. Is it helpful to know basic skills and concepts? Of course but you don’t need to be an expert by anymeans. A good teacher could probably read a basic book on the sport and than figure out ways to enhance the basic skills.
At such a young age connection, allowing the kids to have fun and putting them in a position to succeed is much more important. When you get into older ages, I completely agree that the coach must have more experience in the details of the game.
But if you gave me the choice of someone like Brian or Pat Riley to run a youth development camp/league… I would choose someone to the likes of Brian every time.
A couple weeks ago, a coach tweeted: “If you had to coach a different sport – and thus lost all your sport-specific knowledge – what would you be good at doing? It’s an interesting and appropriate question. I was the head coach of a volleyball team before I really coached basketball, even though I never played volleyball. However, I did well-enough, and looked the part enough, that parents and players thought I was a beach volleyball player, even though I could not even set a ball.
One advantage of an inexperienced coach is that it forces you to empower players. Players teach other players and improve their skills through the teaching. Also, one problem in volleyball coaching is the coach doing all the serving or setting in drills; if the coach wants to practice hitting, rather than rely on an inconsistent setter, the coach will set. However, in the game, a coach cannot set. When I coached initially, my setting was awful. I had to rely on my setters to set in practice in every drill. That gave them more practice, and also gave the hitters more practice hitting the types of sets that they would receive in the games. It’s great to practice hitting perfect sets every time, but what happens in a game when you never get a perfect set? Can you adjust?
At the youngest ages, the skill development and strategy is secondary to the fun and socialtivity (it’s my made up word, but I think we should adopt it).
I equate coaching to practicing medicine. Coaching is about applying the most appropriate treatment that fits each particular situation. Often times, this may mean doing nothing (letting the body heal). It doesn’t look like coaching to parents or the average person, but it is just as much coaching as standing up and yelling. Does the 10,000 hour rule apply to doctors?
I imagine the concept of residency comes from the same concepts or rationale as the 10,000 hour rule.
Brian,
I like this post. I followed John Kessell’s link from USA Volleyball and have really enjoyed your perspective.
One thing that I think is important for coaches to do is try to make a conscious effort to work with kids of all different ages and abilities. When we coach older, more skilled players, we can often “get away with” unclear communication, because they have the skill and knowledge base to parse a poorly worded (or overly worded, poor “body languaged”) instruction and figure out what the hell coach was talking about. When we coach yonger, inexperienced players, you we had better be damn sure we give a clear, concise direction, and even better, a good demonstration (by ourselves or another player) of what we want done. I coached a nationally competitive U17 volleyball team at our club this year, but I also coached a team of 10 and 11 year-old beginners. I definitely noticed myself paying increased attention to being more clear in my instructions and an increased focused on visual cues rather than just being verbal about everything.
On the flip side, coaches who only coach at the lower levels are not challenging themselves to increase their depth of understanding of the game. They also tend to exploit the little nuances of their particular level at the cost of more solid principle-based teaching. In another post you mentioned trapping up top and playing a zone in youth basketball and that reminded me of when you see youth volleyball coaches telling their teams to tip it over on 2 contacts because young players are often not great at picking that up. But it’s funny because, in both cases, the coach is actually doing the OTHER TEAM a service, because (even though they are not as successful now), they are learning how to handle those strategies. But that coach’s own team is not developing properly.
I think that, as coaches, one thing that we can do is to try to plan for our own development. If we want to be better teachers of the game (whatever that game may be), we need to:
1. Maximize the hours we spend teaching the game (repetition)
2. Have some way we can tell if we are effective or not (feedback)
3. Ideally have some sort of mentor there to help us out (guidance)
I too have noticed the same thing about summer camps and have really thought that they have improved my own coaching. If you think about it though, it makes total sense. What else is a summer camp but a mini-season done at warp speed? You have to select a team, teach them tactics and strategies while developing their skills, prepare them for competition, and then compete. As coaches, we all have had one of those middle of the season practices where the motivation of both players and coaches has dipped just a bit, your drills and practice setups are getting a bit stale, and the important competitions are a bit too far a way to impart urgency. Well in a compressed environment like a camp, this can’t (or shouldn’t) happen.
I’ve often wondered what club volleyball (or it’s counterpart AAU basketball) would be like if the season was split into 5 or 6 little month-long mini-seasons. Take all the players in the area, draft teams and have like 6-8 practices before one “season ending” competition. Then redistribute the players and repeat. Would never work politically, socially, etc., but I bet it would help the quality of learning.
I wonder if there’s a way to take that “summer camp” approach and keep it repeating over the course of a full season?
BTW, loved the comment about not speaking to a player without eye contact. Never quite thought about it that way before.
-Joe Trinsey
Joe:
Good points.
I coached a youth volleyball league a couple years ago. I managed the parent volunteers. One father refused to buy into the league’s objectives. While the other teams worked to get three touches and tried to set and hit, his team bumped it over first time and hoped the opponent made a mistake (beginners). He had the “best” team. However, at the end of the league, his team was no longer the “best,” as the other players had improved and could put some pressure on his team if they just bumped over the ball. As you say, his competitive advantage early in the season became his downfall at the end.
I think my strength as a coach has been my willingness (eagerness) to move between and across levels and ages and gain different experience. Once a college coach “makes it,” they are spoiled, in a sense, because the talent that they recruit hides their inability to teach or communicate effectively. I think volleyball, soccer and other sports have an advantage over basketball and football because NCAA rules do not prohibit college coaches from coaching high school and youth club teams. Obviously, it is the disadvantage of the lack of huge salaries that prompts the interest, but when you go from running a college practice to running an u10 practice, it has to help. When I coached J.C. and u11s in the same season, things I learned at the J.C. level informed my coaching of children and vice versa.
The mini-camp idea is similar to one principle of my Playmakers League. I want to emphasize teaching, instruction and cooperation among the coaches and decrease the coach’s ego investment. Therefore, coaches rotate amongst players and teams with no assigned group – just an assigned court. Players get the benefit of working with different coaches and since the coach’s are no judged on their win-loss record with a particular group, there is less ego involvement. The true purpose of the league – provide a good experience for the players and teach them some new skills – replaces the ego of winning. I touched on this in an old article: http://learntocoachbasketball.com/category/managing-a-team
Thanks again.
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