I came across the following question in a Facebook group.
I coach middle school 6-8 grades and have worked on hitting approaches and technique. When we are in hitting lines and drills most of my players will at least try to attempt their approach but in game settings they revert back to running or shuffling to get to the ball and then just hitting it with little or no jumping. Anyone have any drills that will instill the use of their approach in game like settings as well? Or do I just need to give them more reps to get there?
There are two elements to look at here.
Not training in game context
Any time I hear a coach complain about this sort of thing – we do fine in drills, but not in the game (like this one) – I immediately think they probably aren’t training in a game-like context. There are two elements to this.
One is that they could be decomposing the skill. That means breaking it down into its parts and working on them separately, rather than working on those parts while still having the player do the whole skill. Decomposition has some serious issues, as this article from Rob Gray explains.
The other element is having the player perform the skill in a way that doesn’t replicate the game very well. With respect to the hitting example here, that could be something like doing basic hitting lines off a coach toss. If you try to go from that to hitting in a game, the players are naturally going to struggle. You haven’t allowed them to learn how to collect and process the information they need. That’s stuff like the ball flight from the setter’s release, the location of teammates, the position of the block, and the location of defenders.
We want to use a progression based on simplification (also something Gray talks about in the article linked above). That means adding more information to the environment in a stepped fashion. In other words, increasing the complexity as players learn. Eventually, you get to fully game conditions.
Alter your game approach
Even if you’re ready to go fully game context with the players, there’s one more consideration. That’s the perceived cost of making an error. Players will be conservative when they feel the cost of an error is high. That discourages risk-taking, which in the player’s mind equates to doing something not yet proven. In other words, they revert to tried-and-true rather than looking to implement the change you’ve been working on with them.
In a normal game, if a hitter makes an error, the cost is the other team getting a point. Probably also the feeling of letting the team down – especially in critical times. How do we lower that cost?
The latter part having to do with letting the team down is more of a cultural thing. We reduce the cost of an error from that perspective by having a training (and match) environment that accepts errors as part of the process. Admittedly, some players can be quite hard on themselves, which requires additional work.
You can quite quickly and easily lower the cost of an error from a point perspective, though. Just don’t score the game. And if you do something like Second Chance, you give them a do-over.
Incentivize what you want
You can actually take things a step beyond reducing the cost of errors by taking them out of consideration all together. You do this by using scoring to incentivize what you’re after.
How?
By using process scoring. That’s where you give points for the doing the things you want rather than in the normal fashion based on outcomes. The coach who asked the question above could do that for approaches. When players do it correctly, they get a point. What happens after that doesn’t matter – at least with regards to the score.
And if they don’t get it right, you could use Second Chance here too!
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