Planning Practices: (The Second in a Series)

The Night Before

By Mike Tully

In the first article in this series, we
discussed practice as a time management problem.
Coaches seldom have as much practice time as they
would prefer, and so it’s important to make
maximum use of available gym time.

To achieve the greatest possible efficiency, top
coaches not only plan their practices the night
before, but they put it in writing. There is a
vast difference between developing a general idea
of what you wish to do at tomorrow’s practice,
and actually writing it down in detail.

Of course, the amount of detail is up to you.
Some coaches like to time their drills to the
minute. If this works for you, fine. I prefer not
to do that. What happens if a drill is not going
well, or if the kids don’t get it? Recently I
watched a basketball practice in which the coach
obviously had a list of drills and went through
them with strict attention to the timetable. Only
one problem: You could tell that the athletes
weren’t executing properly. They weren’t
understanding the drill, and they weren’t getting
proper feedback on their performance.

Instead, I like to keep in mind what we’re
trying to accomplish. What is this practice all
about? Fortunately, a task list can help you keep
your focus and plan your practice. Right now I’m
coaching a co-ed, fifth- through eighth-grade
team. We said at the beginning of the season that
we wanted to get good at three things:

1) The serve-serve receive game,

2) Making sure that our attacks are pass-set-spike

3) Keeping the ball off the floor.

So in designing a practice, we want to make sure
that we do a lot of serving/receiving, then do a lot
of game play in which we emphasize attack and floor
defense.

This is where writing it down becomes crucial.
Let’s take serving and receiving: In writing your
practice, you want your best servers practicing
against your best receivers. You want as many
meaningful repetitions as possible. And you want
to be able to score the results, so you can see
which athletes are improving and which ones are
not. To emphasize: to get the most out of your
practice, you must do more than decide what
drills you are going to use. You must plan which
athletes will be doing what.

The same principle holds true for your hitters
and defense. You want your top hitters working
against your best defenders, and you want as many
gamelike repetitions as possible.

Of course, you must also spend lots of time on
fundamentals. You can use your task list to
decide how you are going to handle this. Once
you’ve decided what three things you want to
emphasize, you must allot time to teach them
properly. If serving is tops on your list, you
should spend lots of practice time on it. And you
should spend lots of planning time on how to
teach and practice it.

Once you start to write down your practices,
you will begin to see more deeply into the game.
You will understand your athletes differently;
you’ll see what they can and cannot do. You’ll
which ones need to improve at what. You’ll see
how deep your team is, where the potential
problems are.

To summarize, the more you’re interested in
getting the most out of your practices, the more
you will write down your plan the night before.

Next installment: The whiteboard

Mike Tully is a member of the “Yes, I Can!”
coaching staff. You can hear him now on his Pep
Talk Hotline at (973) 696-6743.