The Greatest Extra Development Opportunity of All
We are receiving a higher-than-usual volume of queries about ‘extra training opportunities’ for VJBL athletes, often with requests for private coaching.
Private coaches can provide valuable experiences to athletes, and we have a number of coaches within the MBA community we would gladly recommend depending on your child’s situation. But we caution parents, particularly in U12/14s, who are seeing private coaching as a primary solution and bypassing arguably the #1 determinant of their child’s skill development…
High amounts of deliberate practice and play at-home.
What we mean by those terms:
“Deliberate practice”: Practice with or without a coach, but always with a plan/intent for the session (that is, not simply throwing shots)
“Deliberate play”: Unstructured games where the player is consciously trying to practice things their Rep coach is teaching them. Example: 1v1 with a sibling or 3v3 with friends.
“At-home”: We appreciate not everyone has a ring at their house, so “at-home” also means your local park or school - any place that their coach isn’t!
Research repeatedly shows that children engaging in high levels of deliberate practice and deliberate play activities outside of competition environments are more likely to achieve any goals they have within the sport.
The role of private coaching then becomes to:
Ignite a players’ motivation to practice at home; and
Add new things to a player’s toolkit to practice at-home.
Motivation
Does your child wants to make a 1s team, a state program, or be a Boomer/Opal? The most important thing – perhaps the only thing – you can do as a parent if so is to develop self-motivation and intrinsic motivation in your child.
Intrinsic motivation isn’t dependent on rewards, team selection or other people’s desires, instead the desire to practice at-home comes from…
Wanting to improve and grow as a player
Finding practice a fun and enjoyable pursuit
Feeling a sense of duty as part of belonging to a team
Extrinsic motivation to practice at-home is…
Seeking the status of being in a certain squad
Practising to please others or meet their expectations
As a parent you may feel welcome to offer a reward to help your child establish practice habits (e.g. their choice of dinner/activity for 7 consecutive days of home-based practice). But only for at-home practice, there should be strictly no rewards around game day performance (paying them per point or rebound).
Intrinsic motivation helps players control the controllables. Your child may do 4 hours of home-based practice a week, BUT if other players all do the same thing – there’s a good chance they ‘fail’ their goal of making a certain team.
How much deliberate play/practice?
In our pre-season parent meeting, we shared the following general guidelines
| Player goals | At-Home practice |
|---|---|
| Players seeking to maintain a Cougars Rep program position |
Approx. 2 hours per week (400-600 shots, plus ball-handling and 1v1 play) |
| Players aspiring towards State/National program selection |
Approx. 4 hours per week (1000+ shots, plus ball-handling and 1v1 play) |
Make sure it’s not FOMO
We ask parents, players and coaches to take a moment to check that they aren’t falling victim to post-pandemic FOMO (fear of missing out). A feeling of urgency to having more training time, more tournaments in order to ‘keep up’, which then flows into Friday nights and heightened stress around wins and performance.
Final Thought
The key here is that player development needs to be player-led, be wary of placing any conscious or sub-conscious ambitions as parents onto them. It needs to come from them, or experience shows us that it will be a recipe for disaster.
Darren Anderson
Director of Coaching