Today marked what I hope will be looked back at as a big day in our middle school basketball program. I introduced the concept of the Competitive Cauldron to the coaching staff about 3 days ago. We discussed it, watched some tutorials, and determined some categories that we cared about so we knew what we wanted to track. Today we got to run our first practice with it.
So how’d it go? Pretty good I’d say. I’ll get into the details deeper in but if NOTHING ELSE we did a pretty good job of planning and running the practice according to the schedule because we really wanted to see all the data in the end and you cant collect win/loss data if as a coach you spend all the practice time yammerin’ on longer than planned. So that’s a win there.
It seemed like the players also had a good time – they spend pretty much the entire time “doing stuff” and going head to head with someone which was not the previous norm. So a win for them there too.
If I could change anything (and I can in the future) I would make sure we got in a little bit more training in terms of “how to do it” and simply reserved a little less time for competition, but to be quite honest I’m not entirely sure doing so would have been better. We will have to find a happy medium, but still overall it was more active and more competitive.
OH yeah, and we didn’t have to do any conditioning, but with them actually competing against each other we had two players have to go get sick and come back. Without intentional conditioning we’ve never had that.
Preparation for Competitive Cauldron
Determine the categories you care about.
To run the cauldron for a practice you need to know a couple of things.
- What do you care about?
- How can it be gamified so it can be tracked?
For our team, we took the “easy way out” and chose some standard categories of things to care about. These are the categories of things we will track as part of our competitive cauldron. There were:
- 1v1
- 3v3
- 5v5
- Short Sided Game Competence
- Conditioning (skipped)
- Shooting
- Skills
- Free Throws
Then for each of the above categories we came up with some games / drills.
For 1v1 we had the players each play everyone else. 2 minute games. Losers outs.
For 3v3 we had went a little weird and made them compete at the quality of their 3 man weave (I wish we had done this under skills instead, but this is what we did for today). Dropped balls, missed layups, etc made us lower their score. So we did 5 rounds up and back for each group and each round had a winning group and 4 losers.
For 5v5 we just did a scrimmage. We played three 3-minute games.
Etc, Etc, Etc
Results
We ended up with good data. It’s not something you would act on with just one day, but we were definitely satisfied that the competitive cauldron is going to lead to some powerful info.
We had ideas that a particular player is “the best” player on the team, but the win loss percentage says otherwise. She was 4th best today.
Another player we definitely would not have pegged to be even a top 5 (or just barely) was actually ranked #1 overall. In warmups we didn’t notice it, and honestly during all the competitions it wasn’t really clear, but her win percentage was easily at the top. This is just something that causes a bit of an eyebrow raise because the truth will become more and more clear as the amount of data available increase
We’re going to collect data for several more days and see what it tells us and what we think it can tell them.
How to Improve Running a Competitive Cauldron
The biggest frustration that I had with the process was that on this first day the coaches kept the stats. That meant we spent a lot of time tracking stats that we could have been spending giving feedback to players to help them improve their performance. To fix this we need to find a way for the players to track their own. Our current plan is to create a large bulletin / whiteboard so that they can view their own ranks and record their wins and losses themselves. (NOTE: an update is that we changed the process the 2nd day such that they came and recorded their wins and I recorded only the loss side. Somehow that was actually much easier. We will still be moving towards the large board solution where they can record the entirety of their stats, and we can coach, but baby steps I guess.)
We want to make sure that leave enough time for skill work so that while they’re playing games – they’re performing the actions those games require the way that we want them performed. This means you cant use the whole practice for competition. But I think something like “train it, rep it, gameify it” is probably the right approach. I’m thinking we’ll end up 50-60% competitive, 20% skills, and 20% team walkthroughs.
A collection of games for each category would be a nice reference. We’ll be creating that list as a resource of the Dojo in time, but for now, just know that you don’t want to use the same games every day.
We randomized teams for every event. I’m not sure we should have done it that often. And we are conflicted about whether they should be truly randomized and just accept that sometimes one team will significantly overpower another OR should we intentionally make the team even-ish. We’ll do some research and kind of play around to see what we come up with and I’m sure we’ll have more on this in a future article.
Conclusion
The competitive cauldron is meant to build competitive players and I say we’ve already seen that in this practice. It will take some time to get the maximum value from it, but I’m a believer after just one practice and seeing the data it makes available.
Resources
List of categories we care about as well as an example list of many possible categories
List of “competified”, or gamified, drills we wanted to do
A way to make random teams – we used an app called “team shake”. Until i get around to creating my own full fledged practice app for the cauldron system a companion app like Team Shake will be required. It’s sooo goood at what it does that I may end up doing a separate Team Shake review / demo in order to show how we use it with the cauldron.
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