We’ve been integrating the competitive cauldron concept into our basketball practices for 2 weeks now. In a recent post I did a little retrospective based on our first day’s competitive cauldron experience. We’ve now had 4 full practices including it. Just four days in to the process and we’re learning quite a bit. Below are some observations.
Player’s Care More than Expected
The players care about there rank more than I expected. I thought they would be “aware” and maybe kind of notice, but they ask about it. And while we read out the current rankings they all look around at each other taking it all in. They do it with good spiritedness. They congratulate those rising and also realize their own standing might not be as solid as assumed. Some of them become really excited because they find they are performing unexpectedly well. These players who thought themselves only so-so find they winners more than they expected. This encourages them to work even harder to keep that status.
Quick story
Here’s a story that demonstrates. I’ve changed the names of the players, but beyond that it’s real.
In a recent practice Suzy was the current point leader and was matched up against Maggy. Maggy is bigger and stronger. Maggy probably has 50 to 75 pounds and at least 6 inches of height on Suzy. But Maggy has a major thing holding her back: she is usually pretty lazy acting. But on this day when we were doing a particular drill Maggy was working hard. We were doing a drill where the offense tries to score starting from the perimeter. The defense tries to keep the offense out of the paint entirely and prevent scoring.
Well, as i mentioned, Maggy has all the physical gifts and she simply crushed Suzy. She drove, put her body on her (forward facing – not backing her down) and aggressively attacked the basket. Suzy went down hard from the contact. She bounced back up, but I noticed she looked a little upset as went to the end of the line. I was concerned that she was hurt. I stepped to her privately and asked if she was okay because she had been hit so hard. Her response was a shock.
She responded “It’s not the hit, but what it cost”. When asked to explain she replied “It’s the points. I want to win.” She was referring to the Cauldron. I reminded her that she could do the same thing to her opposition that was done to her. It’s like a light bulb came on above her head. She learned from it for sure and did the the same thing to the next person that she faced. We have a problem getting our team to be physical, but not those girls, not that day.
Story Takeaway
Here’s what is all in that story for me. I had a lazy player that is barely willing to put in effort but could dominate every situation. She finally hit someone in the paint – praise the Lord. Another player who isn’t currently that great, but cares about winning, is busting it which will make everyone better. The other players are watching their teammates really compete and go at each other. I could not ask for more. Well, maybe Maggy bending over and picking up Suzy after the fall since they are teammates. I think that did happen – I was just so in shock from Maggy coming alive I can’t remember for sure. But from a purely competitive standpoint and from a make the team better viewpoint – solid gold.
Comradery is Up
Additional good news is that no one has become mean to their teammates. Everyone cheers everyone else on (pretty new actually), but they cheer on their own temporary event team like crazy. To be honest, we used to not have any real emotion. There use to be only annoyance emanating from the better players. Annoyance that they were being slowed down or that they were going to have to run for another’s shortcomings. But now the worst players are being cheered on by their current partners. They are encouraged and given advice from teammates to improve the next round so they can assist a win.
Top Players are NOT Exactly Who we Expected
Our #1 player for the first three days according to the stats was not who we expected. After 4 days there was a little movement. A different player snuck in to that #1 spot, but it still wasn’t who we expected. The biggest surprise was a player the team would name as top two was not even a top 5 player. She looked completely shocked when we read the rankings. And she responded by proceeding to have a stronger than normal practice. We’re hoping she was trying to prove herself to be what she and everyone thinks she aught to be. We’re double hoping she keeps that intensity up.
Lowest Tier Players are Who we Expected
The players who have the lowest winning percentage of games in the cauldron are exactly who we expect. They’re less skilled and/or less athletic and it is obvious. Now their better teammates are interested in these players in ways they weren’t before. These lower tier players are sometimes the difference between the higher tier players winning or losing a practice competition. So now those higher tier players do more than roll their eyes or shrug off their teammates inadequacies. They cheer them on and even give them pointers on the side to attempt to coach them up.
It’s worth saying again, because it’s true for the team game performance, not just practice. I’m really unsure if the higher level players consciously understand it or not, but bringing the worst players nearer to the average levels the playing field. Then the best competitors get to decide the game instead of the worst ones. And that’s all the best players really want. They want a fair competition and a chance to lead my squad to a ‘W’.
Today, we can definitely guess who the lowest ranking 3 players and we’d be right. I think though that as they improve it will be harder to guess.
Thought opportunity: What happens if the worst players don’t start improving their percentages? What if they don’t become closer to the win percentage of the middle tiers? What does that mean, if anything?
Plans To Improve
Here’s a few ways our implementation of this can be modified to improve practice. We want to improve the flow in general and to make sure we’re building the right skills.
Tuning of Competition Choices
Competitions should be sized and have time spent in proportion to the importance of the skill being gamified. For example, as a coach if you’ve selected free throws as being 10% of the importance of your system then you need to find a way to make sure that free throw competitions count for around 10% of your competitive scoring. So 10% of your competition points should be free throw related. We failed at this. We said free throws were 10% of value to us, but in our practices they consumed 20% of the time. Not only that, but they sometimes accounted for 1/3 of the games “played” (wins available) on a given day. Remember that you came up with your own list of priorities! Make sure you train your team using that list or update it to reflect what you find you really believe!
Practice Plans Make a Difference
You can kind of get away with “winging” practice when you’re just teaching and preaching, but not with this system. Players are competing and tracking winning percentages with the idea that those numbers mean something down the road. With something on the line is not the time to wing it. Your players want fairness in the competition that you probably can’t provide if you just wing practice. Additionally, you probably won’t do a great job of tuning your competition choices if you don’t do it before hand.
It takes us about 10 minutes plan before each practice. We choose the team concepts we want to cover and then select skills we want to emphasize. Then we choose the competitions we want to run. Knowing what is important to you and having a list of drills and competitions for each makes it simple.
Let the Players Do the Win Tracking
Find away for the players to do all the real time tracking of wins and losses themselves. To be honest, we’re still figuring this one out. We say we have a plan for it utilizing a giant whiteboard. Our plan is to put the board up and before each game write up on the board the game being played. The players then own the job of coming over and adding stats for their teams (including player names on team) wins and losses. At the end of the day a coach can take a picture and transfer it to the official score sheet manually. This will probably take about 15 minutes after each practice, but that’s no different than the way it is currently done except with this plan coaches won’t have to maintain the stat sheet during practice.
Wrap Up
The competitive cauldron is going quite well so far. As a coach I think it forces a little more preparation, but I’m okay with that. What I see in my players in terms of the competitive spirit actually showing through makes it worth it. We’re even utilizing the cauldron’s top 5 players to make lineup decisions in upcoming tournament games.
The player we think should be the best and has flashes of “is our best” isn’t even in the top 5 of our cauldron right now will make lineups interesting. There could be some waking up that occurs when lineups become visible to all. It will definitely be a wakeup call to her (and her parents) when she doesn’t start. As coaches we will make clear that those ranking highest win percentage have earned starter status.
“If you want that starter status then come take it” has power behind it. Adding that a starting role “is available to anyone that proves they can win” will definitely wake up some players.
Comments are closed