Game-Based Drills Education Series - Part 1: Create Your Basketball "Flight Simulator" and 1v1 Fill Up Drill

You're listening to a conversation about game-based drills with Nate Sanderson, sponsored by breakthrough basketball coaches. We're going to begin our conversation in this first segment of a four part series talking about game-based drills with a very simple question and that is what makes a drill game-based, especially when it is compared to a more traditional approach or traditional drills that I grew up doing what I was a player and certainly did earlier in my coaching career. Now I want to start with a story from Daniel Coyle's outstanding book, the talent code where he talks about the evolution of the flight simulator. So let's go back in time to the winter of 1934 now at this point in history, the United States mail is being transported across the country by the air court, which is the precursor to our modern air force. Now, the only problem with this arrangement is that they weren't very good at the job.

It wasn't that they couldn't deliver the mail on time or to the appropriate airports. It's that it was incredibly dangerous to do so, particularly during this harsh winter. In fact, from the end of February through the 9th of March in 1934 nine different pilots lost their lives and tragic accidents trying to fly through winter weather to deliver the mail. While president Roosevelt was demanding explanations for these fatalities, the army aviation schools were presented with a difficult challenge up until this point. The way that pilots trade was simply to go up in the air with a more experienced person. They would take them through a series of loops and dives and crazy maneuvers to see if they had the stomach to become a pilot. But the problem wasn't courage and it wasn't bravery and it wasn't the willingness to put themselves in danger. The problem was there was no way to train and make mistakes when it required flying with instruments through severe weather.

In fact, to that point, the only way to gain experience was to do it live, to fly through a storm and hope that you survived. In fact, up until this point at some aviation schools, the fatality rate during training was as high as 25% well, the air Corps knew it had a problem and turned to an unlikely source for a solution. Enter stage. Left Edwin Albert link jr now in the 1920s link himself had fallen in love with flying as a 16 year old, taking lessons from Charlie Chaplin's, half-brothers, Sydney just outside of Bingington New York, and by 1927 he had purchased his own plane, but looking back at his own experience of learning how to fly and the dangers that were associated with it, he asked himself a question, is there a better way to learn how to pilot an airplane? And so he went to work building what would become the world's first flight simulator.

Now this primitive machine resembled a bathtub on stilts. It had tiny wings and a little tail sticking out the back and instrument panel, an electric motor that made it roll and pitch and yaw in response to the controls and a little light on the dashboard that indicated when a pilot made an error. Now link called this the link aviation trainer. He advertise it across the country hoping that aviation schools and perhaps the air Corps itself would be enamored enough to adopt a new way of learning how to fly. Fast forward to 1934 and the air Corps quickly realized that Link's machine was exactly what they needed to teach their pilots how to fly. This launched a training revolution. In fact from 1941 to 1945 over a half a million American airmen would learn to fly using the flight simulator. So what does this have to do with a game based approach to practice?

Well, let's think about it this way. We would prefer that the learning mistakes made by our players happen during practice and we would also prefer that when they go into a game that they're not experiencing something for the first time and learning how to deal with a new situation in the same way that the flight simulator allowed trainers and engineers to be able to manipulate all kinds of environmental variables to create different scenarios, to challenge their pilots. They could make mistakes without worrying about crashing into real mountains. This is exactly what we're trying to accomplish with our game-based drills. We want to create game like situations for our players to experiment with, to be challenged with in practice and yet not have the fear that their mistakes are going to cost them during performance on a Tuesday or Friday night. Now I've had the privilege of sharing with coaches on podcasts and at coaching clinics about our theories and philosophies of building drills that are game like and before we get into what makes it game like I want you to first understand what we don't mean when we're talking about game-based drills.

First of all, we're not just talking about things that are competitive. A drill that asks your team to make 40 layups in two minutes or the first team to make 23 pointers. It may be competitive and that's certainly an aspect of making it game like, but that doesn't define what a game-based drill is to us. At the other end of the spectrum, some coaches might say, well, are you just rolling the balls out and letting them play five on five and scrimmaging in practice? And certainly there is some of that that's going on. We believe that the best teacher of the game is the game itself, but the artistry of building a game-based drill is being able to reduce the five on five situation into a smaller cited game into a one on one or two on two or three on three situation to be able to maximize the repetitions for each player.

But our ultimate goal is to create a simulation of the game itself so that they are practicing in the exact same environments that they're going to experience on game nights. And that's why we at breakthrough basketball have created the game based training system for individual offensive development. Now this video offers a comprehensive look at how to build your skill development using game-based drills to simulate the same situations and scenarios, the same defensive angles and the same scoring attack opportunities that your players will get in games in your breakdown drills. Now the package includes over six hours of video, an ebook with all of the diagrams that you'll ever need, and over 50 drills and the progressions that go with them to empower your players to learn in your own basketball simulator. Now, if you're interested in more information, you can click on the link in the article and stay tuned. In tomorrow's email, we will discuss why 90% of what we do in practice, we try to be game-based, not for those who are interested in what is included in the training video. Take a look at one of our sample drills here.