Game-Based Drills Education Series - Part 2: Evolution to Better Drills, Sniper School, and 2v2 Pick and Roll Drill

You're listening to a conversation about game-based drills with Nate Sanderson, sponsored by breakthrough basketball coaches. Welcome to the second part of our conversation around the subject of game-based drills. Now this week I'm going to share with you three stories from our evolution that have led us to a place today where 90% of our activities in practice are what we would consider to be game-based. Now in our situation, the changes that we underwent during the last seven or eight years of my career in terms of how we teach our skill development and how we plan our practices is really the result of both necessity and failure. My evolution really started when I was coaching at Springville high school. This is a small one, a school in the state of Iowa and one of the unique things about high school sports in our state is that softball and baseball are both played in the summer.

In fact, I think it's the only state out of 50 that don't have those sports as a spring or a fall offering. Now, what that means for us is that we have to share athletes in the summertime. But because the varsity and JV softball schedules happened on different days, it meant that we never really had our full roster in an open gym or a summer workout time together. And so while we were trying to get repetitions in some of our team concepts, particularly with our offense, we had to find ways to be able to train, to be able to teach our offense, to be able to teach our reads without ever having enough players in the gym to go five on five. Now traditionally a lot of coaches will put things in in five on zero. And we realized over the course of time that it's difficult to teach reads.

It's difficult to teach players to react to defenders when they don't exist on the court at the same time. So intuitively we understood that there was a value in having defense on the floor even during some of our installation. But definitely during some of our review sessions in the summer, we just couldn't do it in a five on five setting. So the first thing that we learned was how to be more efficient, how to take parts of our five on five orphans and reduce it down to playing, say two on two or three on three on the strong side of the floor that we might be able to play with the same offensive options. Maybe we like to run a lot of pick and rolls or pin down the screens on the strong side of the floor. We simply couldn't reverse the ball to play the same game on the opposite side of the floor without enough players.

And as we continued to experiment with these small sided games, we started to notice that we were getting more and more repetitions in live play, more and more repetitions of making decisions with the basketball, reacting to help side defenders, choosing what the best action was in our three on three game and we started to get better, I thought faster. Now there's research out there that certainly supports the idea and not counterintuitive that in three on three players are going to get more quality authentic touches than they would in five on five. In fact, Brian McCormick published a study in 2012 where they compared the number of quality or offensive opportunities with the basketball in a five on five game versus in a three on three game and found that in three on three players tend to get 80% more touches than they would playing five on five.

The other thing that we started to notice was that our defense was improving at the same time because we weren't isolating simply offensive repetitions without defense on the floor, but we were able to coach both sides of the ball in nearly every aspect of our office. We also talked about how we would defend those exact same situations simultaneously. So in short, we started to see the benefits of greater efficiency by practicing with small sided games. Now the second thing that started to challenge my thinking about how we were practicing happened in January of 2014 it was during the dog days of the season. You're past Thanksgiving, you're past winter break, but you're not quite close enough to the postseason to really be re-energized. And I remember bringing my captains into my classroom and just kind of expressing this a little bit to them that I wasn't happy with our energy level and our enthusiasm seemed to be waning.

And my captains, there was three of them sitting there and then kind of hemmed and hawed for a few minutes. And finally one of them just said, you know, coach, nobody's having any fun. Well, this was news to me at this point in the year. We were roughly around 500 but we were competitive. We were working hard in our scouting, we were watching film, we were breaking our opponents down. We were talking about how we wanted the guards, certain actions and trying to identify as many of their calls as we could. And to me that was fun. I was having a great time, but to our players, things had become monotonous. We weren't competing in practice as much as we were just comparing for upcoming opponents. And this really made me start to think differently about how I was planning practice was I planning practice simply for my enjoyment without really giving consideration to how much our players were enjoying this process.

Now, as we started to experiment with more small sided games and making things more competitive and involving offense and defense going against each other at the same time, we started to see an uptick in that energy in practice. We started to see more enthusiasm. In short, we started to see more engagement, more lasting engagement from our players as we went through the year. Now the third story, our third experience that really propelled me into fully embracing this game based approach happens over the course of a number of years at Springville. When I first took the job, we kind of piloted this off season shooting program that was part of our open gyms that we called sniper school. Now, this was based on some of the things that I had read in the talent code by Daniel Coyle. And essentially what we had done is created a system for players to come into the gym and they would shoot what we called lines on the floor.

So it might be aligned from the basket to the corner or the basket out to the wing to the three point line. And the idea was that they would shoot 10 shots four feet away from the basket, and if they made at least six out of 10 they would move back another four feet and shoot at eight feet. And if they made six out of 10 there or better, they could go to 12 feet, et cetera, until they got out to the three point line. And the purpose of all this, the goal was to try to beat all five of those spots on a single line. Now by organizing our shooting in this way, it allowed us to be able to track thousands and thousands of shots over the years. And we had our middle schoolers doing this, our high school players were doing it.

We figured out a scoring system, we could look at our spreadsheets and we could identify what we called their 60% range and the thing that we found having players do this year in and year out, particularly in the off season, is that they got better at sniper school. They got better at shooting 60% from farther away from the basket. However, that's success did not always transfer into games. After doing this for a number of years, we had a senior in our program who in sniper school was consistently getting out to the three point line and shooting over the course of an entire off season, close to 54 55% from the three point line, but when she went into her senior year in live play in games, she shot only 29% during the season. I looked at this player and I thought, well, maybe this is an aberration, and clearly she'd been getting better at sniper school.

Maybe it's because she wasn't quite as athletic or she wasn't quite as long or she wasn't quite quick enough to get her shot up and so because they were contested in her situation, maybe that's the reason why she wasn't shooting the same percentage. Well, fast forward one more year, another senior shooter that's been doing sniper school for five years since her eighth grade year. Same situation. She shoot 52% from three in the summer. We get into the season, she shoots 13% from the three point line. Now around the same time I started reading Brian McCormick's terrific book called the 21st century basketball practice and in that book he talks about some of the variables that affect transfer, the idea that what you practice will then be applicable at the same level with the same success rate in competition in an actual game. And some of those variables, which I will talk about in tomorrow's episode include things like variability and randomness and making the shots as similar to what they feel like in a game as possible. Well, when we were working in sniper school, we were lacking almost every single one of those variables and that's largely the reason why our success shooting in a gym with no defense was so different from what we actually experienced in a game. And so we started to explore and started to experiment with different ways to train. Now that was eight years ago when we began our journey down this road of game-based drills. And what I'm excited to share with coaches is an opportunity to share some of the things that we've learned so that you don't have to experience the repeated failures that I did in order to get to this place where I feel like what we're doing in practice actually helps us and transfers to what our athletes are experiencing in games. And so here at breakthrough basketball we've created the game-based training system for individual offensive development.

This package includes over six hours of video demonstrating how we teach our players passing, ball handling, decision making and shooting in a games context. There's an ebook with over 125 pages of diagrams and philosophy and instruction on how to use these drills with players of all ability levels so that you can challenge them right where they are. Now, if you're interested in more information on how to gain access to these resources, you can click on the link in the article and we'll get you out of here with just one example from the video of how we use two on two to teach part of our offense.