Game-Based Drills Education Series - Part 3: Benefits to Game-Based Approach, Hitting Curveballs, Perception Action Coupling, and 2v2 Drive and Kick Drill

You're listening to a conversation about game-based drills with Nate Sanderson, sponsored by Breakthrough Basketball. Welcome to part three of our conversation about the use of game-based drills to train our players and their fundamentals in the game of basketball. Now today what I want to share with you are some of the benefits of using a game based approach. And as we begin this conversation, I want to make clear the difference between a traditional approach and a game based approach to skill development. Now looking at the graphic on the screen, I've taken a screenshot from the game super Mario brothers and I love the contrast here and these two images. When we think of a traditional way to work on our fundamentals, most often we're thinking about isolating skills. For example, using a particular crossover move against a cone or a chair or attempting different finishing moves, but doing it without defense.

It's not typically done in live play. But when we talk about using a game based approach, we're talking about learning how to play the game while we are in a game context. And that was one of the genius aspects of super Mario brothers that led to its popularity was it was an easy game to learn while you were having fun playing the game. Now what I want to do with you today is share what I think are the three main benefits from using a game based approach to skill development and the first one is playing upon this principle of interleaving. Now our friend John O'Sullivan recently published a book called Every Moment Matters where he looked at some of the best practices when it comes to planning a practice and designing your drills for your team. Now John refers to a research study done at Cal Poly University with the college baseball team and what they were asking themselves is what is the best way to take batting practice?

And so they designed two groups that would take two sessions of extra BP for six weeks to start the college season. The first group of hitters would go into the cage for their 45 pitch session and know that they were going to see 15 fast balls followed by 15 offspeed pitches, followed by 15 breaking balls. This is what we would refer to as block practice because they're doing the same thing, the same skill over and over again. Now the second group would go into the cage and they would also see 45 pitches, 15 fast balls, 15 off speed pitches and 15 breaking balls, but rather than see them consecutively, they were randomly thrown from the pitcher during the entire session. In other words, they might see two fast balls followed by a curve ball, followed by two breaking balls, followed by another curve ball, and what they found was that over the course of six weeks, the players in the block session looked better.

They seem to hit the ball harder and farther. They made contact at greater rates. Their batting practice sessions looked incredibly successful. Meanwhile, the interleaving group didn't make as much contact. They seem to be fooled more often in batting practice and didn't quite have the same quality of swing because they were facing what essentially was a live pitching situation. However, the researchers also attempted to correlate their in game performance and what they found over the course of the season is that the hitters that were facing the randomized pitching sequences tended to have higher batting average higher contact rates and seem to hit the ball harder in games than the group of hitters that were facing the block sequences during their batting practice. Now there is a wide body of research into motor skill development that would indicate that this variability, this randomness as part of training is a key factor in creating skills that transfer from practice to a game.

Now, one could argue that you could create random sessions without having defense involved or working out by yourself and I certainly agree with that premise, but there are advantages to dictating the variability of your workouts by using a live defender. Now. The other thing to keep in mind when it comes to basketball skills in particular is that our skills are not isolated events within the game. In other words, there is never a point where we just stand still and wait for someone to throw us pass after pass for us to shoot it prior to a shot. There's movement without the ball. There might be movement with the ball. There's reaction to the fenders and spacing and time and game situation. There's all kinds of variables and factors that go into the shot process and to isolate those to work on passing and catching and then work on dribbling and ball pickup and then work on the act of shooting without marrying those together really inhibits the ability of players to to learn how to interleave or interweave those skills together as they would be experienced in a game.

Now the second term that I want to introduce you to here is the concept of perception action coupling. Now the idea here is that no skill happens in a sterile environment, in the game of basketball. In other words, when you are shooting the ball, you're making a decision and I'm going to talk about decision making here in just a moment, but that decision is predicated on the information that you accrue or that you gather or that you perceive from the environment. In other words, if you receive the ball on the perimeter, your trying to scan the environment to determine what should happen next. You have to have the ability to identify what player is going to defend you. How far away are they? Are they closing out? Are they staying down? Are their hands high? Are their hands low? What are they doing with their, how long are they, how tall are they?

How quick are they? Are they somebody that you can beat off the dribble? Are they somebody that you can shoot over the top of? There's all kinds of variables that are dependent on a player's ability to perceive, to see, to have vision. Now, what is often overlooked then is that the skill itself, the physical technique of shooting the ball should be triggered by what the player perceives and the environment. And if you are not practicing or training with some sort of a defensive cue, some sort of a read for the player to link their skill execution to something that they perceive. Once again, you are robbing them of the opportunity to develop in live play in a game context. Now the third benefit of using a game based approaches, arguably the most important beyond the physical execution of the skill and that is the skill of decision making.

It's deciding which physical skill, what action to take based on what you perceive in the environment. Now again, those decisions are going to be based on what a player is experiencing in a live situation. In other words, when they're in a game, they're reacting to what they see the defense doing. They're reacting to space, they're reacting to time, they're reacting to their teammates and how they're being defended. And so in order to improve a player's decision-making, we have to be able to think again about the flight simulator that we talked about. In part one. We have to be able to create and replicate and repeat scenarios and situations where players are forced to make a decision. You can see here we pulled out a screenshot from the video where we're working on a two on one advantage as a player drives to the basket and a half court set.

Again, they're reading what does that help side defender doing? They're aware of where their teammate is in the corner. They're aware of where the chase defender is coming from behind the dribble and taking all that information in. Now they are asked to make the appropriate decision based on where they're at with the basketball in response to the defense. Now, one of the advantages to our training system as that we have isolated these decision points in so many different aspects of the game. Moving with the ball, without the ball off the dribble in the post off of screening action. We've taken these micro decision points that players experience dozens of times in a game. We've isolated them in a competitive situation with live defense and then ask the players to get repetitions, not just in executing their skills but in executing their perceptual ability to read the environment and make the right decision.

And ultimately we want our ball skills, the things that we do with the basketball, dribbling, passing, catching, shooting, rebounding, et cetera to be tied into our perceptual skills and our decision making skills. And that is the beauty of the game based approach in our game based training system. Now, if you're interested in more information, you can click on the link in the article and we will leave you with an example of this two on two game that we play in order to develop our driving ability, our decision making, our ability to make open shots, well contested by defenders, and our ability to finish at the rim.