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Repeat ... Repeat ... Repeat ... Repeat ...
by Dave
Thursday, September 24, 2009
I saw an e-mail from some coaches to their players the other day which, on the surface, doesn't really contain anything wrong per se but which, after some contemplation, I realized misses the mark by quite a bit. The message said something along the lines of "good players don't need to be told to do something twice. They hear what is told to them and thereafter they do it the right way." The idea of the message was to cause players to take personal responsibility when something they do is corrected. It implores them to take coaches' words to heart and to try harder to incorporate constructive criticism into their games. That is a good thing to tell players. But if you think they're gonna get that message the first time you give it to them, think again, and again, and again ...
Human beings are creatures of habit. Think for a minute about some mundane aspect of your life such as your morning routine or what you typically do after arriving home from school or work. I would be willing to bet that you do things in almost precisely the same order when you get up in the morning at about the same moment each day. I know I do. If my morning hygiene regime is examined, I know that I do things in precisely the same order and that if a stopwatch were to be put on the routine over the course of a month, there probably would be little variance throughout the period.
The phrase "routine will set you free" makes use of the human habit phenomenon in a constructive way. If you use habit to accomplish certain tasks each day, you are freed up to handle non-routine events more easily. If you didn't have habit, the every day things would take you twice as long to finish. If you do not believe that, try mixing up your morning routine or some such pattern and see what happens.
Let's say that you shower, do your hair, dress, eat something for breakfast, drink some coffee, then brush your teeth, etc. Try doing things in a completely different order, within reason. Put that proverbial stopwatch on yourself and see if it takes about the same amount of time to do things in a different order each day or if your normal routine is faster. My guess is the normal routine is very much faster. Worse, I'd be willing to bet that if you do everything in a different order, some of the time, you will forget to do something. Most people function that way.
When I worked an office job, I usually got up at exactly the same moment each day; then got into the shower first; then shaved, brushed my hair; brushed my teeth; got dressed; drank a cup of coffee; pulled out my computer to review news; got up from that at exactly the same moment; packed my bag; got into the car at precisely the same moment; drove to the train station, parked in a spot within 5 spots of where I parked every day in a lot which contained hundreds and hundreds of cars; bought the same newspaper and a cup of coffee from the same guy, walked to almost precisely the same point on the very long train platform, stood next to the same people, and got on the same train at almost the same spot; got off the train at the same location; walked to the same place on the subway platform; jumped on just about the same subway every day; got out at the same spot; walked the same walk; got on the same elevator; and found myself at my desk at about the same time each and every day for something like 12 years. What strikes me in the history of this morning routine is that I often saw the same people on the same train, subway, even elevator. That was true despite some of them coming from New Jersey, others from Connecticut, a few from Pennsylvania, and several from places within New York City or Manhattan itself. That is kind of odd when you think about it. Numerous people waking up at different times in locations far apart, doing essentially the same tasks, taking different means of transportation, and all arriving at the same location at the same moment, over and over again, over years and years.
But enough of the mundane. The point is, people are creatures of habit. Network TV stations work hard to get you to tune in their channel on Sunday night before you go to bed because they know that, on Monday morning, you will turn on the TV and leave whatever channel is on alone. The supermarket business makes trade on understanding people's habits and placing impulse buy items according to that pattern. All of marketing is essentially a human psychology effort and one which makes use of habit perhaps more than anything else.
I heard a softball coach the other day say to his team, "look girls, I am tired of repeating myself over and over again, and not having anyone listen and follow through. I tell you to do it this way and you do it that way once, maybe twice, but then a day or two later, you do it the same way you did it when I corrected you. I'm tired of this. From now on, I want you to listen to me when I correct you and do it the right way thereafter." If you have ever strongly felt this way, I suggest you take a step back and think hard about what coaching entails before moving forward or backing away from the game. Repeating oneself is not only important in coaching, it is the foundation upon which everything else rests.
Let's draw a picture. Lets say you have before you a new team. They can all throw and field OK. They've never really played the game before but they have all the requisite skills. So now, all you need to do is teach them how to react to different things that might happen. You decide the very first thing you want to teach them is bunt defense. You explain to them what each position will do. That takes perhaps 5 minutes. You set them all up in the field, then tap or hit a ball into play a few feet from home and yell, "BUNT." Of course, every girl will do everything exactly as you told them just a few moments ago, won't they? I also suppose that you are now done with ever mentioning bunt defense. They all know what to do and they all practiced it once. If they are real athletes, if they listened to you, if they were paying close attention and took what you said to heart, all of these girls will do everything exactly right on every bunt play they ever face.
OK, so that's an exaggeration. If two days after your single bunt defense practice you were to play a game in which the first batter walked and the second batter bunted, the reality would be somewhat different. The 2B would run headlong into both the SS and CF as all three tried to cover second. The girl fielding the bunt would whip the ball into right because nobody was covering first. The RF, not aware of any particular responsibility on this play, would be busy picking grass out of her fingernails and not see the ball go right past her. The LF would run past the foul line and ask her mother to "bring a bottle of water to the dugout after this inning." The 3B would back up home. And your pitcher would quit the team on the spot, walking off the field because she does not want to spend all that time practicing her pitches just to play with a bunch of losers like the girls on this team.
I don't think I overstate reality on this point. If you want to run a solid bunt defense, you've got to explain it at length, impress everyone of your players with the fact that every position on the field has a specific responsibility, tell them what their responsibilities are, and then run through a typical bunt many, many times. Then at your next practice, you will spend less time explaining the play and more time running through it. You likely will continue to run through bunt defense many more times at every practice for the entire year. And you'll do the same thing again next year with the same group of girls.
Each time you run through bunt defense, you may make little tweaks to speed things up. When you see little mistakes made, you'll correct them. The team will get better and better at this play. But in games, they will make the occasional error on it and then you'll work it some more in practice. That is what softball is all about, repetition of conditioned response.
When a windmill pitcher, catcher or batter takes private lessons to learn the mechanics of her craft, I suppose theoretically, it should take a finite number of lessons before she gets it absolutely right and, thereafter, she should never again need another lesson with respect to the skill. That theory should pan out if the girls taking the lessons are paying attention to their instructors, listening hard and taking the instructions to heart. But if that were the case, private instructors wouldn't be in such high demand. It really is not an issue of girls not paying attention or of perhaps starting them out too young so much as it is a matter of players always needing to be reminded of certain aspects of their mechanics which tend to atrophy over time.
There really are not so many aspects to playing this game that it takes a lifetime to learn them all. There are plenty but it is a finite set. And each skill takes a long time to truly master. If players needed just one iteration of a skill shown the right way and then they had it down pat, it might take about 2 to 3 years and a gifted athlete would be ready to play at world class level. If that theory worked, we wouldn't need coaches to do very much at the highest levels. College and ASA Gold coaches could just get themselves the most skilled and athletic recruits, arrange them on the field of play and simply watch. In case you haven't noticed, that does not happen.
There are probably more coaches kept very busy at the highest levels of the game than anywhere else. Colleges have pitching instructors, catching, infield and outfield coaches, batting instructors, trainers and conditioners, etc. They need these coaches in order to properly prepare athletes who have been playing the game more than 10 years. They have selected and recruited the best athletes their programs can entice and yet they need coaches to train the kids! Why is that?
The other day I was watching a couple coaches in a 14U batting practice. The team was a new one. The coaches had selected the best kids they could draw and put together a team. Now they were a couple weeks into practicing them twice a week. At each practice they spent about half their time on hitting. Each girl would stand in and hit balls pitched to various locations by one coach while another stood and watched their hitting mechanics. These coaches were of the hybrid swing mechanic genre though they were not particularly aware of that fact. The kids they had picked for their team were, of course, the ones who had done the best at tryouts. A large percentage of these kids were rotationally trained.
The coaches liked the way most of the girls turned their hips to drive the ball. They all seemed to do well with pitches inside and in the lower portions of the strike zone. But when the coach threw balls high or on the outside corner, all of these girls would struggle. And they often tried to pull the outside pitches. When this would happen, the coaches would stop the batting practice for a few minutes and show the batters what they were doing wrong. In some cases, they had already told the particular girls to correct their mistake by doing X or Y. But they could not understand why they had told this or that girl to do X and she refused to do it the next time she hit. In one case, a girl was told to do a partuicular thing and she did it fine right away for numerous practice pitches. Later, when she faced live pitching, she reverted back to her errant ways. The coaches were again frustrated.
At this batting practice, one girl would rotate her hips, drop the bat head, and then take what could only be described as a golf swing. The girl had been trained to do this for years because, when she was younger and small for her age, she had trouble generating enough power to hit the ball out of the infield. Now that she was about normal size and of above average strength, she had great difficulty changing her swing mechanics. The coaches told her that any decent pitcher was going to see her swing and know to keep the ball up in the zone to get her out easily. They told her what to do to correct this and she did as they said perhaps once or twice, but she just couldn't repeat it for any length of time. This kid is going to be quite a project for quite a long time.
In addition to problems with habit and learned errors, kids have a lot on their minds. The girl whose swing, throwing, or fielding mechanics (perhaps all three) are being corrected at Wednesday practice also is trying to remember how to conjugate some Spanish verb, how to solve quadratic equations, and / or the order of events in the American Revolution for tests on Thursday and Friday. She is trying to remember if that cute boy likes the Kansas City Chiefs or the Miami Dolphins / the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox. She is focused on what Doris told her about the boy who is going to ask her to Friday night's dance. She is thinking about the fact that her mother told her she must either clean up her room or she has to stay inside all weekend to help with some boring job around the house. She is trying to remember so many things that if you tell her to keep her butt down just once, you would have to be out of your mind to expect her to remember it even though she is perhaps your most focused ballplayer.
I was working with a girl who plays first base for us. She is a good player, quick, athletic. She struggles with hard shots hit to her right. Over two games, the only errors we made in the games were balls hit to her right. She got there too late on both of these plays and the ball careened off her mitt. She is a tall kid and has a tendency to stand too erect. She has, for many years, played from a ready position in which her legs are fairly stiff. What I wanted her to do was get her legs bent with her butt down and her mitt able to touch the ground. Then I wanted her to get on the balls of her feet and be ready to go in either direction very quickly.
I explained what it is I wanted her to do and she made some first efforts at it. I had to explain again and emphasize the getting low aspect because her normal position was so high that her first efforts at getting low were only about half of what I envisioned. Eventually, with some prodding, I got her low enough. We went through maybe ten grounders after that. The next practice, she was back in her normal ready position. I could have said, "I'm tired of repeating myself ..." but I didn't. Instead, I said, "remember, you gotta get low." And she went to the halfway point again so I said, "no, lower." I expect I'll be saying this same thing to this same girl until the end of the year. At some point, maybe it will click in her. Then again, it might not!
I remember a particular SS I worked with for a full year. She had a bad tendency to field everything with one hand which slowed her down. She also tended to field sideways instead of with her shoulders square. Everything else was fine but this one-handed tendency really killed her. I had her for a year and I thought we had tamed the thing. But that was several years ago and I had occasion to see her recently. She is doing a pretty good job in LF but she almost never plays SS anymore. Her coaches picked a girl to play that critical position who has better habits and makes fewer errors. I suppose that puts the truth in the original statement I discussed above, "good players don't need to be told to do something twice. They hear what is told to them and thereafter they do it the right way."
From a personnel point of view, coaches do want the kid who is "easiest to coach" playing the most critical positions. That kid is the one who does not need to be reminded to use two hands, to keep her shoulders square, to bend her knees for the ready position, to not drop the bat head, to rotate her hips, to cover the outside corner, to do this or that to hit against high pitches, where to go on bunt coverage, to block balls in the dirt and how to do that correctly, etc. Coaches are going to pick the kids who listen to them, take constructive criticism to heart and otherwise not make them repeat themselves too much. But coaches themselves should never tire of having to repeat themselves. This game is about repetition. It requires TIRELESS repition of mechanics, plays, and verbal advice. Don't get tired of repeating yourself, just do it. Repeat ... Repeat ... Repeat ... Repeat ... Repeat ...Labels: coaching, Training, work ethic
Permanent Link: Repeat ... Repeat ... Repeat ... Repeat ...
 
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