A John Wooden Teaching Technique: Introduce a Drill on Monday; Have the Players Run it On Tuesday.

Come on! Get into my time machine. I’m taking you back to a John Wooden practice at UCLA. You’re going to learn something that will change the way you teach.

You are one of the players. Your name is Beauford. (That’s safe because Coach never had a player by that name.) Pay attention. Coach Wooden is introducing a new drill and he’s looking right at you.

“Beauford: You get to the top of the key. Bill and Keith: You get to the wings, freethrow line extended. Mike, Tommy, and Marques: You get behind Beauford. Keith and Bill: You make v-cuts and get open. Beauford: Pass the ball to Bill. Keith: As soon as Beauford passes to Bill, you make a hard cut to the weak-side block. Bill: When you catch the ball, you get in triple-threat position. Beauford: You cut away from Bill and touch the weak-side elbow and then cut down the key with a change of pace and change of direction. Bill: You make a one-hand flip pass to Beauford when he is right about here. Beauford: When you catch the ball, throw it up on the board and rebound. Remember to time it right and to come down with legs spread wide and elbows out as you chin the ball. Bill: When Beauford is rebounding, you make a hard cut towards half court and then come back to the wing to receive the outlet pass. Remember to time it right so you’re still accelerating when you catch the ball. The next player in line, that would be you, Mike, pay attention. When you see the outlet pass, make a hard cut to the weak-side and come back to the top of the key to receive the pass from Bill. Remember to still be accelerating when you receive it. Beauford: You replace Bill and Bill, you go to the end of the line at the top of the key. The same play is now going to be run on the other side. Keith: Time it right and make your v-cut to the wing to receive the ball from Mike. Make sure you are not too early or too late. But I’d rather have you be a little late than early. Too early and the defense will be there. Mike will make his cut down the lane and receive the pass from Keith, rebound, and outlet to Keith who has set himself up by cutting toward half court and returning. Mike will replace Keith and Keith goes to the end of the line. We go back and forth, continuously. Pay attention to the details. Does everyone understand the drill?”

OK, chill out. We’re in the time machine again, heading back to the present. You say, “Thank you for rescuing me from having to do that drill.” Why? You say, “Because I would never have remembered all those instructions.”

The above drill, the “Rebound, Pass-Out” drill, is one of the most difficult to run correctly the first time. I know, because I’ve tried to teach it in one-day basketball clinics. It takes at least 15-20 minutes of repeated demonstration, explanation, and a lot of correction for the players to feel comfortable with the basic movements and continuity. It takes at least another 15-20 minutes to get the drill to a point where the players are executing all of the details Coach Wooden mentioned.

At UCLA, the 24-hour cushion between previewing the drill and executing it, helped us run the drill better than we would have, had we been asked to do it immediately after the initial demonstration. For some reason, the delay helped us remember most everything Coach said the day before. After a second, very brief, demonstration the next day, we usually performed the drill near-perfectly the first time. Mind you, Coach still administered some corrections, and I do recall an occasional “Goodness gracious” directed toward certain individuals (probably me more than anyone). But it didn’t take long for us to get to the point where the movements of the drill became second nature, allowing for repetition to drill in the details necessary for quick and proper execution of the fundamentals of the game. In other words, we were learning at a very fast rate.     

If the “24-Hour Preview to Practice” method accelerates learning, what are the reasons? Here are some thoughts.

1. Visualization: “Visualization is looking at the future in a way that is very real to our mind and subconscious.” (http://www.visualizationtechniques.net/what-is-visualization.html) Research shows when we imagine ourselves doing something before doing it, performance is enhanced. There is evidence, if you study something and then go to sleep, you have a more clear understanding when you awake than you did before sleeping. Perhaps the one day delay between the preview of Coach Wooden’s drill and the performance, allowed us time to practice the drill mentally and, thereby, understand it better the next day. 

2. Advance Organizers: “Ausubel maintains that a person’s existing knowledge about a concept is the most important factor in whether new material will be meaningful and how well it can be learned and retained. Advance Organizers help the learner to integrate new materials with what they already know; they ‘prepare’ the learner for new information.” (http://www.guidesandtutorials.com/advance-organizers.html) Perhaps the 24-hour cushion between the preview and practice allowed us to connect new information with what we already knew.

3. Information is Spaced Out: Information seems to sink in deeper, and stay longer, when it is dispensed in separated doses rather than all at the same time. Perhaps the brief explanation the second day, coupled with what I remembered from the first day, helped things to sink in better.

Conclusion
Allowing players to prepare by giving them the “heads up” in advance, is consistent with the Coach Wooden’s overall teaching philosophy. For example, before he asked us to do the “breakdown drills,” which were the separated components of an offensive play, he showed us the entire play first. Consequently, the breakdown drills made sense. Another example is, Coach Wooden posted the practice plan in the locker room so we could get prepared for what was coming up. This helped tremendously. Coach Wooden was a smart teacher. He knew, a one day delay between preview and performance, worked.

If you, Beauford, are still not convinced Coach Wooden’s method of introducing a drill on Monday, and having the players run it on Tuesday, facilitates learning, here’s a final thought that may drive the point home. If I would have told you yesterday I was going to be writing on this subject, and briefly explained the concept, would you have been better prepared to get more out of this posting?