Why do we practice?

I coach both baseball and basketball.  As a coach I consider practice to be critical to the success of my teams and athletes.  This is true for all age groups and even my special needs teams.  Now, the question comes up: Why is practice important?  Why will coaches like myself use practice to help determine playing time?  After all, isn’t the whole purpose of practice to improve player confidence?

I’m going to start this post by saying that the purpose of practice is not confidence.  Confidence is a natural byproduct of the process.  For me, we practice for three reasons; practice improves skills, practice develops a culture, and practice prepares athletes for games.

Practice improves skills:

This is where skills are taught, corrected, blended with other skills, and put into the context of the game.  In sports, skills have to be learned so that their execution in the presence of stress and fatigue is almost automatic and flawless.

Last season I wanted one of my basketball teams to add a new weapon.  See in basketball you do not want a one dimensional offense.  If you are one dimensional then it is easy for another team to shut you down.  Our team was great at layups and rebounds, but this is easy to guard against.  So, we had to continue working on that but shooting had to become a strength as well – guard against layups and we’ll shoot, guard our shooters and we’ll go inside.  This creates a matchup nightmare.

Everyone can shoot in their driveway, but that is when conditions are perfect and they have lots of time to set up for the shot.  Games aren’t like that.  So we really had to focus on building our shooting skill and then learning to do it quickly under pressure.  Only practice develops that.

Practice develops culture:

This is where teams develop an identity, a work ethic, leaders, and an ability to overcome adversity together.  This is something that has to be approached deliberately and methodically.  This does not just happen.

Working on the culture piece has been something that I have had to get better at as a coach.  With baseball this year I spent the first practice developing how I wanted my coaches and I to be addressed, practice patterns, and our identity as a scrappy, hard working, focused team.  From that point on every practice deliberately focused on this.

How do we do all of this?  First we work hard, always.  Second we emphasize doing things as a team and how athlete accomplishments make the team better.  We have team cheers which seem silly until game time, then they become serious to everyone.  Fourth we emphasize togetherness.  Finally, we have expectations and consequences that are consistently applied.  My star players do flutter kicks for attention lapses just like everyone else!

Practice prepares athletes for games:

Practice is where you teach the skills, teach the game, and teach how to respond to situations.  We scrimmage in every practice because we always compete and we always have consequences for losing because losing sucks.  In both baseball and basketball I usually come up with one game situation to work on each practice.  For example, at our last practice we emphasized running on a walk to first base because of the other team makes a mistake we can capitalize on that and turn the walk into two bases or more.  Sure enough, that situation happened at our next game.

So as you can see, there is a lot more to practice than confidence!