Thread by @AlexJSarama

Taylorism, Henry Ford, Traditional Drills & Conceptual Offense!

This is a long thread hitting on many conversation points. I also want to address some of the confusion and misunderstanding as to what constraints are within the basketball coaching community.

Let's start with Taylorism. This was a system of scientific management used in factories created by Fred W. Taylor. The most notable proponent of Taylorism was Henry Ford, who used Taylor's ideas to mass produce the iconic Ford Model T.

According to Taylor, the best way to increase efficiency was to break down each job into its individual motions, while workers were timed with a stopwatch. All unnecessary motion was eliminated and the worker, following a machinelike routine, became far more productive.

Sound familiar? Somehow these exact principles have crossed over into the sports coaching world. Entire sports (not just 🏀) are plagued by this concept as coaches rely predominately on the usage of traditional, decomposed drills which look totally different from their sport.

Just like Ford's Model T, players go through a conveyor belt where they are inundated with bunch of techniques, set play patterns, explicit instructions and expected to 'piece it all together' in the game when they get to the end of the belt. Furthermore...

players must pass through the conveyor belt before they supposedly have the necessary skills to complete in any form of game-play. It's almost like a rite of passage. This is what coaches refer to when saying players must 'first have the fundamentals.'

The problem with drills and this approach is that it is absolutely entrenched within entire coaching communities (at many levels). It is how coaches have coached for decades. In 🏀, so many coaching positions are now held by former players...

I think playing perspective is something VERY valuable to have on a staff, but at the same time it may lead to many of these traditional drills continuing to be used without their validity being questioned. This basically creates a perpetual cycle which continues from gen to gen

Many of these drills don't align with the most basic motor learning findings (e.g. blocked vs random). This is not a case of trying to be difficult and disrespecting the past. It's simply the fact that in 2022 we are fortunate to have so much evidence on skill acquisition.

I believe that by continuing to use classic drills like three man weave, zig zag etc, in light of all this evidence we now have, it's simply doing a disservice to the players we work with by continuing to use these methods. This is regardless of age and level.

I'm incredible passionate about players of ALL levels getting the best experience possible. Basketball is an incredibly exciting and dynamic sport with tremendous benefits that go far deeper than basketball. But I'm really concerned that these are not being reflected.

I hear the term "there's no right or wrong when it comes to basketball coaching" used a lot. For me, this is a cop out statement. Even more so when the validity of the traditional, blocked practice approach is proven in so many studies.

This brings us to the three-man weave. I saw a tweet yesterday which garnered 300+ likes showing the weave. Many coaches say they use the weave "just to get loose" or "it's only for warm-up." If anything, I believe this is an even worse validation for using it.

The problem with the weave, and all these other traditional drills, are that players are completely and utterly removed from their environment (5-on-5). "We can't understand skill without a deep understanding of environment." - last perception/ action podcast with Rob Gray

This is where Newell's constraints model comes in (CLA). Skill is not an innate, fixed property which players possess. It is something that emerges in a task-representative environment. This means, an environment which looks like an actual basketball game.

Going back to the weave post, I saw numerous comments talking about applying constraints to the weave. This makes no sense whatsoever. The weave is a traditional drill which is nothing like basketball. We can't take terminology from the CLA and apply it to the trad approach.

Adding a 'constraint' to the weave to only score using 3 passes or within 6 seconds is NOT the CLA. This is because it is not task-representative design. There are no affordances, opportunities for perception-action coupling, self-organisation and rep without rep in the weave.

Constraints certainly remove certain possibilities and options for action. But they are not just limiting things (e.g. you must do this within X seconds, only use your left hand etc). Rather they are informative boundaries.

Constraints go hand-in-hand with SSGs which look like 🏀. I like Mark O'Sullivan's representative information diagram. This can easily be adapted to basketball. Is there a ball, an opponent, a direction, a consequence? For all these trad drills, there is often only a ball.

With a little bit of planning, many of these traditional drills can be very easily reconfigured (add a defender, add a transition etc), which are then transformed into effective SSGs which align with all the principles of representative learning design.

I also believe the traditional approach & Taylorism extends far deeper than practice, but also into style of play concepts and how teams actually play basketball. Watching NCAA March Madness has validated this theory.

While there are some enjoyable teams to watch, these teams are outnumbered by the majority who attempt to run patterns over and over again, without players actually acting upon affordances in their environment.

How can we incorporate the tenets of CLA not just into practice design, but how teams actually play? This is the key consideration I've been playing around with this week. Fortunately, I believe I'm already doing this but now will be focussed on pursuing this goal even more.

The answer doesn't have to be as radical as ditching set plays entirely. Rather coaches have to embrace the role that individual and task constraints have within an offensive or defensive structure.

This means that it's IMPOSSIBLE to control every part of a possession. The goal should NOT be for teams to run set plays and motion offenses through to their entirety but rather be ADAPTIVE to what happens in their environment.

This means that it's IMPOSSIBLE to control every part of a possession. The goal should NOT be for teams to run set plays and motion offenses through to their entirety but rather be ADAPTIVE to what happens in their environment.

If a team runs a set play or continuity offense through to the end, they have probably missed out on acting on affordances which appeared earlier on in the possession to create an advantage. I call this the Harvard Gorilla syndrome!

Furthermore, coaches must be embrace the idea that basketball is a complex system, and several unpredictable things will happen on both ends of the floor. Rather than trying to control these, embrace it and learn how to coach and prepare players in a way that aligns with this.

For instance, we play with triggers on all live balls and only run a set on a dead ball. Because basketball is a complex system, it’s impossible for me to predict the outcome.

While we do have a very clear shot spectrum (this effectively acts as a task constraint), the players involved in the trigger (indiv constraints), as well as the trigger we use, type of defensive coverage, the spacing, time in game clock etc (all task constraints)…

Will shape that specific offensive possession and what emerges in-front of us. It’s exactly the same on the defensive end too.

Going deeper, when playing against switching in a Pick and Roll we have seven different solutions we emphasise in practice (Reject, Slip, Ghost, Flip, Veer, Pass Ahead & Relay, Skip Pass). But the idea is that any one of these could be used based on the interaction of constraints

For instance, one player may particularly well-versed at rejecting and have a slower defender, providing more opportunities to use it. Meanwhile, we may have a sharpshooter behind in the single side corner, so the picker decides to veer after seeing their def prepare the switch.

While players execute these coverage solutions, the WAY they do this technically completely depends again on individual and task constraints. E.g. a defender with long arms, close to the handler means the handler may wrap the ball behind their back as they reject.

This is another reason why the traditional approach (information processing) is futile because instead of creating adaptability, it promotes inflexibility as players build up a mental model in their head of the 'correct way' of using a technique which is de-contexualised.

My players becoming so well attuned to all these possibilities because we re-create these affordances in our environment every single day. As coaches, we must embrace the fact that by trying to continuously run a pattern without any room for creativity it’s just like Taylorism…

In these rigid systems, players are treated exactly the same, and coached as if they will perform in a controlled, rather than a chaotic environment. This contrasts to the ideas I've just shared on how we can view the game, and not just practice, through an ecological lens.

Ultimately, Taylorism didn’t work. Human beings didn’t like bring treated as robots, ruled through fear, the lack of autonomy etc. I think it’s exactly the same in sport, but many of these players are kids and scared of voicing their true opinion with adults.

I hope this thread helps with some new perspectives. I really believe in a different way of coaching, and as a basketball coaching community, adopting some of these principles will ultimately best-serve the ones who are most important: the players.

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