Playful Practice or Practicing like a Pro

Should children practice like professionals or should pros practice more like children?

In January, I published 20 Hacks for the 24-Hour Athlete, which I wrote primarily for players, as I found myself offering the same advice and sending the same links to players who were looking for off-court advantages or help. Below is a chapter I removed from the final book; some content may appear in the book, as I combined two chapters into one late in the process.

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“Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.” – Diane Ackerman

Every player wants to train like a professional player, as we attribute their professional status to their training and imagine they have access to the best coaches, practices, and training theory. Is their skill attributable to their current training? Should you train like a pro?

A post on a coaching forum said, “Brett Brown of the 76ers said that while it’s not uncommon for NBA players to dramatically improve their shooting after they enter the league, very few seem to improve their ball-handling significantly. It seems to be a skill players learn young or not at all.” I do not know the accuracy of the statement, whether Brown said this, nor whether few NBA players improve their dribbling skills. However, dribbling skills are learnable into adulthood.

We had great ball-handlers when I coached U9s. They looked good in drills, they could do tricks, and they handled the ball well in games. More than half of our team did the slip-and-slide from the And1 Mix-Tapes in our pregame layup lines at the AAU National Tournament. Our first opponent stopped their warmup to watch our players. We shredded presses because every player could handle the ball. How did they develop these skills? Was it because they were young? Yes and no.

We played. Our dribbling drills consisted of follow-the-leader and small-sided games. We encouraged our players to try tricks. One player pulled off the slip-and-slide in a game.

Our two best ball-handlers were the last to leave practices because one’s father was the program director who had to lock up and the other’s mother liked to talk. They played one-vs-one as everyone filed out of the gym. They had no baskets, so one-vs-one was basically keep away. The vestibule was about six to eight feet wide, and they dribbled around or through each other after most practices. Nobody told them to practice while their parents talked. They just played.

Play is fun, voluntary, and done for its own sake rather than another purpose (to improve); you lose a sense of time and gain a diminished consciousness — you are immersed fully in the moment; there is no one way to do things and the experience drives a desire to continue (Brown, 2010). They were unconcerned with their parents standing outside and talking for 20 minutes because they were immersed in play with no sense of time and no desire to do anything else. Once they got into games, they had so much space compared to the vestibule that beating a defender was easy.

Brown believed age affects learning, development, or maybe just dribbling. One problem in our basketball development environment today is many people view any individual drill as skill development. An individual drill is not necessarily skill development. I visited an academy years ago, and the director showed off his U11 players doing very impressive straight-line drills. Once they scrimmaged, nobody beat anyone off the dribble. The director blamed athleticism. whereas I implored him to play tag. He relented, and players lost control of their balls repeatedly as they played tag. These players developed well-trained habits through their complicated straight-line drills, but the skills collapsed under a little bit of pressure, speed, and unpredictability. There was a disconnect between the practice and the game.

Skill acquisition is a subconscious process and leads to fluency, whereas learning is a conscious process focused on accuracy (Krashen, 1982). Fluency precedes accuracy; you spoke and communicated with friends before you knew proper verb tenses and spelling. You can end a sentence with a preposition, and everyone understands the idea despite the grammatical error. Play develops fluency with the ball, the basket, and teammates. The academy players perfected their accuracy — they could conjugate their verbs on a test — but they lacked fluency: They could not converse with another person.

Age is only a factor because of children’s willingness to explore, experiment, and risk mistakes. Young children learn rapidly through a large variety of movements with minimal repetitions, and a tendency not to follow instructions (Schöllhorn et al., 2010). They explore and play. Our players developed their dribbling skills through their after-practice play as much as the playful drills such as tag and follow-the-leader and small-sided games in practice.

NBA players rely on stationary and straight-line dribbling drills, or they attack cones, chairs, or interns rather than playing one-vs-one in confined spaces. They practice like the academy players, focused on accuracy, not fluency. Young players develop their fluency through play; NBA players struggle because they engage in specific movements with many repetitions and almost constant feedback and instructions. It is not the age preventing the development of dribbling skills, but the environment.

Adults view play as superfluous because it is fun, and therefore not serious practice, but every learning environment offers a different social context and fulfills different needs; ignoring any environment is detrimental, whether play or deliberate practice (Cote et al., 2013). One is not better than the other; each has its purpose. However, accuracy without fluency misses the point; are you interested in conversing with another person or just being able to correct grammatical mistakes on paper?

Playful practice and a playful attitude toward practice possess intrinsic value at every stage of development (Anderson & Steel, 2022). San Jose Mercury News columnist Tim Kawakami (2017) once wrote about Stephen Curry and Ian Clark: “They’re playing like little kids, while they’re preparing to do something very serious, and there is Curry in a nutshell, right there.” Coaches praise Curry’s stationary two-ball routine, but ignore the playful aspects of his preparation and development. Steven Kotler wrote in The Rise of Superman, “If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round.” Curry is who he is because of the playfulness, passion, and fun as much as the effort and seriousness.

Nobody is associated more with serious practice than Kobe Bryant and the Mamba Mentality, but his practices often incorporated play. “Bryant would invent various sets of rules where he could only dribble and score with his weak hand; some days he could only score inside the paint, others only from outside” (Pick, 2014). He manipulated task constraints to practice different skills, as the constraints changed the defender’s behaviors. He created different challenges for himself, which mimicked the challenges he faced during the season.

Too often, drill work is insufficient. We spend hours practicing layups, but Mike MacKay, a master coach developer with Canada Basketball, has written that the most missed shot in basketball is the poor-angle layup. The ubiquitous layup drills and practice fail to prepare players fully for the intensity and angles of game layups. Curry’s layup touch may have developed from shooting on “the thick steel rim that offered no absolution” that was on a pole “not squared to a single landmark…so every shot required instant, expert recalibration” (Fleming, 2015). Bryant may have perfected his finishing through practicing against different defenders with different constraints that prohibited the perfect-angle layups and dunks. Layup drills refine the movement and improve wayward technique, but you need to play to develop the touch and feel to become an expert finisher. Play affords the opportunity for exploration and discovery.

Does this mean all NBA players should play tag? Beats me. I am not an NBA trainer, but players might want to try something new if Brown is correct and few NBA players improve their dribbling despite numerous skill trainers running summer-long workouts to improve these skills. Henry Ford said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Maybe the reason players remain the same is they continue with fundamental, skill development drills despite their apparent purposelessness. Who knows?

Future elite performers typically start in playful conditions (Bloom, 1985). The world’s best soccer academies believe serious play best develops players for the future (Nesti & Sulley, 2014). National-level players and expert decision-makers played more as children (Hornig et al., 2016; Berry et al., 2008). Even K. Anders Ericsson (2017), the godfather of deliberate practice, identified children playing as “their first steps down the path of expertise.”

By all means, if you want to train like a pro, do stationary two-ball, straight-line, and other similar drills. However, Brown essentially said these do not work. Instead, add complexity to develop your skills. As Rafe Kelley said, “Complexity translates better to simplicity, but not vice versa.” Make your practice more playful, and more like a game. Couple the perception and the action. Tag is not perfect, but it adds speed, unpredictable changes of direction, evading skills, reading opponents, and more that more closely approximate game dribbling than a straight-line, two-ball, or tennis-ball catching drill. Skill is more than being able to bounce a ball. The skill is being able to handle the ball under pressure and make the best decision given different, constantly changing situations. This is the skill to develop, not being able to dribble two balls at the same time in straight lines.

References

Anderson, D.I. & Steel, K.A. (2022). It’s not the type of practice that matters, it’s the attitude: The impact of playful practice on motor skill learning. Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior, 16(2), 179-93.

Berry, J., Abernethy, B., & Côté, J. (2008). The contribution of structured activity and deliberate play to the development of expert perceptual and decision-making skill. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 30(6), 685-708.

Bloom, B.S. (1985). Developing talent in young people. Ballantine Books.

Brown, S. (2010). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Côté, J., Erickson, K., & Abernethy, B. (2013). Play and practice during childhood. In J. Côté & R. Lidor (Eds.), Conditions of children’s talent development in sport (p. 9-20). Fitness Information Technology.

Ericsson, K.A. & Pool, R. (2017). Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise. HarperOne.

Fleming, C. (2015). Stephen Curry. The full circle. ESPN the Magazine, April 23.

Hornig, M., Aust, F., & Güllich, A. (2016). Practice and play in the development of German top-level professional football players. European Journal of Sport Science, 16(1), 96-105.

Kawakami, T. (2017). Steph Curry, Ian Clark like ‘little kids’ in pregame routine. San Jose Mercury News, May 19.

Krashen, S.D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Pergamon Press Inc.

Nesti, M. & Sulley, C. (2014). Youth development in football: Lessons from the world’s best academies. Routledge.

Pick, D. (2014). Ex-L.A. Laker Tony Gaffney relives bond with Kobe Bryant. Basketball Insiders, October 15.

Schöllhorn, W., Beckmann, H., Janssen, D., & Drepper, J. (2010) Stochastic perturbations in athletic field events enhance skill acquisition. In: Renshaw, I., Davids,K., & Savelsbergh,G.J.P. (Eds) Motor learning in practice – A constraints-led approach (pp. 69-82). Routledge.