Workout Evaluations
Talent identification and coaching as separate, but related parts of talent development
I ran a workout today as a favor for a coach who was evaluating a player who wants to join the club next season. I have not run a general individual workout in a long time; I do not believe in them. I asked the purpose and was told to evaluate the player. I responded I would need less than five minutes. I was asked to fill an hour.
This is a major problem with individual/private training. We fill time. Obviously, for private training, filling time is a part of the business. Parents schedule an hour, and the hour is as much about an hour of court time as it is an hour of deliberate practice or problem solving. Filling time leads to a purposelessness. Trainers organize an hour’s worth of drills and use the same routine with a variety of players, regardless of needs. What’s the purpose? Exercise? Repetitions? Time on task? Confidence? Feeling good? Today, I simply re-hashed workouts from when I was a beginner private trainer over 20 years ago. I can sleepwalk through these workouts, but what is the point? Filling time!
I scheduled 30-minute individual sessions when I was a junior-college head coach, and the players had to arrive with an objective for the session. Why are we here? What is their purpose (not mine) for the workout? They do not need me if they just want to get some reps; they can use a shooting machine or work out with a friend or teammate. I am not a rebounding machine or a passer. An individual workout should be deliberate purpose (in most cases; some parents may just want their child to have fun or get some exercise, which is fine), which requires a purpose around which I can design specific activities to solve the problem or improve a specific aspect of a skill. Without the purpose and specific exercises, it is just work.
I do not evaluate players through individual workouts. I want to see a game or, at minimum, highlights. Anyone can look good in a gym by himself. My five-minute evaluation would be:
Watch three minutes of highlights;
Shoot a few stationary shots (technique, modifiability)
Shoot a few shots on the move (footwork, movement skills, transfer of shooting);
Evaluate attentiveness and process in a mundane drill, such as the Mikan Drill (attitude, practice habits, diligence);
Challenge him with a novel drill beyond his skill level to see how he responds to instructions and failure/frustration (mentality, mistake response, determination, learning habits)
Perform repeat hops (coordination, explosiveness, movement skills).
Easy evaluation of basic skills, mentality, habits, psychology, and movement skills. I am pretty confident I can form a fairly accurate evaluation within these five minutes.
I had to fill an hour, so he had an extra 55 minutes to change my initial impression. Many coaches and scouts suffer from an anchoring or first impression bias. I rarely ask other coaches for their impressions before watching a player myself because their evaluations and beliefs bias my impressions.
I favor my first impressions. To use psychologist Daniel Kahneman's ideas, I rely on System 1, which is fast, instinctive, and emotional. Most of my evaluation mistakes have occurred when I relied on System 2 and was more deliberative and logical: I talked myself into or out of players based on personal relationships developed through the recruiting process (prefer interacting with one more than another) or watched more and more and noticed all the mistakes and bad plays rather than concentrating on the highlights and potential. My best evaluations occurred when I offered almost immediately. My biggest recruiting problem is genuinely liking players and taking an interest in them to the point I often talk myself into offering a player I should not or help them find a different program when I do not or cannot offer.
As a coach, however, I consciously avoid the anchoring bias. I attempt to keep an open mind about all the players and utilize the competitive cauldron to provide some objective feedback to support or question my eye test. I use System 2 to be more deliberative and logical rather than relying mostly on emotions to determine playing time and substitutions.
Once I coach a player, I do not stick to my first impression; I believe everyone will change, and hopefully improve, and these changes will be at a different rate for each player. The competitive cauldron illustrates the normal ups and downs through a season. A player may have plateaued for a week or two, and plays less, then hits another ascension and plays more. Too often, coaches make judgements early in the season, and nothing can change their opinions, which they view as irrefutable and enduring facts rather than a single data point in a constantly evolving system (player) within another evolving system (team).
Talent identification and coaching are separate, but related parts of the same complex talent development process. An evaluation is a determination made at one point in time based on the information available to the evaluator as well as the evaluator’s personal biases. I evaluate players differently than another coach because I evaluate based on how I would use the player and the way I prefer to play, whereas another evaluator may evaluate more generally or favor a different type of player. Neither evaluation is necessarily wrong, and the ultimate success largely depends on the match between the evaluation and the environment.
The skill of talent identification is determining how well current performance will translate to future performance against better competition. Is the 16-year-old star a true talent or an early maturing bully-ball player whose weaknesses will be exposed quickly at the next level? Understanding the future environment improves the evaluation; I am confident I evaluate players better for my team than anyone else because I see how they fit my style, my skills, and my temperament. I know I am not the best coach for every player, and this understanding helps me to find the right fit for players, not just the best players. Once I shift from talent evaluator to coach, the accuracy no longer matters. My coaching objective is to develop all the players and design a style of play to maximize their strengths or develop their games to play at the next level, depending on the competitive level of play.
5 minute evaluation! I'm with you. When I worked at Millfield School, the Director of Sport was an ex-exercise physiologist. He saw numbers instead of children. I refused to fitness test people applying for sports scholarships: 'It's easy to get someone fit,' I said, 'Do they want to be here (rather than a pushy parent) and can they learn?' Were more important questions for me.
When someone asked to join our fitness sessions, I could tell within a minute or two how big their bullshit factor was, I then put them through some simple moves (like yours) and gave them some feedback on what they needed to work on. Their response told me everything I needed to know.
Give me the raw, hungry ones every time.
Brian, I greatly enjoyed this article and agree with so much. Many of us fall victim to the rigid, early judgement and have a hard time moving past it. It pertains to more than just basketball. When I was in college, I did an internship and eventually got hired. For some at the place of employment, it was hard to not still see me as intern when I was an actual employee with responsibilities. Your entry serves as a good reminder to keep our brains neuroplastic, rather than settled cement.
As a parent of teenagers, I'd offer that I'm not a big fan of shooting machines. My belief is that they can reinforce bad habits. Sometimes, a coach/trainer's relationship with the player is really valuable. A great one can see the mechanics, sequencing and form. They can also convey messages that the parent can't. So, even if a workout may seem "mundane" there may be more going on than meets the eye.