Category: Coach Vic's Instruction and Advice
Type: Philosophy
MONITORING PERFORMANCE
One of the key coaching tasks is monitoring player performance in practice sessions to provide feedback. For it to be effective, however, such feedback should be immediate and on-going, specific, and performance-based. When players are learning, such feedback is critical to help them learn. Later, players who have mastered a task should be able to monitor their own performance.
ON-GOING AND IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK - Occasional or partial feedback is not effective. Each time a player travels, for example, he/she should be made aware of travelling.
SPECIFIC FEEDBACK - Imprecise exhortations or admonitions may do something for coaches; they do little, however, to help players learn. Yelling "Nice try... Tough defence... Don't throw the ball away" is not, in fact, very helpful.
PERFORMANCE-BASED FEEDBACK - Feedback should be provided on the basis of how closely the execution of a particular task is consistent with an understanding between players and coach of how that task should be performed. For example, knowing "when" to shoot is as important as knowing "how" to shoot. Consequently, when a player knows that he/she shot from the perimeter when rebounders were in position (knowledge of performance), that is much more helpful then being overly concerned about whether or not the ball went into the basket (knowledge of results). Feedback related to knowing "how" to execute an individual skill should also be performance based. For example, saying "Mary, when you shot you didn't keep your elbow in, under the ball," actually teaches something.
Submitted by: Coach Vic Pruden
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