Learn the Game By Playing the Game

This question and answer with Golden State Warriors assistant coach Alvin Gentry was just published on ESPN.com. While it is largely about Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors current NBA season and accomplishments, there are a couple gems in there for coaches (and players).

When I was a little shortie, seventh grade, when you were one of my coaches at the Denver Nuggets Summer Basketball Camp, you and Larry Brown taught me something about basketball that I still carry with me to this day. You all had the philosophy that you really only get better at basketball by actually playing basketball. You and Coach Brown were like, 'Just keep playing. Run up and down the court, scrimmage, have some fun, just play. You will learn.'

This comment by the interviewer to the coach leads off the article. There is a tendency in coaches to practice the fundamental skills in isolated blocks. Passing without serves or sets. Hitting without passes. Digging without playing out the rest of the rally. There is some value in this, but there is more value putting those fundamentals in the context of the game. The game is random. It isn't a sanitized stripped down event where everything works perfectly. Even when first learning the skills, put them through the skills in the ugly mess of random that is the game. We can guide that random through engineering the specifics of the game and giving targeted feedback on the skills we are teaching at the time.

I think the way you get better at basketball is by playing 5-on-5. Obviously, the work on fundamentals is important, to work on your skills, but to become a great basketball player, all of the great basketball players that I know, they love playing and they play a lot and they play 5-on-5 basketball. You can drill and you can get better with your fundamentals, but if you are going to become a really good basketball player, you are going to have to love the game and just play.

 This should be obvious. For our players to become great they need to love to play. They need to play 6 on 6. They need to play 6 on 6 a lot. A challenge for volleyball coaches and players is access to court time. Many of the facilities we use for practice and competition are not full time volleyball facilities. A basketball player will be a lot more likely to have access to a ball and hoop. This puts a lot of responsibility on the volleyball coach to give our players the most opportunities to play the game.

That's what I tell all of the young players I coach: For every hour you spend working on your game, spend three hours playing the game. That's how you figure out angles, you figure out cuts, that's the way to figure all of those things out because that's the way the game is played. And that's the only way you get better, I think.

 This is an interesting guideline. Of the teams I have been associated with, the better teams spent less time on the skills in isolation and more on 6 on 6 games. The other teams seemed to spend more time on the skills in isolation and less on 6 on 6 games. The better ones were close to that 3:1 game:skills ratio. The others were closer to the flip side of that, 1:3 games:skills. The best team I've been associated with that spent most of that time in 6 on 6 games also spent more time during those 6 on 6 games doing things to reduce the inevitable downtime that comes with an actual "by the book" organized game.