The Competitive Cauldron

Some time ago the book Training Soccer Champions by Anson Dorrance was recommended to me primarily because of its mention of the competitive cauldron. Anson Dorrance is the ridiculously successful head coach of the North Carolina women’s soccer team. I found this video on youtube with Coach Dorrance talking about the origins of the cauldron.

The competitive cauldron is essentially a scoring and ranking system for practices. Players compete with each other during practice in drills that are games with winners and losers. Different things are tracked, all of it is compiled, and the players can see where they rank within the team. It attempts to put an objective value on what they do within games, and gives an incentive to get to the top and stay on top.

When I did a search for “competitive cauldron”, I came across this site with “11 Reasons Why You Should Create Your Own Competitive Cauldron”.  A couple of them stood out to me, numbers 4 and 7.

Number 4 is, “Works on developing and perfecting skills in a pressurized, game-like environment.”

This touches on the principle of motor learning, the specificity of learning hypothesis. Making game-like drills with as much game-like pressure as possible during practice is the optimal way to improve skill execution during actual game situations. Basketball players often practice free throw shots in sets of 10 or more, when they will never shoot more than 3 at a time during a game under reasonable circumstances. Some can go 10 for 10 in practice and then regularly miss during games. Shooting occasional pairs of free throws throughout practice with a set of sprints on the line for missing will have far greater transfer to performance in that skill during the game. Players still shoot them in tens and twenties.

Number 7 is, “Creates objective data and standards to guide your playing time decisions.”

I’ve used limited versions of the competitive cauldron with every team I have led since. I have ranked outsides and liberos by serve receive stats. I have ranked setters by winning percentage and side out percentage. I have ranked hitters by hitting efficiency. It is a very handy accessible way to determine starters and playing time. There is a lot that can be done. Most of what I have done is with just one or two others to collect data, sometimes just myself. With enough help, I could have all of that and more, and I could give the players a ranking chart showing where they stand on the team. It can also be used to handicap the starters in games pitting starters against backups. Depending on the level of detail in the data, you could even know what players will perform best in close games with advancing in the tournament at stake.