2-20-120
This spring I’ve been sharing a bunch of coaching tools to add to your toolbox. Regardless of what you want to coach, there’s some tips and tricks for how to coach it better.
One quick concept that I like is this idea of 2-20-120 for teaching a concept. What this means is that a player/team is going to:
Watch a 2-minute video before practice.
Spend 20 minutes discussing it.
Spend 120 minutes practicing it.
The actual time periods here don’t really matter all that much. I just find 2-20-120 a catchy way of remembering it.
I’ve shared other ways of doing video sessions previously. Yes/No Matrix and Sideout Log work well for individual sessions. My favorite way to 2-20-120 is to teach a team concept.
For example, say you want to work on this idea of “Cover and Reverse.”
(Do you like this play? Come to an Offensive Concepts seminar and learn how to train this and more!)
So here’s how you 2-20-120 it:
2 Mins
Grab your favorite video editor1 and add a few clips. Or add the same clip and loop it a couple times. Or slow it down. Or do a screen grab with an arrow pointing to what’s important. Etc. Narrate over it or add a couple text slides. Keep it short and simple.
I find 2 minutes or a little less is about right. If you’re a club coach, they can watch it in the car on the way to practice. If you’re a hs/college coach, they can watch it during after class. Don’t go on and on for 7 minutes. You’ll lose some of them. If you have serious TikTok skills and you can get your point across in 40s, even better.
20 Minutes
Discuss with the team before practice. If you have a classroom by the court handy, that’s great. But the good thing about phones is that you actually don’t even need a projector or tv. If you’re a club coach, you can just find a quiet spot in the hallway outside the gym or whatever and circle up and break out your phones. Go over the concept. My favorite way to start the discussion is:
So what do ya’ll think?
Okay, actually, let me back up a minute.
My favorite way to start the discussion is to speak/text to one of my leaders on the team. Make sure they watched the video.2 Plant a couple seeds and make sure they are ready to chime in and not let your first question just hang in the air. Always Stack The Deck in your favor.
Okay, so where was I.
Don’t launch into explaining your clip. That’s what the clip was for! If you can’t explain a concept in a 2-minute clip, break the concept into chunks and explain one piece of it in a 2-minute clip. Or else, keep the whole concept in a 2-minute clip and your explanation might be something to the effect of, “hey, we might not get every detail here, but I just wanted everybody to get a feel for how reversing the ball makes you hard to defend.”
You had everybody watch the clip so you don’t have to just play the clip and explain. What you’re looking for is to get some discussion and Q&A going. Your team might chime in with interesting things to say. If not, try things like:
What would this add to our game if we got good at this?
How would this make us difficult to defend?
Does this seem scary to try? What could go wrong?
If they visualize how the play can succeed or fail they are now visualizing the play. They are setting intentions and that’s the first step to learning.
Intention
Attention
Power
Energy
Power and Energy come over time. (Power is how you express an action in the moment. Energy is how much you have in the tank to continue to perform.)
The most important thing you can do in these discussions in to set an Intention.
Then you need to figure out where our Attention will be when we practice it. You may or may not get there in your pre-practice discussion, but eventually you’re going to either explicitly say something like:
The three things we need to focus on today to get this right are: A, B, and C.
Or, if you have the time, you might say:
Okay, so what do we need to have our mind and eyes on while we practice this?
And see what you can draw out of them.
It’s important that these focuses are Attention, not Execution (yet). So, in the previous Cover and Reverse example, you want things like:
“I need to look at the block when I’m covering,” not, “I need to cover the ball well.”
or
“I’m going to linger when I Doordash3 and not just charge off the net.” rather than saying, “I need to kill the ball in transition.”
120 Minutes
Now you’re in practice. And you’re going into practice with:
A clear Intention of a play that the team is looking to make.
1-3 clear Attentional Focuses for the players while making that play.
If that doesn’t help you in training, I don’t know what will!
Now, to be clear: you’re not just going to practice this one play or one concept for the full practice. You’ll probably run your normal Practice Template and hit the usual beats. Just make sure that you have appropriate drills that are going to allow that play to happen and keep reminding players of those Attentional Focuses.
Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!
I just use whatever one came with my PC. I’m stuck in 2011-era Youtube style videos with the blue background and white font for titling. Whatever.
If your team leaders aren’t watching the videos you send out, you have bigger problems.
Come to a clinic, it will make sense…