Fake Fundamentals

To be clear: not a good thing

Once upon a time, I read a blog post by a basketball coach with the awesome title of Fake Fundamentals. I can’t find that blog post anymore, but apparently he released a whole ebook series around the concept. Smart move, ebooks pay more than blog posts and (edit) he’s got a Substack too. I’ve gotten his ebooks and have been enjoying them as a non-basketball coach. Mostly though, the concept of Fake Fundamentals resonated with me and has become part of my verbiage ever since.

What Are Fake Fundamentals?

I have two definitions of Fake Fundamentals. The first is more optimistic. A Fake Fundamental is something that a coach teaches a player because it seems like a good idea. Let’s get right to a controversial one. Here’s a question that gets asked, in some form, on the volleyball Reddit board every few weeks.

I was instructing at the GMS clinic in Chattanooga, TN this weekend and the topic came up again.

I believe that this idea that you would move your arms independently to the side and connect them near the point of contact is a Fake Fundamental. It seems like it would be good!

The problem is, nobody really does that.

Now yes, there could be outdated coaching in the USA, Brazil, Poland, and Italy on both their women’s and men’s national teams. And we might see that trend reverse some day as the collective coaching brainpower of those countries realizes the errors of their way.

But I think the more likely idea is that of it takes what it takes. I don’t think all those men and women were necessarily trained to pass that way. They may have been more or less encouraged to do that by coaches over the years. But you’re generally not trained into an elite national team. You weren’t just a regular player and then coach got hold of you. You get to that level because you have this incredible intuitive sense of how to do this stuff already, and those instincts get refined and shaped.

Or, another way to think about it is, the various NT programs are this massive funnel. Players who can’t figure out, either naturally or through instruction, how to move at a level that it takes just get weeded out.

And it just seems like the more efficient way to move and track is to connect your hands somewhere near the center of your body and then track from there. I don’t know why, but it does seem to be the case. On the vast majority of passes by really good passes, you can pause the video at a frame where the hands are connected:

1. Pointed somewhat toward the ground (but usually not straight down)

2. Relatively straight (but usually not perfectly so)

3. Near the centerline of the body (but not always the exact center)

(Side note: Laurenzano in the top right is somebody you might call a late connecter because, although his hands go to the centerline and move outward together, he often doesn’t actually finish connecting his hands until fairly late. I see do see that as a legitimate possible pattern for passers, particularly when passing jump serves with a lot of heat. But note that he doesn’t move one arm and then the other… both arms still move relatively together with his pinkies almost touching, and then he seems to make his connection. That said, he’s one of the more complex passers among the high level liberos of the world and, if I were his coach, I would encourage him to see if he could get a little simpler in his technique.)

Fake Fundamentals When Trying Not To Have Fake Fundamentals

Now let’s go another layer deeper. In your question to avoid Fake Fundamentals, don’t make new ones!

In my 3 descriptions above, I use hedging language.

Somewhat toward the ground
Relatively straight
Near the centerline

Because guess what? We can go too far in the other direction too. And I have. I’ve coached passers to be too straight and too stiff into the centerline. I think that was a mistake. Being a little “too stiff” could be part of a coaching paradigm that’s either using direct Goldilocks Method or else just an attitude of, “hey, sometimes you need to overcorrect a little in one direction in order to deprogram a less than ideal motor pattern.” Sometimes, with beginning passers, or passers trying to change a pattern, I’ll even have passers start with their hands already connected, before the server even serves. But nowadays, I’m very clear to say to that player, “this is not what you’ll do in the long run, I just want you to feel what it feels like to be connected super-early.”

There’s A Kernel Of Truth

They say there’s a kernel of truth in every joke, and many Fake Fundamentals do have a kernel of truth in them. What this “independent arms” cue is trying to avoid is the pass where a passer connects straight in their midline and then just twists their body, without any shape from the shoulders. If you watch all those elite passers, they start shaping their shoulder and upper back early so that they don’t just swing out and punt the ball into the stands.

The problem with Fake Fundamentals is that the tail starts to wag the dog. The coach gets so into them that the goal no longer becomes to put a good contact on the ball to pass to target. The Fake Fundamental becomes a goal in and of itself. And then players start doing counterproductive things just in order to accomplish the Fake Fundamental. We don’t like counterproductive. We like productive.

The Goal Is Not Balance

Marv used to say that, “we need to coach in reality.” I’ve shared my origin story of being shocked when Carl taught me to plan my defense around where balls actually got hit, not just some system that made sense on paper.

What this means is that I’m not attempting to strike some hypothetical balance between competing ideas. In this specific example, I’m not saying, “hey some people think you should be stiff and straight and some think you should be independent arms, so I want to aim for the middle of those two techniques” If being way on the stiff and straight end was useful, I would have those players stiff af. And if being way on the independent arms was helpful, that’s what I would coach. I’m happy to be an extremist and I think the comfortable middle is generally to be avoided.

Instead, I just want to live in reality as much as possible. “Is that true?” is one of the most important things we can say as a coach and I was fired up to see my buddy Tod use that on a recent episode of The Volleypod. The point that I’m making here is that my goal is just to try to assess the best patterns of movement and guide my players toward the most effective solutions. In this case, “relatively straight and near the centerline” seems to be the motor pattern that allows players to best deal with the most difficult serves. So that’s where I’m going.

The Less Optimistic Explanation

I’m only going to spend a little time on this, because it probably is less common. But I believe that some Fake Fundamentals appear because it is important to some coaches for everybody to see that their players are being coached. Possibly because it’s also important to many parents that their players appear to be performing techniques that have been coached into them.

I think this also stems from the fact that many coaches (and, more understandably: parents) don’t have a great eye for the game. They watch athletes who are moving efficiently and fluidly transitioning between the more easily-observable stages of a movement (such as starting position, contact point, etc) and have trouble catching all the details. To this level of observation, these athletes appear to be naturally gifted or succeeding in spite of less than ideal technique. In reality, it is the other way around.

(Now, this doesn’t mean that we can coach fluidity into our athletes either! Any more than you can teach a dancer rhythm or teach a musician to stay on beat. The dancer must learn rhythm and the musician must learn to stay on beat. They learn by practice and by observation of what their actions produce in the physical world.)

Regardless of what’s going on in these strawman coaches’ minds, there sometimes seems to be an attraction to getting players to play in a way that clearly indicates they’ve been coached to play that way. Because the subtle fluidity of elite performance can be difficult to detect, adding contrived, rigid pieces to a player’s movement pattern gives them the indication of being coached up. Which is true, adding random extra bits of “technique” to a movement pattern does show that a player has been coached up. But not in a good way. Don’t be that coach.