Yes/No Matrix
This spring I’m doing 3 different running article series.
On Tuesday, I’m releasing articles aimed at giving you a small, specific tool to make your in-practice or in-match coaching more effective. On Fridays, I’m writing about ways to increase the physical capability of players. On Sundays, I’m releasing a more statistically-oriented beach article.
Last week I wrapped up a 3-part article series on Coaching Eyework. Check it out. That series was long. I’ll keep this one much more in the small, specific tool category as promised.
This week, let’s talk about another tool for your coaching toolbox that I call the Yes/No Matrix. This is a technique that’s going to combine some guided discovery with (let’s be honest with ourselves) some confirmation bias to help athletes discover and gain confidence in aspects of their technique.
For those of you who want to do video sessions with players and are a little unsure of what to do, or feel like your video sessions have been a bit vague, Yes/No Matrix works really well to sharpen up video sessions. So let’s start with that.
Yes/No Matrix is basically a 2x2 grid where you’ll compare did you (“Yes”) do something or did you not (“No”) do that thing. And then did you have a Success or Failure outcome because of that.
Okay, that’s kind of vague, so let’s take a specific case study here:
Here’s a Y/N Matrix I did with a passer. The writing and zoom isn’t super-clear, so that word in the top-left is “simple.” So what we’re looking for is, “did you (yes/no) have a simple platform?” And then, was the result a “Good Pass” or “not Good Pass”? Simple enough.
In the example, we can see that, when she was simple, she had 7 good passes and only 2 that weren’t good. When she wasn’t simple, she had 5 good and 6 not good. In this situation, we just picked her 20 most recent passes. With a little math, we can see that:
78% Good Pass when Yes (Simple)
45% Good Pass when No (Not Simple)
This is a particularly blatant example, which is why I used it for this article. It may not always be so clear. But often it will be! That’s because:
You’re (usually) only going to pick very clear success indicators. And..
You’re going to watch the video first. At least the first time you do this with a particular player. So you’re going to make sure it lines up :)
As a general rule, the first couple times I do video exploration with a player, I’m going to guide them to a specific outcome that stacks up with what we’ve been working on in practice. To be clear, I don’t want to use this to “prove a player wrong.” Like if I want a player to finish right-left and they want to finish left-right and I try to have some sandbagged comparison of those two moves… that might not hit with that player.
But the sweet spot is something where the player has already been making a change, has a feeling it might help her out, but needs a boost to continue down the path of change. In my referenced example, this was a player who had previously had a pretty noisy platform with a lot of bodying the ball to the target and some turning of the platform on contact. She had never been really taught to pass with a simple platform. The concept made sense to her, it felt okay in training, she had a feeling it might be helping her, etc.
Then when we added the Yes/No Matrix into a video session, her confidence grows, because it adds a structured weight of proof on top of what she’s just starting to feel in training. This is also why I like to do these video sessions right before practice. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to go through 20 receptions and do a quick Yes/No on all of them. You’re not diving deep into the nuances of each rep. You’re just targeting one thing and giving a Yes/No on it and seeing the result. If done correctly, that player’s going to hop out to the training court with some renewed energy to continue working on that aspect of the game.
So let me repeat:
You’re not diving deep into the nuances of each rep.
There’s a time and place to explore nuances and dive into the full spectrum of technique. But this isn’t it. The more you let the conversation drift to other things, the less you’ll keep focus on your Yes/No. Be focused and keep your player focused during the session. This will also have the effect of keeping the session short, which means the player will be more excited to repeat this sort of video session.
Yes/No Matrix Without Video
You can do a Yes/No Matrix without video in the course of a training drill. For example, if you had a whiteboard near the court, you might say to a player, “okay after every rep, tell me if you feel like you went slow to fast.” Or you might say to a setter, “I’ll mark Yes/No if you used your pivot or not and then whether the set went to the hitting window.”
There’s 2 downsides to using Yes/No Matrix in practice:
You can get real biased in your Yes/No because you can’t separate the result. When you watch video, you can (do your best to) pause the video after the Yes/No can be seen but before you see the result. That way you’re at least less-biased by the result.
One coach is completely taken up by tracking and recording the result. So it’s very coach-intensive and can’t be done consistently. Or at least I haven’t figured out a good logistical flow to it.
Give the Yes/No Matrix a try and let me know how it works out for any of your players.