Repetition is an extremely important part of effective teaching but it goes beyond doing drills repeatedly. It is also in what we communicate to our team. If you follow our program you know that we believe in repetition but you also know that there must be variety in your repetition.
For example, if you want to be a good rebounding team, you might utilize a 2 on 2 blockout drill. Certainly this is a good drill. But you have a much better chance of being a good rebounding team if you have a variety of rebounding drills. In our program, we have around 15 rebounding drills. We don’t use each of them everyday but at certain times during the course of the season. They all stress the same fundamentals but the variety makes it fresh for our team. A new or rarely used drill will help stimulate the learning curve.
We have found the same can be true of communicating. We think the ability for a staff to communicate to a team is tremendously important. Having said that, it should be noted that it is not always an easy thing to do.
Just as in parenting, sometimes you can say that same thing over and over to your child and for some reason it doesn’t register. Yet one person outside of your home mentions it to your child and it’s like a light switch has been turned on.
Knowing this up front, we work hard as a staff to look at how and what we communicate. But we’ve found out that who can also be important.
We often bring in other people outside our program to speak to our team. Obviously we are careful in who we select but you’d be surprised at how many people out there can bring a good message to your team. We have used coaches from other sports, teachers from LSU, sports personalities, politicians, business leaders, and even an occasional booster that has a story to tell.
One such example is a member of our Fast Break Club. Lydia Sims has been a big fan of our program. We later learned that she played on some of the great Immaculata teams with Marianne Stanley and later coached on the collegiate level. She addressed our team and she talked in great detail on the struggles of female athletes and the difficulties they had to overcome. It was time well spent for our players to get a great history lesson.
During our run to the Final Four in 2004, we were fortunate enough to be involved in a regional in which Ann Meyers-Drysdale was doing the color commentating for ESPN. We asked her to talk to our team and she did a wonderful job in painting a picture for them on the excitement of going to the Final Four.
At LSU, we are blesse
d with great coaches and motivational speakers. We have used Skip Bertman several times along with Dale Brown, Nick Saban and Les Miles. Each year during our first four Final Four runs, we brought in professional Felicia Hall who did a tremendous job of working with our players in team building exercises along with guiding them through team goal setting.This is a great way to motivate your team and to have them learn from some great “teachers” outside of your staff. The greatest benefit is that it almost always comes back to reinforce what you’ve been teaching them.
