LADDER OF SUCCESS (PART V): PROGRESSION

The following comes from a book that I started a few years back and have yet to finish. This is an excerpt from the chapter titled "Prepare and Compete."

CLIMBING THE LADDER OF SUCCESS

PROGRESSION is the fourth rung on the ladder. Progression refers to the level on which we are playing and practicing and the importance of working on one area before moving on to the next. “Level” does not have to refer to going from the junior high school level to the high school level. It means the level of play that you are on within yourself. That sounds a little dramatic but the competitive athlete understands even the importance of playing at a certain level. It is competing and finding out that the once difficult fundamental has now become an easy part of your game that you can execute naturally. By working with progressive teaching ideas in fundamentals, we are actually putting parts together to form the whole. As young players learn to master one level of the teaching, they can then move on to the next level. As they increase their skill level, they graduate on to more difficult drills or perhaps try to raise their repetitions in certain drills. It is working in a progressive manner that will allow each youngster to move towards the basketball potential.

We often use the example of the farmer with our players at LSU. There are a lot of fundamental steps that the farmer must go through before he/she can harvest their crop. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time, but it is the only way for their crops to succeed. They cannot pass up any steps or skip one phase. They must tend to the soil, properly plant the seeds, and then work each day to water and fertilize in order to have the harvest they desire. A basketball player must understand that either she or her team will not have the opportunity to cut down the nets if they are going to try and take short cuts. It is the law of the harvest!

The same is true of our coaching philosophy at LSU. We utilize a Part/Whole Method in all phases of how we play. What this means is that regardless of the offense or defense that we are utilizing, we are going to break it down in to simple parts to teach a more concise level. In recent years, our team at LSU has gained a reputation for being very good on the defensive end of the floor. Our base defense is man-to-man. Each day we break that defense down into smaller parts for teaching reasons and to help simplify the habit-forming process for our players. We will work 1-on-1, 2-on-2, 3-on-3 and 4-on-4 on various parts of our man-to-man before we advance to the 5-on-5 that players probably enjoy the most. However, our team defense (the 5-on-5) would suffer if we did not spend the time that do breaking the defense down into smaller parts.