I had a point guard in the NBA that I worked with regularly over the course of two seasons. In season we would see each other regularly, and in the off season I would see him every other week. We saw a lot of each other.
When you work with someone that regularly, you get to the point where you can give paragraph long explanations of things in one word. I would start off early in our work explaining something like foot position, and it would take me 30seconds or more to explain what I wanted him to do and why. After a couple of years, all you have to do is say “feet” and the player knows what you mean.
This is a double edge sword. It saves time. But it also increases the chances that you’ll get tuned out. This player didn’t intentionally tune me out, but we had a situation where I learned there was a break down of some kind.
For the better part of a year and half, we were working on getting the shooting hand on the middle of the basketball earlier in his motion. This is something he really struggled with, despite the fact that he was really trying. In my mind, I had fully explained to him several times what we were working on, and why, and in my mind he fully understood. It was just that the habit was hard to break.
In our third off-season, I was tasked with spending more time with another player, so I didn’t see the point guard. Late in the summer, just before training camp, we met up for a few days. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months and quickly talked about how strange it was to not see each other for that long.
As we got in to the workout, I took the opportunity to go back and explain the whole “get your hand on the middle of the ball early, and here is why” speech. The player stopped, looked at me and said “why have you not told me that before?”
I was speechless. In my mind we had talked about this idea over and over. I’d asked him if he understood, and I remember him saying yes. But here we were in September of year 3, and he was looking at me like it finally made sense to him.
As we talked about it more, I realized that he just may have heard the message so many times that it became white noise to him. Then, with a little time in between and a slightly different way of saying it, all of a sudden the message was fresh again.
If the message you are trying to send as a coach is important, but it isn’t being received, you can’t give up. Ever. Keep searching for new ways to say it, and eventually the message will get through.
