“I
think that you tend to underteach for fear of crushing them under the weight of
your words.” – Yngve
I
wrestle with this a lot. On the one side
there is my boy Sahaj who say’s I have about 40 seconds before he stops
listening to me. On the other side I
have Crayon who says if taking the extra time to teach helps one person then it
was worth it.
Then
I think about this:
At
13:24 they begin their prehuddle talk for the game against Illinois. This huddle is agonizingly long, I am sitting
in a comfortable chair and I get anxious listening to this. I cannot imagine being at nationals and
listening to this whole thing. Then once
you think it’s over and they’re going to stop talking, they have another
huddle, this whole ordeal is over by 18:57.
5 minutes and 33 seconds are dedicated to the pregame. The game ends at 22:31, 3 minutes and 34
seconds of the video are dedicated to the actual game.
Sure
this is a video that has gone through the magic of editing, but I don’t really
care this huddle was too long.
They
lose to Illinois.
Compare
this to the huddle before the Oregon game.
At 27:00 Maryland’s leaders start talking at 27:40 they break out the
huddle. 40 seconds of beautiful brevity.
They
beat Oregon.
Lou Burruss once named a coaching post "Words are Worthless". It's always stuck with me and is a foundation of my coaching methods.
ReplyDeletehttp://winthefields.blogspot.com/2011/03/inner-game-words-are-worthless.html
I think it's worth saying that the Maryland vs. Illinois was the first game of nationals, and vs. Oregon was later in the tournament.
ReplyDeleteI agree that people tend to say too much in huddles though.
I think there is an important distinction between teaching and huddle talk.
ReplyDeleteI'm a huge fan of Tiina Booth's "Say one or zero things in a huddle". But in teaching new concepts, I think there are other factors at play, like the whys, hows, coaching cues, and so on.
I'm not trying to get my players to learn new things in in-game huddles. I am trying to get them to learn new things when I'm introducing a concept in practice for the first time.