Practice Breakdowns

There are some interesting things going here at NEDA these days. Right now a project we are working on is figuring out what % of each practice is devoted to which drills and which skills then integrating it into our YPI. The main outcome of the project is eventually to find or develop software that will allow a coach to manage practice planning with their yearly planning instrument.

It would be so interesting to know that in the last month you spent 28% of your practice time working on shooting for example. Or that you spent 15% of your practice time on movement skills.

There are a lot of interesting ways to represent the data that is formed by collecting all of your practice plans together.

Obviously the YPI document that everyone can picture is nice, and it could be filled out automatically by the program after you type in your practice plans. I think a lot/most CIS coaches already do their practice planning on a computer, this would be no different, except the program would ask you to take special care in describing the name of drills you are running.

The next interesting view would come if you click on either a date in the YPI, which would take you directly to the practice plan for that specific day. In our context, clicking on the name of a drill would bring up a detailed desription, or taking it even further, a video clip of the NEDA players executing a particular drill.

Clicking on a category name in the YPI (like "picks" or "defensive transition") would bring up a list of the days that you worked on those things or possibly a list of all of the drills that work on either of those aspects of the game.

It would be an amazing tool for the education of other coaches out there. It would also be usefull for coaches just looking to get a better handle on what they are doing in their own context without doing all of the work to go through and analize what they are doing.

There are a lot of possibilities with this software. The only question now is whether or not it already exists. Hopefully it has already been invented (and we'll find out in the coming weeks) or I might have to make this my first million dollars.


Tyler