excited to welcome author and teaching and learning educator Doug Lima to the basketball podcast Doug has appeared on episode 153 of the basketball podcast and we are grateful to be able to follow up with him on many of the topics that have appeared after we connected with so many coaches after he published the coach's guide to teaching Dudley moth is a former teacher and School principal he helped found uncommon schools a network of high-performing schools in underserved communities his book teach Like A Champion Now teach Like A Champion 2.0 describes techniques used by exceptional teachers it has sold more than a million copies and has been translated into a dozen languages his other books include practice perfect 42 Rules for getting better at getting better and reading reconsidered Doug welcome to the podcast hey thanks for having me back I'm excited to be here well our first one was so much fun and got incredible response I believe for both of us and uh clearly your book has stimulated a lot of coaches thinking as well so grateful to have you back and a lot of the topics we're going to discuss have come out since that podcast and since that book so give us an idea of why we're here yeah uh I mean I'm not sure that I'm 100 decided to you know do a 2.0 version of the book but you know I find them always thinking about things in the book and talking to a lot of coaches and I think they're like at least three chapters that I've outlined in my mind that will like I'll add to the 2.0 version of the book um and so I thought I thought it might be interesting to talk about those because they're really like in many ways their responses to the issues that coaches raise when I when we talk about teaching athletes so um so some will be interesting or at least useful to at least some other people so well I couldn't say yes fast enough when you suggested and uh I'm so excited to talk to you I mean just again great stuff you share always and so much of it relevant to uh coaching and teaching and you know just just generally being more effective so one of the topics that uh you know we want to talk about a little bit is this concept of game coaching what is the best role for a coach and what actually impacts performance and I know this question is is at the Forefront for many of us yeah it's such a fascinating question and really like I started thinking about it because it's the first question that coaches always ask often it's you know what should I what should I have time talk look like and I think that's a really fascinating question and I guess the first thing I would say is you know um as a preface to my answer I think there are two potential goals you know uh we're often we're trying to win games and that's not wrong right uh that's an important purpose it's part of part of learning is learning how to win um and we're also trying to teach and teach for long-term value and learning for athletes and sometimes those things work together well and sometimes they happen in conflict and game day is emotional and I often get caught up in the winning and so I can do things that are counterproductive to winning in the in trying to win and I can do things that are counterproductive to learning and trying to win so interestingly this started for me when I started I was talking to a couple soccer clubs about it and I went to watch um a guy for me who's like one of the very best Youth Soccer Coaches I know literally like if I could have my kids play for him every year I would in a second and he said do you want to come watch me on game day and give me some feedback on what I'm doing and I said yeah great I'd love to and uh so I watched him do his pregame talk and it started off beautifully he just thought really intentionally about like what how the where the kids were seating and how they were seated and um and how he's going to present information to them and then he said okay guys so here are six things we need to think about for the game today and then they went through the six things and then he was like and a couple more things and a couple you know and I uh one of the things we know about working memory is that it gets overlooked really quickly um and it was really clear to me that best possible outcome here was that he he was what I perceived to be happening was his describing to players all the things that uh could potentially go wrong but it wasn't really helping them to think about them and master them uh and prepare for them uh and so I think I don't think it helped them when they walked out on the field and possibly it uh overloaded their working memory even like degraded their performance a little bit so we just started talking about like what should what should it look like before the game and what should halftime look like and so the first thing that we did was just divide game day into four moments that I think could just let's start by naming them one is the pregame talk one is the halftime talk one is the post game talk and one is just live coaching which is the thing that I'm saying and doing on the sideline what players are playing and I think one of the most important things is to try and Link them so if you know I can tell you some of the things we talked about for pregame and half time but I think one of the things is like and then how do I link that to what I say to play players on the side well the first thing is just to remove this notion that the hollywoodization of these different pieces is not true right that's not what is actual coaching and what actually makes an impact right not the big speech uh I think that's right right the issue is um is rarely that guys don't want it enough or you know don't have the fire burning in their bellies and if that is the issue you're probably not going to fix it by I mean there are probably occasions when you can fix it by talking to them but for the most part that's embedded in the culture and you know you learn to play with fire by practicing playing with fire uh you know with fire in your belly so um you know I think the opportunity for uh for teaching and learning and you know one of the interesting stories that I actually I did tell the story a little bit in the coach's guide to teaching but um Gregor Townsend is the head coach of Scotland's rugby team and he was telling me the story of this Six Nations rugby match against their rival England and the first half just could not have gone worse than it did and they were down you know they were down like 30 to six or something to buy a bunch of tries and he was just like this this you know halfway through the first half he's like I'm gonna turn on the hair dryer you know at halftime and by the time it got closer to halftime he's like well there's no reason like this game is gone like uh I'm not even gonna do that I'm just gonna walk in there and I'm gonna coach my halftime talk is going to be about making sure that this never happens again and the guys understand their role so that when we walk out at the next match we understand what we should be focused on and what our roles are and what we should be doing so it was almost like today is a loss and so he said I walked in and I was really calm and I said let's go through a variety of scenarios and I want you to tell me what exactly you're supposed to be thinking about well you're supposed to be looking at and what you're supposed to be in the variety these following scenario you know in each of these scenarios this is where we're getting beat it's like I was really calm we're really focused on it uh and we walked out we walked out into halftime and we ran off you know five tries in a row and tied they ended up losing the game you know in like the very last seconds but they basically tied up this game that he thought was going he was like you know what the plural of anecdote is not data right so I don't know for sure but I keep on going back to like was there something about the fact that instead of going with emotion I went with like attention right this is what you should be paying attention to and was there some connection between the halftime talk of what happened afterwards so we'll never know but I do find found that's a really interesting question right I love that example and to a certain extent like coaches that argue on behalf of their style whatever it may be a lot of it is what players get used to and they can they can Excel despite or because of what you're doing in halftime or pregame or stuff like that I'll give you a quick story as I was with a mentor for a long time and he used to almost always lose his mind at halftime because he always felt there were things they could do better and the one time we went into the half we're up 23 on the number one team in the country and he said because iconic tried to convince him say okay listen they've been pretty good he went in there and said some nice things to them and then they came out and they almost lost yeah and you blame me afterwards and I reflected on that first of all saying you know that was a bad decision on my part I overstepped and secondly it wasn't that it was wrong to say nice things it was that players weren't used to it so talk to us a little bit about a style in a short style in terms of approaching it let's say without emotion well so yeah I'm gonna I guess I'll start when you say style let me start by describing what I think maximizes long-term learning for players and so this is kind of the model that I came up with this coach so let's start with the pregame talk um players remember what they think about right so if I want them to think about things during the game I should cause them to I should not just tell them what I want them to think about things and I want to tie those things to language cues so what we decided was he should come up with like let's say three or four phrases that they had talked about in practice that were part of their game model that he wanted that he anticipated that he would probably say on the sidelines press hi um transition quickly you know something like that and that the pregame talk should be something like guys one of the things we're going to work on today is press high you're going to hear me say that on the sidelines when I say press hi what actions and what thoughts should that trigger for you turn and talk to your partner go 30 seconds right okay so pause great Chris what's what you know as an outside back what should that cause you to think about great Kevin as a center midfielder what you did or maybe it's even like outside backs get together center-backs get together what's your responsibility what should be thinking about when you hear the phrase press I go right so then I'm causing them to think about and focus their attention on a limited number of things that will that will help them during you know Elite athlete that being a lead athlete is controlling your attention and your emotions under challenging situations so I'm helping them to guide their attention to and think about the most important things and linking it to the language that'll actually use so then the next thing is like so then live during the game what should I be shouting I should use them for because they've rehearsed and they've thought in their minds what will I do what will I look for when this happens so I'm really guiding them to like in the match there are only so many things that can you can constructively think about we're going to be thinking about this idea what we're doing right side you know so then that maybe I take my other phrases in the pre-game like great when you hear when you when you hear me say lightning transition what should you think about what should you do what should you look for so it's a small number of things you know I think like three or four is probably the the most you can hope to have players really think about but they're processing and thinking about it and preparing to think about it during the match so then you know I think half time I think half time is like is really interesting um I think the first thing that I want to do is be able to process my own emotions so I want to probably give players a little bit of time Circle up with my coaches and say great what's important here what do we want to talk about one of the most useful phrases that a coach has said to me that it's in the book is you know when you chase five rabbits you can't you catch none and often half time is like here are 36 things you guys we need to do differently or each coach has five things right so I'm the head coach and I say here are the three things we really need to focus on when I say you know coach to my assistant what do you got and he says three things and then the other coach has three more all of a sudden worth nine things and and uh and now working memories overloaded and players are confused and it's actually likely to degrade their performance so let's huddle let's talk about what the most important points we want to make are and then maybe even talk a little bit strategically about and like what is the affect we want to present are they flat do they need to hear a little bit of intensity from us if so why or do they need um Focus do they need confidence right let's I'm not saying that you should never you know you can't ever should never get emotional but let's be strategic as opposed to reactive about it so let's huddle really quickly and talk about what are our points and what is the what is the emotion let's plan our affect when we walk in there and stop the players and then ideally you know I think that's where it started in that ideally like I want players to do a little bit thinking right maybe it's like as we said we're going to press high and we said the three things that we're going to do when we're pressing High were the following things and we're not doing why are we struggling to do this part of it uh you know and it could be let me let me map it for you here are some things that are happening because just be totally directive like this is what I want you to think about or it could be you tell me you know I just think like those are both different options but I'm really only going to be able to cause people to think intentionally about a small number of things so I need to be super super intentional about them and I need to link them to the emotional setting in the in the halftime talk so I love what you're saying particularly about you gave us the four things and then how you connected them you just gave us an example of that as well and I think that's so important because again if it's important enough to teach it's important enough to hold them accountable to it that would apply in this simple situation I'm saying if it's important enough to go in the game with this Focus then throughout the game and then post game that's partly what we hold them accountable to and what we evaluate the game on I think so much of game day coaching is self is the art of self-discipline which is like of course you could think of 15 things that can go wrong but all you accomplish by telling players be careful let's be careful let's be careful don't do this don't it's like you give yourself the opportunity to say I told you so but you don't really help them manage those situations if you need 15. and so you've got to step back and think about okay what are the important things that I want that I actually want them to be able to think about here in you know here now and that requires me to match my emotions and uh and make some decisions right about what's most important well and not taking away their freedom and creativity to play the game which is you've worked all week to get ready for the game and if we give them too much information that's a problem but also to your point there it reminded me of when a sports psychologist came into my team once and then gave the example of saying Red Wagon and then ask the players what do you think of when you hear the word Red Wagon obviously you hear of a red wagon so what you say can have a big impact on them in some context because that's ultimately what they're going to think about and what they're remembering you know I think that's so important which is you the ideal solution is to I want players to have a mental model of what right looks like and so what I want in their minds is I want them thinking about what is the solution what is what does effective play look like what does our game model look like what do Solutions look like to the problem that we're facing as opposed to calling their attention to like what's going wrong and the mistakes that we're making and inserting those mistakes or anxiety about those mistakes in their head so like I would like particularly youth players to walk out it's challenging out there we know how to solve this problem what are the things we think so remind ourselves what the solution looks like remind ourselves that we can solve it get a little bit fired up to go out and solve it right that as opposed to here's what you guys are doing wrong here are the mistakes we're making you know like that's describing the problem is not as effective as describing the solution I want to get your thoughts on this and maybe you've dealt with it maybe you haven't a lot but this concept of an in-game intervention particularly around an individual player it could be around a substitution or some could be some type of specific in-game feedback are there some ideas for Best Practices to be able to do this by that you mean individual player you can do better at this and I need to be able to alert you to the fact that you can do better at this or you know obviously you're doing well at this and keep doing it that type of thing I think like shouting things to a player while they're trying to execute is challenging right and so generally frowned upon right it just doesn't impact them and the player doesn't want to hear it do they I mean I think that that's I I wish it were more frowned upon them than it is right I think that like this is another just like the exercise of self-discipline I feel emotional about it and so I yell it I think one of the first things that every coach needs on the sideline is um a notepad what it's a great way to take notes on the things that gather data about what you're seeing but one of the reasons why people struggle to exert self-discipline over their own verbalization the things that they shout is because there's no other way to productively use their observations unless they tell the player when they notice it right then but if I can write it down or even better like I've worked with a premier league coach we've talked about this he's like I'm too emotional during the game to stop and write down I'm like great have an assistant behind you who you're like write that down write that down write that down and what that does is it gives you a productive way to use your observations and if you don't have another way to channel your observations and put them to productive use all you will do will shout them will be you'll shout them at people in the moment when they're trying to do something else I was working with a coach a couple weeks ago who my focus was to try and get him to recognize the difference between yelling something helpful to a player and yelling something true to a player Casey you can't you can't stick your leg out like that and you're defending right um after the play she's still trying to play she probably knows she made the mistake but even if she didn't tell her what she did wrong and it isn't going to help her prepare for what's happening next all it's doing is drawing her working memory and her attention to the past as opposed to the next thing and probably frustrating her and feeling like yeah I know like I know I made the mistake right how does that help me versus so that's something that's true I'm sure he's accurate but I'm not sure it helps the athlete much versus waiting for downtime and saying Casey when they attack in numbers protect the middle of the field first she you know shape your hips to you know to be ready to turn and run in the direction the ball's moving right that's like okay forward looking thing that I can solve delivered in a moment when my working memory is not focused on playing so I don't have to choose between listening to you and Performing well because if you force me to do that if you shout at me while I'm trying to play I have to choose I can listen to you and degrade my own performance or I can practice ignoring you we don't really want it first of all we don't really want to build the culture where players practice ignoring us so waiting for the right moment and talking for about forward-looking about next thing to your question just about like interventions with players I also think you know substitution rules are different in different games but but I still remember a youth coach who my son played for who my son was a center-back in soccer when you make a mistake as a center-back it's a howler often right like you know like everybody everybody notices it and it can be bad you know can bad every emotional you end up giving up a goal and so he played for a lot of coaches who'd be like yeah I got it you know like you can never do that you know because the coaches embarrassed women team gives up a bad call makes a mistake and this coach would very quietly pull him out stand on the sideline next room for you know 30 seconds often put his arm around him and say you know when you you know what whatever the same feedback go back in and do it right and so in that setting it's private it's not public it's clear that my goal is to help you and support you and then like then the message is like go you know go do it go going forward and I think that that was like you can't always do that but to me that's a better intervention than across the field while I'm trying while I'm trying to play in front of lots of other people um and so you know I think there are could you do could you know you see you actually see this quite often and uh and you know player will come over to the side near the sideline they don't even really have to come out right but just that like taking a few steps towards you even honestly if everyone else can hear it the vibe is still I'm trying to have a private conversation with you I'm not trying I'm not trying to make this about me and my ego or overheard by everyone else in the stadium so a few things to end out is one is the connection between guidance and motor learning and what you're talking about there is the problem with guidance let's say having marks on the floor early and learning it's fine but eventually it becomes a dependence and it removes that individual uh decision making that freedom and creativity that we want all of our players to play with so that connects there to giving too much feedback within the game that's right that's right the second thing that I think is brilliant that you shared is this idea of journaling it or communicating it to an assistant and the reason again it connects to psychological strategies like thought stopping or what my sports psychologists call parking is literally that you park it so that you can deal with it later and you acknowledge it you become conscious of it and then you park it and you know you can come back to it but often you just let it go and that's the main part about most of these emotions We Carry in a game isn't it just our ability to let it go yeah that's right you know if you listen to an audio tape of yourself during the game you know three quarters of the things you you would say like okay I probably could have let that one go and in fact the things that are really important stand out more if the channel the primary channel of communication is not cluttered with things of secondary importance and tertiary importance right the more disciplined I can be the more the things I do say matter so it actually help it helps you to communicate more if you can cut out the less important more impulsive things that you say this is great stuff so actionable and I want to ask your thoughts just before we move on to a different topic about not actually having a post game and I mentioned this to you that Lynn Roberts University Utah should call up at uh Toledo both of them on the podcast suggest said that they do not meet with their team post game yeah I think there's very limited value in post-game talks uh it's hard for me to conceptualize how you can help a player or help a team other than to like reframe an experience for like I would say like would I might I want to do a post game talk if like we lost but I want them you know I want players to see things that they did productively like we did you know like there are a lot of things we did good today you know we did well today if we continue to do this we will be successful you know you know don't take this too hard right I can see like in a like a framing exercise like that but I think most of post game talk is coach processing their own emotion send a lot of things to players that they simply can't process in the moment when they're they're highly emotional and they're spent in their spent psychologically and there's no time for them to use or apply it and so it's going to get forgotten anyway so I think at minimum very very short limited number of points as positive as possible so that players come back motivated to learn and improve on you know the next day but I think it's really it's a really interesting thought exercise which is like what do I need to say post game other than you know is it possible there's no post-game talk I can see that yeah and we've talked about youth coaches a little bit about that concept and they a lot of them insisted well we've got to meet with them and I understand that but a lot of that I'm just said to them is well you got to meet with them to kind of tell them what's next more than what happened I like that I like that idea of what's next right see you Monday we'll be back maybe even on Monday we'll talk about how we like we'll talk about why we were so successful today and we'll work on kind of taking it to the next level Monday we'll talk a little bit about how we can defend against some of the things that happened go home get some rest right make sure you get your you know make sure you rest or maybe the thing that I have maybe my post game talk is not a post game talk but it's a post game ritual which is like we all shake each other's hand we all you know like there's something that we always do together culturally at the end of the game that cements our sense of belonging and and uh togetherness and that's how we end every time and then it's like it's familiar it reminds us that we're part of a team and a culture and I don't have to like make a decision about what I want to talk about when I'm potentially highly emotional and I'm likely to say something that's non-productive so that might be enough that might just that might be another option which because it's nice to end an event with some sort of like something that feels like closure but maybe it's just a ritual every time thank you everyone the team thank the refs thank your parents let's go and and absolutely I love that that's that's so cool because yeah with my young teams we've got into this ritual of starting practice or Starting Games with get better and at the end of it we end with got better and win or lose we connect them to the fact that we we learned and we're gonna improve because of the experience so I love that idea of the ritual and formalizing that a little bit more let's talk about using video as a learning tool because I know this is big on your mind and I'd love to hear your thoughts and in your words and please discuss the degree to which athletes succeed in learning from video has not necessarily increased at the pace with technological advances yeah it's fast I mean it's such an exciting time right we have this incredible learning tool at our disposal just like 15 years ago 10 years ago if you wanted to show players video of themselves playing you would and just think of the think of the process right you'd have to call a videographer with a big video camera and explain to them what to shoot and they'd shoot some of the video then they go and they take it back and they'd spend a week preparing it they'd send it to you on a DVD and then you have to roll a TV in somewhere put the DVD in the TV and if you wanted to edit that and highlight you know something like the the spacing of your play like maybe you could point to it on the screen but now you can like you can say you can walk out on the field with your iPad you know in the middle of practice and be like pause boys let me show you what you look like in the three on two what do you notice about your spacing or you can the next day you know produce a video um you can send a video to players on their phone showing them highlighted you know in like three different interactions where you look at them in the Press right it's incredibly powerful but in some ways all of this technical sophistication also distracts us from even the most elite levels professional sports levels division one level a lot of video uses coach at the front of the room saying guys see this see this see this got it do better go and I would say no they don't see that ultimately what decides whether someone learns from videos what's happening in their brain while they're watching the video it's very complex it's a very complex form of information and the more sexy the things that we can do with the video the more likely we are to overlook the basics of it I'll just give you a tiny example of this I spend a day with an NBA team it's so early it's NBA Summer League so interestingly just like to put this in context you know you know this better than I but like it's Four Guys four or five guys from the very bottom of the roster of the NBA roster and eight guys whose lifelong dream is to be on the NBA roster and so there's a lot at stake for these guys and they videotape them in the morning practice and they can like they go into a room and they can chop up the video in 10 minutes you know it's voice coded so every time Chris touches the ball someone says Chris and they could be like show me all of Chris is playing the they can produce anything and so guys come in the players come into this Auditorium in between practice and they get to see 10 videos of themselves practicing in the morning and then go do it better in the afternoon so it's incredibly sophisticated not one of the guys sitting in the room has a notebook with them no one is writing anything down and the coach has not thought of like what is where do I pause the video to focus players on the visual cue that should like I can tell them what they did wrong or what they did right in this segment but what I want is for them is to pause it right before they make the decision have them look at the visual cue that told them you had space you should have shot you did not have space you should not have shot um so that they the power of videos helping me to understand visual cues no one's thought about the question where they want to pause the video how players are going to turn what they talk about into long-term memory and I haven't thought about how players are going to talk to each other about the video because if I can if I can teach one player to recognize something I can make them a little bit better but the killer app is we all see the queue put the back door is on similarly together we see it fast you know we see it and understand what it means faster than the opposition can see it and so for that we have to talk to each other about it about what we're perceiving in video sessions and so what often doesn't happen in videos that you know play people remember what they think about it's just not a lot of thought writing talking about what we're seeing and video is you know in any video there are 15 things happening at once you put up a video of you know here's three examples of us in the Press put up a video guys what do you know like you've watched the video six times before you show it to players right so you know this video really really well as soon as you put the video up you think they're looking at the spacing and they're like is that me out there you know like which are we in the red or in the white right is it oh is this the game where I'm about to get smoked where I didn't box out and I'm about to make a big like they're not even watching and you're like great did you see the spacing there and the answer is no no one was looking at it and so one of the phrases that I'm gonna sort of put in the chapter is like the the video starts before it starts you have to start shaping players attention before you even put the video up so I'm going to show you the video Once what you watch first basing then I'm going to show it to you again and we'll go slowly and I want you to pay particular attention to like I want you to pay attention to this because otherwise everyone in the room will be looking at something different and then we'll have shared perception about what our spacing tells us about what comes next so I've got so many thoughts this is awesome so the when you just said you know it starts before it starts the one thing that I started doing later in my career and it connects to that was I started to text the group in advance or the small group The individuals what we were going to cover in advance so that they came in with an understanding and idea the second thing that really stands out from what you're saying is I realize how much time I spent preparing for a practice and how little time I spend preparing for a video session and the video session and if and we know anything about video nowadays it's almost more impactful yeah if I prepare more for it and uh that's got to be a part of my plan doesn't it yeah I think the truth like in thinking about preparation I think what did Bobby Knight say most people have the will to win very few people have the will to prepare to win but that is very true about video when I have a video ready I should plan first of all I should play on my pause points where exactly do I want to pause the video because what players are looking at when I ask them the questions are important and what question do I want to ask right so um so it's not just showing the video but it's showing the video and stopping somewhere and asking a specific question and maybe what do I want to direct their attention to even before they watch it and then maybe even like I think any video that's beyond a very simple video players probably need to see more than once to really understand and so maybe it's even like what is the what is my question the first time I show the video and what is my question the second time I show the video and does that imply showing less video better for sure am I going to be able to get through 36 clips of you you know with poor defensive spacing no my goal should be to show three really good clips that really cause you to understand but to do that I really have to think about what I want you to look at what vocabulary do I want you to use to talk about it so you can talk about this concept here teammates later um and how can they even copy like them one of the next step I think one of the coaches that I've worked with it took us a really long time to get here but one of my key main arguments was when you play for this team is a rugby team you should get a notebook and your notebook has your name on it and the name of the team on it and you bring it to every video meeting so that the coach can say pause sketch how we look now sketch how we should look You Know sketch it on your in your notebook or pause based on this video write down one note that you want to think about when we walk out on the practice floor so you can review it before you go out there right just because we talk about it does not mean it gets encoded in memory and so I have to think about how I'm going to cost my players to remember what we talked about for what they learned the great many coaches that'll let them know the the great Dawn Meyer used to always have his players carry notebooks everywhere and that was one of the concepts was that they write down stuff and the other thing it connects for me when you talk about that is that the pause procedure when I was a you know college professor lecturing you know that idea of me talking for 60 minutes versus me talking for five minutes and pausing or 10 minutes and pausing and giving them time to process for a minute or two and that's that's definitely relevant in this film example isn't it yeah absolutely you know film is so dense cognitively that I have we we have a you know my team studies video all the time mostly teachers we have a working role it's called the three-minute rule which is like even the most professional group of teachers if you're showing them teaching video if the video is longer than three minutes you have to pause it and this is you know like video of a classroom is much slower and much less dense and then uh video of a basketball game or a soccer match like working memory is going to get overloaded very quickly it's very intense there's so much to track giving just honestly you could pause and not even ask a question if you decide I'm going to show you here's here's a video of us defending I'm gonna shut two for 50 you know 15 seconds I'll pause here and let you jot some notes and think about what you've seen and then I'll press play we don't even need to talk about it I don't even need to ask you just giving you time to like think about what you've seen Because by the time you get to the end of them in 30 seconds you you know of like really dance action you won't remember what you thought and observed about what happened in the first 30 seconds and so a lot of thinking just to pierce Into The Ether I'm gonna jump around a little bit with some of the topics about video because there's just so much I want to cover with you but one of them was I remember reading an article this year that it was an NHL team I can't remember the team but they banned in-game video for their team because they thought players were getting too obsessed with it too focused on it and again it removed some of their ability to just play the game and others they were like they were thinking as they were playing what is this going to look like when we watch it in the film exactly it became a crutch almost so I mean it does speak to the just the ubiquity of video right it's everywhere now we take we can tape everything which is potentially great but that's different from whether we should yeah it's such a fascinating thing and uh you know the other thing that kind of stood out is I sat in with one of my Consulting clients for their video session much like you talked about at summer league and knowing what you're actually sharing with them is such a fascinating part of this because they left the video session and when we debriefed with the coaches you know they were talking about oh we got to get more skilled we got to do more of these type of things to get better individually and I stopped them and said do you realize that nine of your 10 Clips were about decisions they had nothing to do with skill and it was just that kind of thing that they went in thinking they were talking about one thing and the reality was they showed their players something completely different and mainly we don't know what the players contextualize doing so I'm so glad you said that because I think one of the most interesting questions that you can ask about a video is to like especially if you pause it is to say what do you see or what do you notice here because we know so little about what players perceive and how they think and so just the open-ended question of what do you you know what it could be that they say fascinating things that are like really insightful that you never thought of it could be that they say things that are like bright spot on with the mental model and you're like they understand how we're trying to play it could be that they say things that are like utterly random like they're just they're just noticing exactly the wrong thing or they're what they're noticing has nothing to do with where their eyes should be at that moment you know it could be any combination of those things but just ask in a very open-ended you know oftentimes we have something we want players to see that we see in the video or say do you see this to like watch for this there's also a place for like tell me what you see so that I can understand you know so it's a it's a way to check for understanding and understand how my players perceive the game which is like that's very very important especially to decision making and that's kind of what you're saying that video should be this interactive process right it's not a lecture it's an interactive process absolutely I mean yes I do believe that I think that um some of my sort of some of the clients that I have that are like at a higher level you know the highest possible level they feel like as game day approaches they and this is their working Theory I don't know whether I agree with it but as game day approaches I want to get more directive and you know so like three days from the game I'm okay being like what do you see what's important here and the day before the game it's you know like our spacing is too tight you know is our spacing how it should be is it is it tight enough or is it too loose um but it's interesting I propose I mentioned that to another coach and he was like I would do it exactly the opposite which is like but the day before the game I would actually want to be more open-ended and understand where they are and have them be thinking more about decisions that are closer to the game and so I think like those two theories are kind of fascinating like do you first of all you know maybe you don't even have to have a progression but do you want to progress from more directive to less directive or less directive to more directive as the game gets closer to me it connects back to what you talked about a little bit with pregame speeches in a sense that you know again if we give them too many things they're not getting the main message so to me the value of film and where I want you to get into this too because we had a brief discussion before we did the podcast um a few weeks ago about the difference between individual films small group film team film and to me I've felt that team film is less valuable than small group or individual but you rightly pointed out the value of Team film as well so to me it comes back to what is the message you're trying to send within that session and are you sending it and that's the main thing it's a little bit like we're you know we're just talking like there's so many potential distractions on game day and so much of it is like my self-discipline what I want to accomplish with a video and recognizing that sort of like I was saying like you plan your message and you also plan your affect what I want to get out of a video could be technical it could be tactical it could be cultural right it could be like I just want to honor the guys who are without any fanfare work on their behinds off without the ball and all the thankless things and I want us all to like celebrate I want us all to see that and celebrate it and like they're going to get the best parking spot like there can be lots of different reasons to shoot video and I just want to be really intentional about what I'm trying to accomplish because otherwise there's just so many directions that can it can go and you just never know what people are watching watching for and seeing and watching and seeing are very different things so it connects back to like this intentionality as like an NBA coach told me once that even at that level he felt like you know maybe three of the 15 players watch every clip right and then yeah five of them don't watch anything they're not paying attention at all and then there's this middle and it's like this intentionality and that's why it's like what is the most important thing and how can I direct their attention to it and I know that's something that you talk about attending to attention so uh can you talk a little bit about that yeah I mean I think you said it you said it perfectly which is uh just to go back to this phrase like you know to be an elite athlete is to manage my attention and my emotions under complex circumstances and so I always want to be thinking about what what should my players be thinking about how can I steer them to be thinking about the most important things everything that I mentioned it does not the most important thing is it just is a distraction from that and so I think it's one of the one of the many reasons why less is often so much you know less is more that I would often think that if the more we say the more we tell players the more they'll learn and I think that that's one of the it's one of the biggest paradoxes of coaching which is in the effort to speed up learning we often slow it down and so just being really like what our place thinking about what are they watching what are they focused on if that is particularly in you know in uh you know that is the greatest determine the greatest determinant of what we learn is what we're paying attention to the other part for me is like what like the barometer of a good film session or the most important thing might be what are you connecting back to the next practice to me that's a big big deficit sometimes is that there's a great film session and then nothing from that film session is connected to the next practice or that practice yeah it's interesting I think one of the best time I think you know we tend to show video after after the game after the practice but actually it's probably more productive before which is like if I had to choose between watching myself after practice and critiquing myself or watching a model of Ideal execution before we go out you know right before we walk out on the floor so it's right in my mind is like what we want to look like when we you know when we play the double Gap offense I'm I mean in an Ideal World we have both sometimes but I might choose the first which is like the video comes beforehand to help me Envision what I'm trying to do I asked or I saw your exposure once before a game and asked him what he does before a game and he said he goes through the game before video with an assistant coach basically critiquing the decisions and when you just said that that connects back to that to me and going okay why would he do that before a game would it could kind of make him like anxious or I screwed up or different things like that but what you just said is it brings it to his attention and probably helps him apply it better whatever different decisions he wants or what decisions he wants to keep on with doesn't it but I think right before right before a game I probably want to help players envision high quality execution of us us playing the way we want to play as much as possible one because I think you know like I think is a really interesting you know I think it builds confidence right like I think it's a really interesting analogy in um you know there's a ton of uh in in Major League Baseball there's a ton of research on the idea that like what you're doing when you're hitting a baseball is perceiving the motion of the pitcher before he releases the ball and so what that tells me is that batting practice taken from a batting machine probably doesn't help me very much because the skill is not actually watching the ball of the skills watching the pitcher and so a lot of teams are like okay no more batting you know uh no no more batting machine and um and you know one of the other key things we know from research is that um once you've encoded a skill uh random practice and serial practice when we're productive than blocked practice right so batting practice traditionally was like five fastballs five curveballs and so then the so obviously if I want to maximize learning batting practice should be like I'm not going to tell you what pitch is going to be you just have to hit it and I think what they found was that that was probably better long term for players learning but it shattered them psychologically right before because so much of batting practice happens right before the game in the major leagues and so they had to kind of find a middle ground of like the first five pitches the first five pitches like we're gonna choose what they're gonna be and they're gonna be delivered to like challenge you but then you get to call what you want your last five pitches to be so you walk out of the field remembering what it felt like to Cork the ball and feeling good and confident and having a little bit of swagger I do think there's probably a video version of that which is even if we look at some like here's some things we need to learn from the last game here's some challenges the very last thing I want my players to see before they walk out on the floor I want them to see themselves succeeding have a really good image of what success looks like and walk out on the floor with a little bit of like Swagger I love that and when you talk about random practice I'm I'm curious because I started doing this and again I'd love to hear your thoughts on this that once I dove deeper into research around random variable practice whatever it may be and retrieval practice specifically from some stuff you share is I started to instead of showing like say we show 10 Clips we're not going to do three defense or three of the same things we're actually gonna mix up all the clips so they have to absolutely come back and retrieve and does this once you tell them now I love that right once you say now we're going to watch some examples of us in the you know in our zone defense right like well now I've told them yeah half the things like what's important here right what is what is this clip telling us right that's uh then I'm learning to watch more studiously without without the sort of you know uh I want to remove something at first when we're learning how to defend it like great let's talk about how to defend but over time yeah I need to step back a little bit and probably let I really like the idea of interleaving videos right so that I have to like struggle to figure out what it's about and what we're learning here and what the challenge is and what the solution is so that's not always predictable to me I think it's a lot like that batting practice example which is if I always know it's a curveball then I won't learn to see the curveball when it's coming if I always know you tell me like these are some good examples of our spacing I won't learn to look and see is our spacing good or bad here is spacing not even the issue here is the issue something totally different the gift of video I think is that it teaches it gives us so many more opportunities to teach players to see the game and you know and decision making always starts with perception but that doesn't but those things don't happen automatically unless we unless we think intentionally about how to cause it to happen the only piece of advice I'll give coaches about that is that like early in the year I taught my players why I'm doing it so that I said listen I can put this in a perfect order and it'll look more impressive but the idea is to mix it so that you guys have to constantly obviously search and retrieve search decide and execute so to speak and from in terms of that uh perception form but it also connects back to your planned pause points right yeah so it's only messy to the players to me I know what I'm doing you know one other example I love I love your point and one other example of it in addition to like interleaving content I think is interleaving quality like so often we're like let's see some good examples let's see some bad examples even the idea that examples are either good or bad as opposed to like good and bad or mixed or you know like so I mean I think it's just withholding that information being like here you know here's us defending what do you think right that is really teaching players to like do the kind of seeing and evaluating that they have to do during the game so not you know so interleaving the just from a quality perspective good bad good media mediocre uh good mediocre bad you know just like always having to do that evaluative step of what's what do we see out here I love that I'm adding that and I did want to ask your thoughts then on using film to actually critique a player are there some best strategies that you can suggest this is sort of like player did poorly I want you to understand you need to intervene to help them do something better yeah uh you know I think it's good it's good for that right it's um it's gift is that it objectifies the conversation for years and years and years to put the players who were making who were you know shooting when the shot wasn't on taking back your bad shot selection we would say your shot selection was terrible and then it's a judgment I don't agree you know I don't agree you know like much easier you know much better to be able to say let's watch some videos of your shot selection and talk about when you're you know when it's off when it's optimal and when it could be better let's start with like what are the things we want to think about we're making or selection shots great I'm going to show you some examples and you're gonna you know and I'm gonna be honest some of these frustrated me as a coach and I want you to tell me which ones which ones frustrated me and should frustrate you as a player wants to be great and how you can make them better right so um but all of a sudden it's an objective conversation because we can look at it together and you can if you and I can even say if you disagree with me and you want to make the case we can roll it back and we can watch again and you can tell me why that's a good shot because I should be able to be like okay I agree but if you look at again you're off balance and you're not facing the basket and yeah and your teammate is open 10 feet away but I think it it makes it feel less like it makes it feel the process feel less subjective and more objective that also I think lets me take some of the I think that lets me adjust my tone a little bit which is like the video is going to do the work of pointing out the error and so my role can shift to like making you realize that was a mistake to making you to helping you think about what the solutions are and how to get better at it what do you see here I'm going to ask you to focus on your shot selection what do you see here core shot selection great let's talk about what we can do to make it better right now I'm your ally as opposed to like the guy who's um as opposed to the hanging judge or maybe it's what do you see here uh shot selection seems fine I disagree watch again why do you know what what are we looking at that's different what are we looking at differently here is important for us to understand this and Company and understanding why is it why why we disagree about these shots so I think I think it's one of the gifts of video I just think like we're all we should always be thinking about a lot of food safe to be you know I want I want to make players comfortable discussing their mistakes with me and so um when a player identifies a mistake right they've done they've done the hard work then I don't wanna if I shout at them the incentive is don't you know don't don't reveal your mistakes because you make me mad so like what'd you do wrong here I'm out of position thank you I appreciate that all right uh I just you know I think that like culture is important in those moments but um you know it's so potentially powerful to see to let players see their see their mistakes and how to fix them so there is a place for direct instruction in film just like in the coaching environment but generally the tone is you want it to be Comfort uh more conversational more open-minded and obviously safe is that fair to say yes I think that psychological safety is right you know like one of my favorite lines is I'm so glad I saw that mistake it's going to help me to help you right I'm going to help you this is how I'm going to help you get but I'd rather you know I'm glad we saw this now because I want to make sure that like we fix it before the game before the before the playoffs before the championship fight because that's how we're getting this is how we're going to get better I'm not saying mistakes may not affect you plays but I'm not gonna be mad at you like I'm you know I'm not gonna be mad at you for making mistakes maybe Maddie for lack of effort right but um or you know but I'm gonna my goal is to help you get better so we're gonna sit down and talk about it and I'll tell you what I need from you if you can't fix it you know then that has a you know at some levels that has that has a playing time effect and I think that's right you know there should be accountability for it and there should be rewards for guys who work hard and fix things but I want to make this I wanna I think sometimes when we introduce a lot of emotion to those conversations we distract players from the things we want them to focus on so I'm yelling at you you can hear the anger in my voice when we're talking about the video and now you're thinking about why is he mad at me does he does he react to equally to interacting the same way to hers that all the players make does he sound like my dad when he's angry and rightly or not all those things are not I'm thinking about shot selection right so they're distractions from where I want your minds again it's about like guiding attention and focusing on attention so there are some times where like you know it's the 10th time you know I'm not saying there's never a time to be like look this is happening over and over we really need to fix this I'm not saying there's never a time for emotion but I just think we usually go there too quickly and don't recognize the way that it often um interrupts and disrupts focus on learning absolutely and uh and another part of video of course in using your phrasing here effective watching is powerful so how can we help our players our athletes watch video better I'll just go back to one point that I made before which is I think the most important part of any video is the pause point right there's a bit like it's actually where you stop the video that is the most important thing because it lets me slow down I mean just to go back group Invasion games decision games are all about cues about visual cues that tell us what decision to make and if all that happens in my training as an athlete is a coach tells me you should have been wide there that I'm always dependent on the coach and true autonomy is the coach helps me to understand when they when they're positioned like that you're wide great let's watch the video what do you notice about their position deposition centrally great so you should be wide next step great let's watch the video what do you notice I should be wide right that in the end players have to players have to perceive the visual cues that tell them what decision is what decision or decisions are required or open to them at any given moment and the real power of videos that I can slow down reality and pause it and really study and and develop understanding of visual cues so I mean interesting like you know videos it's moving pictures but the most important point is where it is where you pause it pause what you see here talk to me about the defensive spacing talk about his body position or maybe even maybe even none of that just pause what do you see here those are all opportunities to teach players to read cues and until we had video and we could stop reality like that we never had a way to teach Q so that to me is the most powerful part of video often overlooked and that means that the most part most important part of the video is right is where I pause it enough to go back to your point about planning like when I plan to show a video if I haven't thought like I should know to the second at six seconds at 16 seconds I'm going to pause this video this is what I want players to be looking at on the screen when I ask them what do you notice about our defensive spacing and if it's a second later if it's second later it's not as good as if it's at six seconds because that's where the visual cue is occurring and just as some advice the way I used to do that uh was that I actually because you can do this with most video editors now you can actually build in a frame so that you can add a frame where it actually pauses and freezes and then that reminds you as a coach that this is the point that I want to pause so it's super simple with modern video to do that and maybe one other tiny one I think one other thing you can do is then often what we're doing as coaches is we are linking complex visual picture a picture of the defense and of the opposition defending us on what sort of you know what that requires of us or what our spacing should look like to a concept that exists in language and one of the things that video allows me then to do is like I pause and I show us attacking in a pod of three in the case of round B I can put the language that I want to use to describe that on the screen right so that players associate the language to the picture the language to the picture the language to the picture over and over and over again so then when I start to use the language it's cue in the picture and so um you know I just think one of the potential power of videos the ability to combine picture and Language by superimposing here's our term for this over the uh over you know over the image of it at the moment when players an interesting well I think there are a lot of details about how this can be done but ideally like you wouldn't have to go back and forth between looking at the word in the picture they would be close together on the screen lots of times like uh one club that I worked this was doing this with like put lots of fancy graphics and one of the things we realized is actually a much simpler graphic like is less distracting and just want you to associate this picture PODS of three with this phrase so that I can say getting our threes and that Q is an image in your head that you've seen a thousand times in video we're so glad you brought that up I've seen some video that looks like Hollywood Productions and stuff like that but just remember everything you add to it can distract from what you want them to actually learn right yeah better videos not necessarily or fancier videos not necessarily better video from a learning perspective like a lot of times what we're adding is actually distraction it's a great book on the there's um the this concept in cognitive science is often called dual coding which is like under it's like processing things in language and in pictures at the same time it's a great book on this by a guy named Oliver caviglioli but one of the things he talks about for teachers is really simple thoughts like really simple line Graphics as opposed to like you know lots of times we put inspiring images on the screen because we think it will be more motivating but all it really is is distracting paying attention to attention what am I paying what am I paying attention to is the most important thing in learning focus on being effective rather than impressive uh that type of thing yeah no that's that's great I'm so glad we got to that point Doug this has been fascinating uh so educational for me and I know for everyone so again thank you for joining us and sharing and I already know we're going to do a part three at some point and I know you got some Journeys ahead as well where you're gonna kind of dive into some of these ideas even more so I can't wait to bring you back and share even more with our audience yeah I look forward to it thanks again and I hope to see you soon