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In a small elementary school gym located in Greendale, Wisconsin a lanky red-headed 9-year-old was introduced to the amazing game of basketball. Days I had basketball practice were my favorite days of the week, three times a week I would run two blocks from my house to get to the gym and meet my teammates and Coach Chris to learn the basics of basketball.

At first, none of us really knew what we were doing, what the rules were, or how the game was even technically played. Most practices consisted of Coach Chris explaining the basics to us while we used trial and error methods to figure out how to move our bodies in relation to the ball, while being conscious of how all the rules and skills are supposed to be executed. In Fitts and Posner's 3 Stage Model of Learning, we were in the Cognitive Stage. Trying to figure out how to make the movements of dribbling, making sure not to travel with the ball, how to shoot and pass the ball. As a team, we were pretty bad and made little improvements initially, but as individuals we were making drastic improvements. We were figuring out what strategies worked for each different move and talking ourselves through them as we learned.

As we progressed in practice as a team, we saw a slower rate in our improvements, but saw more growth in our understanding and analysis of the game, as well as a better ability to complete the more complex components. Our improvements were visible in practice as well as in games, we were much more consistent in the accuracy of our ball handling and play execution. This was possible due to our intensive practice on those refined set of skills and our increased ability to tell when we made an error in our movements. At this point, we were in the Associative Stage, we were now able to identify the specific cues that we knew went with certain movements and applied them in practice. We were able to identify when to move our bodies in sync with the ball, or how to read our teammates’ body language to know what direction to move in during certain plays.

Getting to high school, competition levels grew, and our practices and games intensified. Things we were not able to do without tediously talking ourselves through each step came naturally to us and required little to no concentration. My teammates and I were now able to dribble without looking while calling out plays and communicating with each other. We were also able to watch a player take a shot and see where the error was in the players form or release. Using the visual cues from the environment and our extensive experience in watching and taking shots, we were able to tell if the ball will be short or long, fall to the right or left, or where it will bounce off the rim in order to predict where our bodies needed to be in order to get the rebound. This exemplifies the Autonomous Stage because there was a drastic reduction in the demand for attention in certain tasks. Some skills were automatic to us, we could process information from two separate tasks concurrently, and we could detect and even correct error at times.

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Coach is Always Right ... Right?: Practice Variability

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Coach is Always Right ... Right?: Practice Variability

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When I played club basketball in middle school my team shared our high school gym with the boy’s team who were one year older than us. At random points during practice, Coach Chris would make us do drills with and scrimmage against the boys instead of only within our team. Even with Coach Chris’ assurance that it was for our own good, my teammates and I absolutely hated this part of practice because the boys always seemed to outplay and outperform us in every way. Blocked our shots, boxed us out, outscored us, better play execution – you name it, they did it better than us.

Coach Chris incorporated high levels of contextual interference into our random practice schedule by making us practice free throws, jump shots and specific plays along with scrimmages in sets only he knew the order to – we never knew what we would be practicing or if we were going to be practicing alongside our own teammates or the boy’s team. Coach Chris made sure to motivate us and ensure we played our hardest against the boys during scrimmages by making the losing team (which was always us) sprint two sets of suicides after the game.

Because we were practicing on a random schedule, we had to continuously abandon and reconstruct each action plan for every play, drill, or shot we were instructed to do. This resulted in us putting much more cognitive work in than we would have if we knew the order of the drills we were doing.

Although we performed poorly and with many errors during practices with the boys, the additional amount of cognitive work and high contextual interference we worked through allowed us to retain more learning in practices. This aided us in games where we were playing girls our own age, our team showed positive transfer and increased performance, allowing us to beat them.

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Procedural memory is used often in basketball. The most basic yet important instance of procedural memory at work during a basketball game is when I am running up the court on a fast break about to shoot a layup. Procedural memory is my non-conscious and automatic memory system which allows me to remember the correct sequence of events necessary to successfully shoot and make the layup.

From the first day I started playing basketball, I was constantly told that whatever side of the basket I am shooting the layup on, when I get to the bottom of the lane I must lift my arm and leg on that specific side to take the shot, aiming at the corner of the shooter’s square on the basket. For example, when I shoot a layup on the right side of the basket, I must lift my right leg at the same time as my right arm, aiming at the corner of the shooters square. This ensures that the ball is protected by my body from a defender who may try to block the shot, my body is oriented at the correct position under the basket, and the shot angle is correct for it to go in.

At the moment the I shoot the layup after making it down the court, I am not actively thinking “Okay now that I’m at the block at the bottom of the lane, I have to reach my right arm up keeping hold of the ball while concurrently lifting my right leg and aim at the corner square” – I just take the shot. It is a simple but extremely important shot that any experienced player is able to take without thinking about.

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During summer break in high school, my team had practice every day and we participated in summer league games every week. Much to the delight of myself and my teammates who were also posts, our coach created Post Week, a week where the posts would separate from the team every day and intensively practice important fundamentals and drills specific to us.

Much of this training consisted of breaking down plays to focus on how we received and handled the ball under the basket with the pressure of a defender. We would be put in various one-on-one situations with a defender and repeatedly rehearsed different situations and plays to see how we would get around our defender and score. After the extensive practice we completed during Post Week, the posts saw significant individual improvements after the first few days of practice as well better team function on the court during our games in the following weeks.

Through the Identical Elements Theory and the Transfer-Appropriate Processing Theory, the posts experienced high amounts of positive transfer from our one-on-one practice situations. We were able to apply these to game situations when reunited with the guards of our team. By breaking down the plays and practicing the identical movements, as well practicing problem solving and decision making under pressure as we would in a game, we successfully completed plays and got around our defenders when we played in our league games.

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Get Your Head in the Game: Central Resource Theory

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Get Your Head in the Game: Central Resource Theory

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If you have ever attended or played in a basketball game, you know there are a lot of things going on, whether an NBA game or a high school game, there is always a chaotic atmosphere. This is part of the reason I love the game so much, there is so much going on it is nerve-racking and exciting at the same time. This chaotic atmosphere however, is not always good, players need to learn how to hone in on the important factors of the game and focus solely on them to play successfully.

In a game I am constantly bombarded with stimuli, some of which are essential for me to focus on in order to stay in the game; there are coaches yelling plays and feedback, I must be conscious of the 9 other people on the court with me, parents and fans are always yelling, my position on the court in relation to the ball, the current play, and what position I am playing must always be correct, referees are constantly stopping the game, I must be conscious of the scoreboard and how much time is left – the list goes on and on!

According to the Theories of Attention, a person’s attention capacity is fixed and has a certain limit to the number of things a person can pay attention to at one instance. More specifically, the Central Resource Theory states that I have an attention reserve that all the different stimuli I am being exposed to during a game are competing for. Because of my fixed limit of attention capacity, if I try and take in all the stimuli at once I will get overwhelmed, which could result in a decrease in my performance causing me to mess up a play or cause the other team to get the ball and score.

I have learned with experience which stimuli are important to the game that I need to pay attention to and which ones I need to tune out. I limit my attention to the players on the court and the plays that are being carried out, my coach, the referees, the scoreboard, and where I am versus where I should be on the court. Any other information is not essential to the game and simply cause interference and decreased performance.