Knot-Tying & Ball Runs

Tiny Details That Improve Teams

“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” - John Wooden

“Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.” - Leonardo da Vinci

Socks & Shoes

John Wooden is regarded as one of the best coaches of all time (at least in American coaching spheres) leading his UCLA men’s basketball teams to 10 national titles over the course of his career and helping produce scores of All-Star NBA players, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton.

One of the more memorable anecdotes from his coaching career is from the first team meeting he held at the beginning of every season. Wooden would stand at the front of the room and teach players how to put on their socks and shoes. For Wooden, those were crucial details that their success depended on.

About two years ago I saw a coaching peer do the soccer version of this. He sat his players down, showed them how put their socks on properly, taught them how to fasten their shoes tight to their feet, and then he took it one step further. He showed them how to tie their shoes so the knot was small and flush against their cleats, ensuring that they would hit the ball cleanly. (I’ll try to track down his exact shoe-tying technique and share it with you.)

Now this detail will probably dissolve away as Nike and Adidas produce more and more laceless cleats, which in turn will be replaced by the next great thing, like spray-on shoes. But these stories touch upon a salient point: good coaching gets the big things right – training sessions, match preparation, culture creation – but great coaching focuses on the details. And it’s worth mentioning that you can’t be a great coach without first being a good coach.

In the Classroom

Doug Lemov is a teacher, but his best work didn’t come from his classroom – instead if came from the classrooms of others. Lemov has spent years studying successful teachers, codifying their teaching techniques, then compiling that information into resources for other educators to sue. While not all of Lemov’s work is applicable to sports coaching, there is significant overlap.

(As an aside, if you intend to peruse his work I suggest you read Teach Like a Champion, not The Coach’s Guide to Teaching. While the latter seems more relevant, I personally found that there were more actionable items in the former. If you can’t afford a copy – as I imagine there are many other youth soccer coaches like me who don’t make much – contact me through Twitter or email [coachtophsubstack@gmail.com] and I’ll send you my copy.)

One such applicable moment, discussed in Teach Like a Champion, came from a teacher named Mr. McCurry. McCurry was mentioned specifically because he does something no (or few) other teachers do – he teaches his kids how to pass out papers. Now the actual act of passing out papers is quite droll, and teaching kids how to do it would be considered borderline neurotic to some, but if it’s done correctly it has cascading positive effects.

Lemov writes that McCurry teaching his students how to hand out papers succinctly and successfully accrues an extra 8 days worth of classroom time over the course of the year. That’s a lot more time students can spend learning about multiplication tables and sentence structure. It’s a tiny, tiny detail that has profound implications when used correctly.

While the way McCurry teaches his students how to pass out papers deserves its very own paragraph, I’d rather discuss its applicability to coaching. However, if you want to see how McCurry teaches it, you can watch a video of it here.

Ball Runs

I won’t bore you with a third plodding story so instead I’ll skip the details (ironically enough) and move right to the point. Essentially, I was wondering about how to apply this concept to coaching and then it hit me: ball runs.

Using the back of a napkin, let’s do some quick math. Let’s say my U12 boys team goes on a ball run. It takes them 5 minutes to disperse, get the balls behind the goal and the bush and the water bottles, wildly kick them over, run back, pile up the balls, and be ready for the next set of instructions. If that team goes on three ball runs each practice, that’s 15 minutes we’ve just used. If we train three times a week then that’s 45 minutes of just collecting balls.

But our season is 10 weeks long. That’s 450 minutes, or 7.5 hours, spent on organizing one tiny aspect of a training session. If each practice is 90 minutes, that means we’ve wasted 5 practices worth of time. Imagine what we could have done before the final game of the season – potentially a big game if our season went well – with all that extra practice time.

Fortunately there’s an alternative. Much like Mr. McCurry, I can teach my players how to do a ball run on our first day. I can spend 10 minutes demonstrating how some players need to run to the balls to kick them back while a smaller group receives and piles them up. And, maybe most importantly, I can teach them how to weight their passes, a soccer skill which holds real value in the game. If that gets our average ball run time down to even just 3 minutes, we’ll have an extra two training sessions that would have normally been lost.

I went through this process with the last team I coached, and while I didn’t have the wherewithal to gather and analyze the data, I did notice that practices went smoother and we had quicker transition times between exercises (all of which align with the 4th Principle of Good Coaching I might add). We also finished second in our league, but I’m not bold enough to say that was a correlation.

Finding Details

There are details everywhere that are so small and fine that they’re easily overlooked. But when they’re broken down and put in the context of a larger picture, you start to wonder how they could ever be missed. Coach Wooden did it with socks and another coach did it with knot-tying.

Every coaching environment is unique, but we can still learn from others. So what details might be overlooked today? Are they time-based, like with ball runs? Are they related to materials, like socks and shoes? Could they be psychological, as Bielsa has shown? Or are they technical/tactical, like Guardiola relies on? Maybe there’s details observed through technology as Nagelsmann has used?

While the details we use may not be any of these things specifically, the underlying principles remain the same. And the more we learn and share as coaches, the better we all become. So what details, do you use, that makes you a great coach?