Using Tracking To Differentiate “I Taught” Vs. “They Learned”
One of the biggest things that can be brought out of the technological and information revolution inside of baseball is the fact that we can start to see the difference between ‘I taught something’ which is easy to feel as the coach, and ‘they learned’ which is much harder to tell.
Coaches can easily mistake teaching for learning in their players. If I were to ask you how can you tell if someone has learned something you were taught? How would you answer? This is a really difficult questions that we all face when working with anyone. The mind can easily think that just because you talked to a player about something, or that you gave a presentation that everyone learned. The mind can sometimes try to convince you think the people who you ‘taught’ picked up everything. But we are are not an objective observer of your own actions or sessions.
Further more when it comes to coaching we mistake competency among players quickly without collecting enough information to accurately assess whether the group has learned the skill.
What Is Tracking?
Tracking is when you write down or collect some type of information to help you see trends or patterns in player development. This can be electronically through a piece of technology or written down by a coach or staff member.
Tracking information helps us to disciplined with what we do. This is the key point I am trying to get across. If you are trying to catch 5 rabbits you don’t catch any. Tracking information during practice helps us to focus on the one rabbit that we set out catch.
When tracking information we are looking for one piece of information as opposed to seeking to collect millions of pieces of information which can distract us from the main point. Tracking keeps us focused on what we are trying to teach.
Example In Action
Lets say that coaches are focusing on working with players to lay off cutters throw off the plate. We could put an emphasis on it during classroom work with players. Looking at the different pieces of information that point to this being a great skill to obtain. Coaches may pull up examples of this through video. They may also have a pitching coach talk about how the teams pitchers try to work opposite side hitters with this pitch. Coaches may then go to the cage set up a Spinball Machine to throw opposite handed cutters to a hitters. (This is obviously abbreviated as you can get very creative with your programming but this isn’t the point of this article)
This is where things can get messy. Often once coaches move out into the field or out of a ‘controlled environment’ the action can speed up on us. Which to me means that we need to have a plan to answer the key question of “How do you know if the player has acquired the skill?”
Staying Focused
Lets say that you have gone through the process of addressing a skill, examining the benefits of acquiring the skill, and have a solid process of how you will go about teaching it. Then you get out into the batting cage with a player and realize that his bat path is off, and that you have an attack angle issue, or that they also have a problem laying off the curveball in. What do you do then? Coaches have a decision to make in this situations. Do you move off of what was planned and address these other issues or focus on what we have set out to accomplish this day/week/month? As coaches we believe many times that finding multiple things to focus on is better than focusing on the one. But the issue here is that by changing your focus from the one to the many we lose track of what we set out to accomplish. This is where tracking information brings us back to our essential issue for that time period. Tracking keeps us focused instead of moving around haphazardly.
Using Technology and Support Staff To Help Track
In practice collecting data not only from different technologies can help us to narrow our focus even more. Along with technology asking other coaches/support staff to help provide feedback on the one thing that we are keeping track of can be useful to coaches. Incorporating other staff in the collection/feedback process is a good use of not only resources available to coaches but also helps to be more efficient with what we are tracking for that period.
In this scenario you could ask the support staff to watch the Rapsodo and to call out whether the pitch the player swung at was a strike or a ball/on or off the plate. It will provide more data and these staff members can also write down different pieces of information or pull the data out for review later on.
So going back to the main question here of: Did my players learn to lay off the cutter in? We can be in such a hurry to say that players got it, and that they learned this skill but in reality, three players got it, five display the skill but inconsistently, and three are wildly inconsistent when displaying the skill. So you may be ready to move on from this skill but only a handful of players are consistently displaying this skill.
Great coaches are will ask questions like “Who is getting this?” and “What are they not getting?” and collecting this data to make it easier to go back and realize what needs to be addressed further and where we are having success. Tracking one specific piece of information is easily implemented into any organization or culture, and can be very effective for narrowing the focus of coaches.
