How do you know change is happening if you don’t see it happen?

Measuring Improvement In Players When It Is Incremental Change.

How do you know change is happening if you don’t see it happen? If improving 1% over the course of a week or month is the goal then this is a very small step that might go unnoticed. Obviously improvement is a bunch of small steps taken over time. The question here is how do you know when and if a player has improved if you can’t actually see it?

This causes a lot of issues for coaches and players as they may improve in some areas but not others. Or not recognize that change has happened, or when it has happened. This leads to issues in understanding improvements. Or worse frustrations between everyone involved. If a player thinks they have improved and the coach thinks the opposite then we can see how issues can pop up.

Improvements need to show for you to understand that they occurred. How can we tell if a player has improved? The ultimate scorecard comes from the game itself. Does the player show improve in game situations? Well in order to answer this question we need to decide how we are going to measure this improvement. How and what will you use to measure this change? Often coaches may jump in this situation to focus on a result metric such as OBP. This is completely fine and might be a good first step in terms of understanding changes.

I would argue that focusing on a metric like Out Of Zone Swings or inversely In Zone Swing will be more process oriented. Meaning that a player can have a high OBP while swinging at everything which can lead to false improvement as they move through their development process. While putting the onus on the process of which pitches is the player swinging at help to focus at a more granular level. While a player can get away with swinging at pitches that are out of the zone of the focus is placed on improving that area it should carry from one level of play to the next better than focusing on outcomes might.

This is obviously just one example of what could be done to track improvements. Putting a metric to track now helps to direct the players training instead of jumping around to fix several issues that could be happening.

Or imagine if change isn’t recognized then it may lead to more time being wasted on non-issues for players. Imagine spending time on something that is no longer an issue for a player but not realizing that it has improved.

The main point I’m trying to get across is that setting goals and having ways to measure change should be something we strive for. Especially as levels of play increase. The fact of the matter is that if you don’t have a way to measure a players change often you are speculating at the answer.

Having a gauge to keep you honest as a coach is something we should strive for. Tracking the improvements should be something that keeps us honest from making false claims or being biased by our own thoughts about a situation.

Often when I see coaches talk about working on a particular area of a players swing or really any skill I find myself asking how would this show up in a measurable way? How can we track this over a given period of time, and would these metrics truly mean that change has occured?

Recognizing that a player has made a 10% improvement is really hard to see never mind a 1%. Along with being hard to see the back slide of improvement occurs immediately. Having a way to assess learning, and getting past I taught and getting to they learned should be the focus of looking for improvements.