Model For K-Vest Best Practice
One thing that happens when coaches get the opportunity to use a K-Vest for the first time is that they walk away from the experience thinking something along the lines of “That was awesome! But what can I do with this now?” I want to provide an example model of what this process could look like for coaches.
What are we using it for?
I think this is the first question that we need to ask ourselves in almost any situation when it comes to using technology and data. It is an important question that needs to be thought about by coaches. This is the part that isn’t fun. For teachers it would be lesson planning. For coaches it is thinking about how we want to use the different tools we have available and what is the overall goal of its use?
Lets say for example that we are at the beginning of our season and we want to just focus on getting some general information about how the players move. This will allow us to create reports that we can go back to at different points during the season. This is a good first step in the process. Get players on the device collect some information so that you can process it by yourself while learning how to use the device in a low stress situation. (Non-teaching environment) This time could also be used to focus on getting player familiar with the device.
Educating All Stakeholders
Taking the time at some point before the season to talk about the device and the information that it’s going to provide to everyone should not be overlooked. This is an imperative opportunity that is missed by many people. Creating a common understanding among all people within a space is important for making sure that everyone not only understands but shares a common language around this technologies. Again this can be a less formal environment and sets out just to instruct stakeholders about the major information that you plan on focusing on.
Deciding What Is Important
This is probably the part of the process that you should spend the most time thinking through what you value as an organization. K-Vest provides almost an infinite amount of information in terms of player movement. Which means that you as the coach can take a lot of different roads when working with this device. K-Vest will collect multiple different body segments angles and rotational information that can be daunting if looked at in totality. Which can lead to some people shutting down mentally when they consider every option available to them.
Hitting a very open topic so many people feel certain ways about different metrics. Taking the time to decide what you feel is most important for your players to be doing with their bodies and then picking several key metrics that you value from K-Vest.
For our example today lets say that we value X-Factor Stretch as a Key Metric from our players. I am only going to select one for simplicity in today’s post.
K-Vest provides nice graphs of the stretch at different point in the swing but it also, can also see this metric play out in the form of a graph. K-Vest provides some pro ranges of data but you will also start to potentially see some commonalities that you want to branch off and examine. With the graphical information that is provided to us we can start to build models about where players are not meeting the key metric we might have set up. The Efficiency Report also provides graphs that show us the timing that the X-Factor takes.
We need to pick a 1 or 0 approach to these plans. Which means for the X-Factor Stretch data maybe we want all players at First Move Forward to have at least a -35 degree stretch. Once we have a goal set out for our players we can now build a plan around this.
Building Packages
Once we have:
- Decided how we want to use this device.
2. Educated Coaches and Player
3. Decided what we value
We can get to the point now when we can start to look at players individually and think creatively about how we want build drill packages around each player to either maintain what they are doing or improve how they currently move.
Documenting these packages for each player is going to key. This will allow you a place to refer back to in our next step (Evaluation of program). This is where the coach shows his worth. The real question here is: Can the coach effectively plan and implement a program that leads to change in hitters?
Coaches should build key drills and movement work that can be done on a daily basis with players. Setting up 12–15 different programs for each and every hitter on your team will take time. But it is an area that should not be overlooked. This is essentially the equivalent of teachers spending time lesson planning to ensure that lessons are effective. We should be striving for the same in the coaching space.
Evaluation Of Programs
Once you have gone through a 3–4 weeks of the set programming we can now go back to the K-Vest Unit and use it for Formative Feedback.
“Formative feedback is ongoing and helps faculty (coaches) to focus on student (players) learning and students (players) to better understand the limits of their own knowledge and how to improve. By determining what students have learned and what is unclear, instructors can focus the class more effectively to meet the learning needs of that group.”- Tufts University (Parenthesis by me)
What this basically means is that we are using K-Vest as a way to get information on how our plan is working. At this point we have a decision to make. Is the player making progress? Yes or N. 1 or 0. If we see progress in the player then we can slightly alter the plan to potentially focus on something else while keeping the key components that we believe are leading toward lasting change. If we see no progress we can start to deviate from our original plan to try to make progress with particular players.
At all times but specifically if the plan is not leading toward improvements coaches should be seeking input from the player about what they think is working, and what might need to be altered. Building the program with the player as an active stakeholder is an important part of this. Especially if we don’t see solid progress toward the goal.
This process will look very different for every coach. This is just a sample of how it could be done. From my experience people want K-Vest to spit out a “Your doing great!” on player performance but that is rarely the case. As always deciding what you think is most important and working toward that goal will add the most value to your players. Adding a process into your program on how K-Vest can be used as a teaching and feedback tool is something that should be examined deeper.
