The 3 Keys to Remembering Basketball Plays
The best process…
Why should we study Basketball Plays?
Basketball plays can be very challenging to remember. In particular when one gets to advanced levels of basketball and the plays become more complex. There are many different kinds of plays and sets one has to remember. They include man offense, zone offense, press breaker offense, side line, baseline, jump ball, press defense, man defense, zone defense, and lastly how to cover on simple offense plays like screens or post defense. As you can see all of these different plays can get really confusing when your coach is calling them out on the side lines. Each play can have a variety of options out of it as well. This is why it is important to find a simple way to digest all the plays within a couple of seconds of hearing them called out when you are out on the floor playing a college game. Obviously being able to recall and utilize plays can be a great advantage for players and a teams success. When the plays get to the level of college play or higher the learning process becomes much more advanced than previous levels played. There are various learning styles suggested and by looking at the research of them we can see the advantages and or disadvantages of them.
Hebb Repetition
The Hebb repetition concept is finding that immediate serial recall which is improved over trials for memory lists that are surreptitiously repeated across trials, relative to new lists.
This could be valuable with learning plays in that if you learned them in order you might remember the order of the plays more fluently. For instance if you have a team run plays 1–5 and add a step to each play that follows then every time you are in the process of a called play they would each assist in the process by remembering previous plays to trigger memory with the current play called out. Also as you increase plays then you can go back down to play 1, then 1 and 2, then 1, 2 and 3 and so on. This leads to the repetitive process to remember plays in a order. The advantage of this process is when they get in the game and if they cant remember number 4 they can think of moves in play number 3 to help trigger play number 4. The plays can be triggered by previous motions learned in the sequence.
There are some drawbacks with this system of learning plays. Research has shown that it is easy to confuse learning with this type of process by having errors. For example when leaning a play and you run the play wrong you will continue to repeat the wrong play. Due to repeating something over and over again and you have an error in it but have ran it over and over incorrectly that it becomes automatic with the wrong steps. You will remember the error when going over it in the future.
Overall if you add another learning process in with it that didn't allow for the errors to come into play this could then be one productive way to remember all the different plays.
Operant conditioning
Many people might know about the operant conditioning effect. The most common study done with this is with a dog, bell, and meat. The trained dog was allowed to eat the meat when it heard the bell. So after awhile of operant conditioning the dogs would salivatate from just hearing the bell.
This could be useful in learning basketball plays. To get rid of there error that could come from Hebb repetition you could add in operant conditioning then this error could go away. The balance of the two together would be much more advantageous than by themselves.
With operant conditioning every time a player gets the play wrong they would have to do a down and back. However if they get the play correct they will get praised for it. This will help them realize they can just keep messing up the plays or they will have to run. If you force someone to pay attention to what they are doing and then add the Hebb repetition in with this it will lead to less errors within the Hebb repetition process.
Research shows that this is a very productive way to teach someone new things. If they are positively rewarded after doing something right they will like that and want to continue doing it. If they are punished they don’t want to do that punishment again which also leads to them learning how to do something correctly. Either way they will receive feedback to the process of learning it.
Interleaved practice
Interleaving is a process where students mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study in order to improve their learning. Interleaving strategy promises improved results. This strategy of interleave learning is not very common but it is taken over the attention of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Over the past four decades, the research has found that interleaving is outperforming blocking strategy for many of the subjects including category learning and sports.
One of the main sports it has been investigated in is basketball. The way they have been testing this is having athletes do a couple of minutes of shooting short shots, then ball handling, followed by deep shoots, and then repeat the process. Then they will be comparing how they improve over the standard blocking strategy. Standard is having them do a single activity like ball handling until they do it prefect before they move on to the next skill.f
This would be interesting to see what happens with plays. I believe we would see the same results as the different skills. Although there really hasn’t been any research done specifically on remembering plays. The building process definately could be utilized in the learning process of plays for basketball.
How you would do interval theory for plays, I would have them do some man offensive plays, then move to defense plays, and lastly out of bounds plays. Once you they get through all of the plays have them repeat them.
Hypothesis
I personally believe if you tie all three of these strategies together it would be very productive way of learning plays and being able to recall them more quickly. First if you put in the interleaved practice. The athletes wouldn’t get bored of doing the same thing over and over again. It will freshen things up and then on top of that they can go back and practice what they can remember. Add that in with the Hebb repetition where you start with play number one then increase like 1–5 for man plays and rainbow order for defenses. It will be easier for them to remember what is next if they think of the order sequence things were in. Lastly to get rid of the error within Hebb repetition use operant conditioning. This would work nicely into this system because it will show the players when they are doing something wrong or something right with either punishment or praise. Overall I think all three strategies combined in the teaching of them would help fill all the gaps that could appear. Along with that it could help out a great number of players because everyone learns differently. Having three different strategies it will help suit more players and better incorporate for learning styles. The process of learning plays will vary player to player and team to team, however if we can reach out with a variety of learning styles it will be better suited to reach more players while assisting in the learning process.