Constraints led coaching and differencial learning need changing situations. The most common situation in a coaching drill is that the coach ist feeding the ball in the court. In a situation with one player or with a group. Some coaches seem to be fixed to their places. In this article you see, that you can use the cue, the „hiking coach“ for a lot of differencial situations.

Sometimes it takes only a little bit of imagination to develop new drills that satisfy the requirements of an „evidence based coaching“. It looks a bit like that, what Holger Geschwindner called: „Practised nonsense“! Geschwindner was the personal basketball coach of Dirk Nowitzki, who was one of the most successfull basketball players in the NBA.

In every education for coaches, they are instructed to think about their position from where to hit or toss the ball into play. As a rule, it is to start the rally with a proper gaming face-off and the rest are „no go“ positions for the coach, corresponding to textbook rules. I remember my own education as a coach. There were right positions and wrong ones. The „wrong“ position in an exam situation could be a decisive criterion for failing.

Then we saw later the so-called „spanish drills“, where coaches work with the ball-toss from most diverse positions. This already suggested that there are other ways of feeding. This was differential, changed constraints. But it was practiced without an at that time not yet available scientific background.

This drill „Coach where are thou?“ shows some of the possible positions from where the coach can feed the ball in many different ways or from many different positions. From systemic coaching and system dynamic approach, it is known that every change, no matter how small, causes irritation, can set a biological system into vibration and thus lead to a learning process and a creative expansion of the scope for solving a motor task. In sport, technique and tactics are so developed without the need for explicit guidance from the coach.

In connection with further variations in the training structure (goals, tasks, environment, material, rules of the game, …), an infinite number of further combinations of variations can be developed. In this way, we also follow the requirements of differential learning and the renunciation of repetition.

Let`s do it!