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- Learn To See
“Everyone who plays this game knows how to look. But very few know how to see.”
In 1984, adidas produced an eighteen-minute video called Prepare To Win. In essence, it’s an early version of a TED talk, with detailed craft knowledge passed down by Indiana’s iconic basketball coach, Bob Knight.
Knight offers a range of sage advice, including:
learn your strengths and your weaknesses (so you can stay away from your weaknesses)
understand what goes into losing just as much as what goes into winning
you’ve got to be adaptable and able to play the game in a variety of ways
But right in the middle of the piece — at 10 minutes — Knight drops his A-material.
“Everybody looks at the game, but very few people see,” Knight says strongly, adding, “Very few players train themselves to use their eyes.”
While this video is from forty years ago, he’s still correct. To this day, most players don’t train themselves to use their eyes.
Worse, of course, is that coaches still don’t know how to help players train their eyes.
Knight urges players to develop an ability to see what’s going on on the court, pointing to some specific game elements that are crucial: “See the open man, see where to take the ball, see the guy that’s being defended, see who’s open on the break,” he says.
How To See
Excellent work by Doug Lemov, Geir Jordet, Markus Raab and Joseph Johnson, in particular, have helped popularize important coaching techniques like scanning, teaching to see, noticing, expertise-based searching, affordances, perception-action coupling, and more.
Owing to this work, we now have a more sophisticated understanding and more advanced words for the difference between looking and seeing that Knight was pointing to.
Take these quotes from Lemov’s outstanding book, The Coach’s Guide to Teaching:
“Your knowledge and experience tell you where to look on the playing field… [and] what experience has not taught you to look for, you may never see.”
“If we want better decisions, the place to start is with the eyes, to guide them to see — and make a habit of looking at — the most salient details of a situation.”
“Athletes must have extensive exposure to the geometry of the game…[and] our teaching should often focus on guiding players to find the signal amidst the noise.”
These three quotes appear within the same page, and point to some immediate cues that many coaches are missing in teaching their players to see:
It would be helpful to understand how (and what) a player see on the field
It would be helpful to build them a hierarchy of salient details in each situation
It would be helpful to explicitly and clearly describe the signal in each situation
These three points alone have severe ramifications for the mainstream ways of delivering player feedback, video analysis, game preparation, training design, mental skills, language development, and skill acquisition.
It’s also worth pointing out, seeing is the focus of the first chapter of Lemov’s book. He’s clearly describing the signal for this situation: that these are nice-to-haves, they’re mandatory and foundational pieces to learning.
As coaches, we urgently need to push ourselves into this mastery space. We don’t need any more information, we need to apply it. We’ve got to be able to teach our players to see, which means understanding what details are important (and why, and in which order). Further, we’ve got to design training exercises that accentuate these new skills, opportunities and decisions.
Craftsmanship is defined by high skill. This is the definition of high skill.
So here’s my challenge to you…
The next time you’re working with a player, your position group, or your team, push yourself to explore three things with them:
Pass on your experience about what to look for (and what is merely noise)
Build a hierarchy with them of most important details in a situation (it’s not all equally important so you must clearly pick 1, 2, 3, etc).
Attach decision-making analysis to seeing just as much as the outcome of the decision.
Bob Knight pointed this out to us 40 years ago. It’s time to stop looking and start seeing.