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Greetings!
Looking at the team's past few performances and looking forward to the upcoming MVC tournament, I became curious about how to frame performance and expectations within basketball training cycles.
For those unfamiliar with elite sport training programs, do a quick search on Sports Periodization, Macro- Meso- Micro-cycles, and various phase training programs. These are the sort of tools that coaches and some athletes know a lot about and use them to guide anticipated peak performance curves towards important fixtures in the competitive schedule.
Unfortunately, being uninformed of these strategies, the average fan often assumes that their favorite team should be at 100% for 100% of the competitions. When the team suddenly, unexpectedly falters, the poor performances are attributed to 'lack of focus', 'lack of intensity', 'no heart', etc. While these candidate explanations may be true in some cases, the blame may not necessarily lie in some collection of individual ineptitude, lack of moral fiber, or locker-room cancer.
Obviously, coaches and trainers aren't intentionally sending a team on the floor that is unprepared to compete, but angling for peak performance at different points in the season could provide insight into why teams like WSU and UNI are suddenly being challenged by the Evansvilles of the world. Teams with different goals have different training cycles that direct anticipated peak performances differently. Obviously, this isn't the only factor, but it's one that isn't discussed frequently enough in my mind.
Additionally, for fairly obvious reasons, it might not be in a coach's or program's best interest to announce to paying attendees that they were willing to risk losing Game X in order to perform better in Game Y.
Now, with all of that said, I have neither played or coached basketball. My sporting expertise lies elsewhere. I was wondering if someone here with basketball experience could shed some light into how coaches practically manage the macrocycle and particularly final mesocycle and the anticipated performance impacts.
Applying general knowledge, I would anticipate a short (4-5) day rest for this team might put them back in better form (and possibly best form of the season). Of course, I'm not that familiar with issues related to intra-team dynamics and conditions for optimizing coordinated effort. Considering HCGM's success in post-season tournaments, I'm comfortable assuming that he knows a great deal about this subject. There's a heck of a lot more to coaching in 2010 than yelling in the locker-room and calling time-outs. ;-)
Thoughts? Comments? Personal Experiences?
Looking at the team's past few performances and looking forward to the upcoming MVC tournament, I became curious about how to frame performance and expectations within basketball training cycles.
For those unfamiliar with elite sport training programs, do a quick search on Sports Periodization, Macro- Meso- Micro-cycles, and various phase training programs. These are the sort of tools that coaches and some athletes know a lot about and use them to guide anticipated peak performance curves towards important fixtures in the competitive schedule.
Unfortunately, being uninformed of these strategies, the average fan often assumes that their favorite team should be at 100% for 100% of the competitions. When the team suddenly, unexpectedly falters, the poor performances are attributed to 'lack of focus', 'lack of intensity', 'no heart', etc. While these candidate explanations may be true in some cases, the blame may not necessarily lie in some collection of individual ineptitude, lack of moral fiber, or locker-room cancer.
Obviously, coaches and trainers aren't intentionally sending a team on the floor that is unprepared to compete, but angling for peak performance at different points in the season could provide insight into why teams like WSU and UNI are suddenly being challenged by the Evansvilles of the world. Teams with different goals have different training cycles that direct anticipated peak performances differently. Obviously, this isn't the only factor, but it's one that isn't discussed frequently enough in my mind.
Additionally, for fairly obvious reasons, it might not be in a coach's or program's best interest to announce to paying attendees that they were willing to risk losing Game X in order to perform better in Game Y.
Now, with all of that said, I have neither played or coached basketball. My sporting expertise lies elsewhere. I was wondering if someone here with basketball experience could shed some light into how coaches practically manage the macrocycle and particularly final mesocycle and the anticipated performance impacts.
Applying general knowledge, I would anticipate a short (4-5) day rest for this team might put them back in better form (and possibly best form of the season). Of course, I'm not that familiar with issues related to intra-team dynamics and conditions for optimizing coordinated effort. Considering HCGM's success in post-season tournaments, I'm comfortable assuming that he knows a great deal about this subject. There's a heck of a lot more to coaching in 2010 than yelling in the locker-room and calling time-outs. ;-)
Thoughts? Comments? Personal Experiences?
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