I find the banter about player development on this forum to be grating, and so I'm creating a thread to hopefully confine it within this space and maybe someday Jason will create a new hidden forum that I don't have to read about it anymore.
Just so everybody knows what my position is:
- I think there are two basic components of player development: Skill/Body Development and Experience Development
- Skill/Body Development is done primarily in the offseason and the Head Coach has very little input in to this
- Experience Development happens as players use their Skill/Body development in games and then adjusts. The Head coach plays a decent sized role in this development.
- When fans talk over each other about player development they often mix up the two.
- It is my personal opinion that experience development is best achieved when players are allowed to have some success and some challenges. In order to have this mix the players need to play in the right environment meaning that they have enough opportunities to use their skill/body development to gain confidence, but enough challenges to learn from as well and to indicate what skills/body development they need to work on.
- The previous point is just based on common sense and how humans best learn. I just taught my daughter how to drive (extremely scary) and I first started in the parking lot with skills development and then I progressively gave her opportunities on the road to learn and excel. For example we started on neighborhood streets, then progressed to city streets, and then to freeways/etc.
- I suppose there is an approach to teach someone to swim by throwing them in the deep end, but why would you take the risk of someone drowning when you can teach them how to float and use strokes and then safely give them opportunities to progress towards the deep end. On the other hand if you just give them floaties they'll never learn either.
- Regarding playing vets to develop young players, I've never personally said this, but I have said young players need good players to develop properly. All I mean by saying this is that young players need to be in an environment where they can have some success in demonstrating their skills/body development and aren't overburdened by needing to do too much and not having any success. This is a general statement and doesn't apply all the time. There are definitely examples of players getting in the way of others player development because the young player is never able to try things.
- Player development is a balance, not an exact science, and something that happens over a long time, so be patient.
