What the CLA Is and Isn't (Part 2)
Alex Sarama and Gray Thomas, deliver an online clinic for the Bavarian Basketball Federation in Germany.
30 min
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Alex Sarama and Gray Thomas, deliver an online clinic for the Bavarian Basketball Federation in Germany.
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In this episode, Alex Sarama and Gray Thomas, deliver an online clinic for the Bavarian Basketball Federation in Germany. They discuss the constraints-led approach (CLA) and clarify common misconceptions about its application in basketball coaching. The CLA is not just a coaching method but a framework for understanding performance in basketball. It considers the individual, task, and environmental constraints that shape skill acquisition and performance. Throughout the episode, they provides practical examples and insights for coaches looking to implement the CLA effectively.
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Esta transcrição corresponde ao áudio original em inglês.
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Hey coach, if you haven't yet listened to What the CLA Is and Isn't Part 1, we do recommend giving that a listen before listening to today's episode, which is Part 2 from that discussion. This is the audio recording of an online clinic Gray Thomas and myself delivered for the Bavarian Basketball Federation.
So what it is, and I think this is something we can't get away from, the fact that the CLA is inherently far more enjoyable for players. And I think this is something I say a lot. For the vast majority of us as coaches, we probably don't have players who are guaranteed to be professionals or make it to the highest levels of our sport.
And I think this is the reality of most coaching in basketball at the grassroots level. And one thing that we cannot argue with, with the CLA is that it's simply more fun for players because they're not coming to practice doing the same thing every single time.
And I often remember actually how I started my book. In the first chapter, I gave the story of my experience playing in my younger days. And as a 14-year-old, I believe I could have probably run the practices for my club team. And the reason why is because the practices were always the same.
And this is, you know, the biggest advantage of the CLA is that players never know what they're going to do in a practice, because if we're doing it well, we're going to slightly change every time the practice. It's always going to be novel and players can express themselves in different ways.
So I think this is one of the biggest reasons we would encourage coaches to explore just giving this approach a try. And Trying one practice where you don't do a single drill and you have small-sided games and everything, and just ask your players at the end what they thought of the practice.
And that's you know the biggest piece of advice we give to most coaches. And I think a reason a lot of coaches decide to adopt the CLA—it's for this reason. And this is often a key piece of ammunition I use in trying to get coaches on board with this in consulting projects I do.
I often talk about this. So if you're trying to implement the CLA more in your club. I would really share this point with your other coaches because this is something we just can't dispute. It's inherently more enjoyable. Okay. Another one. The CLA is not vague and generic.
And something we've seen recently is some trainers in certain circles saying that it's just not a specific approach, that we need drills, that we need movements too. And we don't believe we need any of that. And I'm gonna pass over to Gray and just explain why the CLA, it's not vague, but it's specific.
And maybe Gray, you could touch on Why, in just layman's terms, why we don't need to teach a player a movement or a drill before something emerges in a CLA environment?
Yeah. So we'll see this in all walks of life and in terms of behavior across organisms to not just humans. We'll see it in traffic systems. We'll see it in schools of fish, flock of starlings, the way they fly and can turn on a dime as a group without any type of communication, right?
This complex behavior is going to emerge from the system. Given that they already have the resources available to them to accomplish whatever that task at hand may be. All directions or instructions are going to do is guide that system in a particular direction for that behavior to be elicited in some kind of way.
And in the sense of being vague or general, the great thing about this approach is it mixes the objective with the subjective. So in the sense of you have your principles of play. There are objective things you want to accomplish in a basketball game in the sense of you want to score more than your opponent.
You want them to stop, but it is subjective because it is specific to your personnel and your players. And it generates this collaborative co-design process that really elicits a lot more complex behavior, allows a lot more freedom of solution, and can produce a lot wider variety of behaviors in the game, outside of the game, in terms of culture building.
And without having to give a step-by-step process for someone to adhere to, because all that is, is the same thing as giving someone an address. They put it into GPS and they don't even look where they're going when they get to their destination.
Right.
And to build on that, I think a lot of coaches ask us at Transforming Basketball for videos of our CLA activities. And yes, we're releasing that to help, but the best way to use CLA activities is to design your own. And this is what we want to leave you thinking about today.
The CLA activities you do, you should be inventing due to a specific reason. It's not just about taking some drill or some small-sided game and doing it with your players. And the inspiration for designing your own CLA activities should come from knowing your players and your principles of play.
So the first thing you have to have is your principles. How do you actually want your team to play on offense and defense? So that could be as simple as you want to switch pick and rolls aggressively. Well, now with that specific principle of play determined, you could now create a small-sided game activity.
Maybe it's a 2-on-2 pick and roll where the defense must switch and there's some type of consequence if they don't switch properly. So that could be if the defense don't get 2 feet outside the 3-point line when they switch, The offense get 2 points in possession.
That would be the constraint. So the idea is it's completely custom based on your vision of basketball. So if you're really serious about coaching effectively, you have to have a sheet of paper with all your principles of play identified offensively and defensively. Because once you have that, or you have that for your whole club, now you can start to actually design your CLA activities well.
So principles of play is a huge one. And if you want to take it a step further, you should then start designing or tweaking your activities based on your players. And we call that a rate limiter. So what this involves doing is having another sheet of paper, and you could do this maybe after this clinic if you're interested, and just maybe take 3 players on your team and write down as specifically as possible what their rate limiters are.
What are the things that are preventing them from being more skillful? And it's gotta be something specific. It can't just be they've gotta become a better shooter or a better finisher. It could be they don't finish well when they're in traffic at speed.
Okay? So it's a highly specific scenario and you identify the most important rate limiters for each player. Now, once you have those paired with your principles of play, that gives you the framework to design your own activities. Okay? So. Absolutely. If you want inspiration, go to our website, transformingbasketball.com, go to the resources, watch the videos.
Great. But that's not what we want to leave you with. We don't just want to give you the tools. We want to show you how you can make your own tools because that's how you become an effective CLA coach. Okay. It's, it's all in response to what is happening and where you're at.
There's no such thing as copy paste and just doing the same drill with each team. Okay. And at the same time, this is not a method which is going to lead to overnight success. It's taken me 5 years of exploring the CLA to get to where I am now.
And I think that's the beautiful part of this. As a coach, it forces you to continuously grow and develop. And there's no better thing for creative coaches. And, you know, yes, I believe that if you start doing CLA practices, I do think you'll see results very early on.
But it's not a magic bullet. Okay. I think it requires an investment from you and a commitment from you to continue learning and exploring this. And I think that's the best thing about the CLA. It's just a continuous development journey.
Absolutely. And the alternative, the more traditional approach doesn't necessarily say that a particular method will lead to overnight success, but a popular framework is 10,000 hours will get you to a particular level. But what they don't talk about on that side of things is how are those 10,000 hours being spent?
Is it 9,000 hours of conditioning, 1,000 hours of free throw shooting or different things like that? It's kind of agnostic to the personnel, the situation, and what is actually trying to be developed. Whereas this is also saying, yes, it's going to take some time to develop into the player, into the coach, into the team that you want to be.
But by being specific and adhering to these principles and constantly viewing development through this framework, different solutions will emerge and you will see a lot of growth across the board and not through rote repetition or some specific formula of if you do enough inputs, you'll get the right output.
And finally, I think this is a way to drastically improve your coaching. And this is something I've been seeing a lot recently. I have a theory that a lot of times coaches struggle with game coaching Because they struggle to observe what is happening in real time and have specific solutions for solving them.
And the reason why is because they don't get many opportunities in practice to actually work on that. And what I'm starting to see now is that CLA coaches who do this well in practice are becoming far better in the game. And I think the rationale is easy.
It's because we have to diagnose what is happening, what is occurring. And have very specific solutions to solve these problems. And naturally, the more you are coaching with live environments, the more you're changing constraints, the easier it becomes to identify certain concepts, certain tendencies which are emerging in the game and have a solution for solving them.
So I think if you want to become a better game coach and be able to give more specific feedback to your team, run more effective timeouts. The CLA is a great way to achieve that. So we're good. We've left quite a good amount of time for questions.
If you're just getting introduced to CLA for the first time, there will probably be a lot of things from today that you need to rewatch. We would recommend going to episode 5 of the Transforming Basketball podcast, Making Sense of the CLA in Basketball.
That is really a beginner's introduction into what the CLA is with far more specific examples. You can also see the videos on our website, which is on your screen. But I think, you know, I'm personally quite excited about the work being done in Germany, especially by the Bavarian Federation.
And I wanted today to go in with something a little bit more advanced for the coaches who are already familiar with this approach. So of course, you know, if this is new to you, no problem, but we've got a bunch of resources at Transforming to help you out.
And obviously the Bavarian Federation too. Have released a lot of resources to help coaches understand this approach.
Absolutely. And if anybody ever wants to get more resources on the deep theoretical history or the underpinnings of this, feel free to reach out to us. And I've got a library of the origins of these theories. Like I said, it's not just for sports science.
It's not just for basketball. It's fundamental to coordinated movement across organisms. So I'm happy to discuss at any particular high-level conversation that anybody wants to have.
Perfect. So with that in mind, we are going to stop the share and we will open this up for questions. It can be as specific, as practical as you like, coaches. And you can use the chat box too, whatever you prefer. Felix.
Someone wants to ask something in German, I can translate it. No problem.
Felix, I know you've got one.
I'm good. I understood everything.
Then we did our job.
Felix, how about just sharing your perspective as a practitioner from the week we spent in London together?
Concerning the CLA or concerning—
Yeah, like biggest observations, like things we spoke about consistently that week. I think that would be an interesting point to unpack.
Hello everyone. I visited Alex when I was in London at the London Lions because I like the work he's doing there and wanted to observe for myself, like a whole practice. And my biggest observation was, I think that the players enjoyed and they really enjoyed the practice.
But at the same time, it was not just roll, roll the ball, ball out and play. This is like the biggest misconception. I think when a lot of guys talk about the CLA, they think it's more just playing the game, you know? And maybe it would be interesting also for you to talk about the PDPs you did, you know?
Sure.
Especially observing, you know, what is not functional in the game for certain players and how Can you then put them in situations when you talked about the rate limiters? You know, maybe this is an important aspect which could be cool for some of the guys to know.
Yeah.
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So this is just an example of the PDP. So let's take this one here. The idea is that we have— that's a great point, Felix. Thanks for raising that. I spoke on slide 7 about creating CLA activities based on rate limiters. So The idea is it starts by actually identifying what these highly specific rate limiters are.
And you can see that in the column on the left. That's me identifying a player's rate limiters. And I could do this through observation, through looking at statistics, through conversations with staff members. So the idea is we prioritize the rate limiters in the, in the order of the worst one or the one that will have the biggest impact on the player's role on the team.
Once we've identified the rate limiters, then we can create the activities to solve those problems and address it. Okay, so that's kind of the key thing we're getting at here. It's a highly specific approach. It's not vague, it's not generic. We can create these specific solutions based on the rate limiters that are unique and different to every player.
So that's our PDP format at Transforming Basketball. And it's probably the biggest thing for any organization that we work with, like youth clubs, whatever. The best thing you can do as a coach is create PDPs for your players because it completely changes your lens as to how you design practice.
And it's an amazing way to accelerate the development process.
It's also going to give you a tool to sort of systematize how you monitor the development of what you're trying to address, right? Throughout a season, you might have an idea. Of we need to focus on this in practice for this particular player or this thing.
But if you have a PDP and that kind of system in place, you can actually track, okay, what did we identify as the rate limiter that we need to address? Here were the activities that we did 3 weeks ago. Did we see any progress there?
And now what rate limiters are we identifying as opposed to kind of leaving it up to you to remember in your own capacity?
I've seen a great question here from David. Do you change your pregame? Often, yes. And I think it's important to have a combination of go-to small-sided games that the players know. But what I love to do is change the pregame based on the rate limiters we've identified for the team that week or the opponent.
So even, you know, under 16s or under 18s, I would still do something like 2-on-2 live. Maybe it's pick and roll against switching or against the hedge, like whatever you anticipate your opponent will do. You could sprinkle that into the pregame warmup, or maybe there's something from the last game.
There is a rate limit, so maybe closeout decisions that your players weren't good making decisions out of closeouts. So even pregame, we try and design the activity based on rate limiters, and it could be you do it in practice, you give it a name, and then pregame you say, all right guys, these are the three small-sided games we're going to do.
We've done them at practice already. So, you know what we're going to get into. Great question there. This one was from Thomas. Do you think it's easy to think outside of the box to break up your view?
Yes and no. No, in the sense of, I don't think you really understand the deep hold your beliefs might have on the way that you see the world, the way that you coach until you begin to question those. But I think being open to questioning those is the process of making it easier on yourself as you go along.
So I can give a practical example of myself as a researcher. I got my master's in experimental psychology. It was very information processing based. And I came to the ecological psychology program here at UConn. And I slowly start— when certain concepts would stick, I'd noticed that it started to change the way I kind of viewed things, how I might study, how I might move, how my particular environment might be contributing to my level of productivity, my mood, or these different things.
So I think by being open to it initially is going to be what makes it easier for you. And then it's a process of asking questions from there, finding one thing you think you can change and seeing how those results play out. So that's the long way of saying yes, it can be easy in the sense of if you're open to it, but no, I don't think changing your belief or your perspective or your worldview is an easy process in a vacuum.
I think it's just small things, coaches, that you could start to do. So for instance, and the easiest thing we say is just add a defender into everything you do. Find a way to just add one defender. Maybe you do a drill every time, just tweak it, add one defender somewhere, and that's going to change the activity completely.
And then you can start to scale constraints, tweak them more and more, the more comfortable you get seeing what happens. And for those of you interested, the best place I'd start is this. This is our resources page on the transformingbasketball.com website. And we have loads of free stuff here.
So we've got an FAQ section, sharing more. We've got a blog page, which takes you to a weekly blog where we've done a lot of it, where we're really going nitty gritty into these ideas. We've got the podcast, we've got all the constraint ideas, which I mentioned earlier on in this episode for you to play around with.
And this is the big one, our free activities. So if you click this one, It's going to take you to a page where we've got a bunch of our small-sided games, which will allow you to start really seeing more about what this is practically.
And what we hope is that you can then identify your own constraints based on what you are seeing within these. Within the resources page, we also have some of the theory and the papers showing where this actually comes from. And we've got even more resources at the bottom there.
So. The idea is we wanted to have a ton of free material so that coaches can really feel like they understand this. And then of course we have some products. If you want to take your learning to a whole new level, we've got different videos and products which you can actually utilize.
So, you know, feel free to always shoot us a question. You can message us on social media. Our email is info@transformingbball.com and we will take questions anytime. I see one last question here from Alex. How do you make the session goal and We call it intentions.
So I think trying to have 2 or 3 intentions per practice based on your rate limiters. And I think if you go into practice without an intention, it's difficult to deliver an effective practice. So have 2 or 3, and that could be maybe one is improving your team shot selection.
Maybe the second intention is being able to convert advantages more consistently. And maybe the third one is your pick and roll defense. So the idea is if you have these intentions, they come from your rate limiters, things you're observing in games, weaknesses, all of this.
You then create your intentions and from your intentions, your practice activities. The big problem is a lot of coaches go into practice without an intention. So then they just reuse the same drills over and over again. And if you have intentions that will really shape the activities you use and critically why you use them.
Right. So I think that's it. We haven't seen any more questions coming in. A real pleasure as always. Big thanks for having us on. Much appreciated, Robert.
One question.
Oh, go for it.
The CLA, you can use it also for completed players. I mean, for players like Man Team. Do you have experience with Man Team?
Absolutely. So right now I'm working with the Portland Trail Blazers. Last year I was with Paris Basketball in EuroCup. And, you know, I can say the CLA works just as well for professionals as with beginners. It's exactly the same.
Yeah.
From whenever they start playing, 6 years old, whatever. The key thing is to think about how you use the constraints. So instead of having a completely live defender, maybe it's a defender who can't move. Maybe they have to have one hand behind their back.
Maybe they can't jump. So maybe there's a big advantage. Maybe it's 2 against 1. So we've also, we did a podcast on this, just how to use the CLA with beginners and what it looks like. So we provided a bunch of specific examples and I'm just finding it now.
It was episode 26 and 27 of the podcast. So we did 2 episodes there where we really went into detail as to what using the CLA looks like with players brand new to basketball.
I already shared your workshops with all the coaches I had, so.
Love it. Thank you very much.
For me, for me is to find a way to teach the players how to read the game. Definitely. And to make better decision. And with all drills, it's not working. So, I mean, it's hard to teach young guns how to make better decisions and how to make better, uh, spacing.
All through the game. That's why I really like Alan. I really like your—
Much appreciated.
Absolutely. And I think that's a great point. You want your players to make quick decisions, right? A lot of decision-making research philosophies are really internally focused. Does the player have the right work ethic? Do they have the right level of focus, grit? You hear the resiliency, you hear these words thrown around and they're really internally based, whereas this, framework actually gives you the tools to ask the question of what is it about the environment, the individual, and the task at hand?
What interaction here is actually producing what's going on? What is it leading to that decision being made instead of assuming that either the player doesn't have the right stuff or they don't get it? So it actually views development as one, it's continuous, development never ends.
And 2, anyone can develop from Steph Curry to the worst player in the world. Anyone has a chance to grow. And it's really human-forward in that aspect too. So yes, it's a lot of work on the coach's part to identify those things and tweak the right things.
But not only are you going to develop better players, you're going to develop better people and you're going to develop better relationships. Right.
Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you. And just a shameless piece of self-promotion. My book is out, so that will be on Amazon. And if you're really looking to take a very deep dive into this and have like loads of practical examples. That will be the book for you.
As someone who researches this professionally, it will be the only resource in this domain pertaining to basketball.
So I highly recommend it. I didn't pay him to say that.
Not yet.
Okay. First of all, thanks for the presentation. I would also like to ask how it is with the beginners. Do you constantly approach? I mean, my players are not beginners, but they're under 4.0. So when do I understand that The constraints are overwhelming them and how should I change them accordingly?
Yeah, great question. So I would say, I think a really good way to look at it is the optimal challenge. So we want some level of difficulty, but we also don't want it too easy. So it should be pleasantly frustrating. So I'll give you an example, like maybe they're doing a one-on-one and every time they just, they're not scoring consistently or not even getting close to scoring.
Right? And you could see that quite consistently across the board. That's when I would make an on-the-fly observation in practice and immediately change it. And what I'd do is simply make it simpler. So I could increase the advantage. So maybe the one-on-one, instead of a defender starting in front, they start on the side or maybe even behind them.
And we change that advantage. Maybe we say the defense have to play defense in a particular way. No jump or one jump, one hand. Maybe it's one area. Something I love is in one-on-one, defense can only play inside the smile and the offense drives from the 3-point line.
So I think that's the fun part, trying to see, is it, is the optimal challenge just right? And if it's not, find a way to make it easier. And then maybe you see after a few minutes that the players have lots of success.
And then you make it harder again. And I think this is the fun part of continually changing across this spectrum based on how the players respond to the constraints. It's like a continuum where you'll be moving up and down it during the whole practice.
Great question. This is a good one from Konstantin. What are your favorite constraints for shooting? So yes, that's it, brads. So brads is our big thing. We don't care how they shoot. We care more on the outcome in terms of Brads, arc, that's the most important.
And getting them exploring different ways to shoot early on. And I think this is where some of the stuff with differential learning is really interesting. Obviously all of that research comes from Germany. So we would really focus on getting players shooting adaptively, shooting with different positions, different stances, different balls.
So basically adding lots of variability into shooting straight away. And it could be as simple as when you do shooting in practice. Always have your players change location and have the passer pass from different places so that every single repetition there's some variability.
And that's, that's like differential learning in its most basic form. And then you could get more variability from there. But we find that using brads and implementing this external focus of attention is really the way to go with shooting.
And brads have a scientific basis in the sense that it's a larger surface area for the ball to fall into. So You don't even have to relay that kind of high-level information to your players. You just give them the target and let them find the solution that it's going to happen because there's going to be brads that have a lot of arc.
There's going to be brads that have seemingly no arc, depending on the shot, depending on the player, depending on the time delivery and all these things. But if you can get them geared towards looking for those affordances in the game, that's what's going to produce the results you want instead of handing them the solution guide and telling them exactly how to do it.
And just a really simple practical add on that. When you shoot, you could just have a one-on-one where the defender always comes from a different angle. They pass the ball and the offense can't dribble. They gotta catch and shoot. And all that's gonna do is having that time pressure, just adding one defender completely changes the shot, changes the— and there's evidence showing us it changes the release angle, changes the movement itself, cuz they have to shoot quicker.
They can't. Suddenly adjust and shoot slowly like they do when they're shooting 1-on-0. So even for beginners, I love stuff like that. Big advantage. They got to shoot before the defender gets there. Really simple way to go about it. And then if that can be supplemented with differential learning, we think that's a really effective approach.
Last chance for any questions.
Also feel free to ask something in German. I can translate it for you. No problem. And so don't hesitate. It seems like no one is writing anymore and even the chance to use the microphone wasn't used. So thanks both of you. It was fantastic having a 3-for-1.
Our pleasure.
I didn't expect that.
Thank you so much to everyone for joining. We really appreciate the support and it's, for us, it's just amazing to see basketball across the world changing. And I think all of you on this are a part of that. So let's keep making progress and transforming basketball.
So thanks everyone.
Thanks everyone for the opportunity.
Take care.
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