How To Structure Your Season
The season began two weeks ago. We’re already half a month through our 5 month season. This is a time we’ve been thinking about a lot.
My assistant, Coach Nick Drendel and I, have put a lot of time and thought into the practices we’ve run. We think about them on multiple levels and I want to talk you through how we formulate our plans.
But before we jump into the intricacies of teaching double legs, we must consider the overall plans of the season.
This all starts with the competition schedule.
Your competition schedule dictates how many training days you really have. In many ways it chooses your live days, your recovery days, your prematch days, and your technique days. It allows or limits the possibilities of your teachings.
Now our goal for the first semester was to cover the gamut of basic techniques. We realized early that to do this, we need to allow for long blocks of time to focus on the intricacies of techniques.
In order to have these long blocks, we must avoid competing every single week. If we compete every single week, we force our hand on our weekly practice structure.
Here is what I mean. When competing every week, there are only 6 days between each competition. In these days you can only do so much. Sunday is an off day, Monday is generally a slower recovery day. Friday needs to be a prematch day. Then there is the normal live day that needs to be either, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.
This leaves only two days a week to work wholeheartedly on technique. Now, I don’t feel like 2/6 days (33%) a week is much time to get significant technical work in.
Here’s the other thing, when we compete weekly, It tends to make you be reactionary with technique. If we struggled in one position, I feel like we need to work it which limits us even more.
We want to be proactive about our technique. We want to pick a strategy and stick with it. And we want to avoid having such a small portion of our week being dedicated to improving our wrestling technique.
This is where the biweekly tournament schedule comes in. With the strategy of competing every other week, we potentially have 5 days the first week and 4 days the second week minus a live day or two to focus on technique. That is ~8 days of 11 of technique which is a much improved 72% of practice days dedicated to technique.
This is one massive structural strategy of our practice plan. We want to dedicate, larger amounts of time to focus on technique. We do so by limiting our competitions a bit.
Strategy part two: Dedicate multiple days to one technique/position
WThe idea here is to tell a story. The art of teaching is about storytelling- we take this seriously. Our baseline technique stories are generally 2-3 days long.
Examples of 2-3 day stories are the perfect single-leg finish, changing directions in the front headlock, creating motion from the bottom position, etc.
But we don’t stop there. Our stories are multi-tiered. Yes, we have our 2-3 day story blocks. We also go more micro: each day tells a story, and even each small technique within the day has a story.
Examples...
Story Block: Perfect single leg
Day 1: Drilling the perfect single leg (Sweep single -> Treetop -> Back trip)
Technique: Back trip is like a Mario hop (you’d get it if you were there)
Then we have a more macro level of teaching technique. We go from the story block, to the week, to the month, to the phase, to the year.
Examples...
Story Block: The perfect single leg
Week: How to drill basic head inside and head outside attacks correctly
Month: Everything you need to know before competing
Phase: Basic technique wins matches and it takes reps to make those techniques second nature.
Year: Give you the skills to paint your own wrestling masterpiece
Part three of our strategy: Phase Planning
Every Phase you must understand what your goals are. This year, we are defining this first phase as the first semester up until Christmas. Our plan is to teach basic technique and limit the amount of ambiguity we allow.
We will teach simple stuff in a “step one, step two, step three” manner. This is not the time to give a thousand options on techniques- we want to limit the choices… for now.
We are a young team and need to focus on the simplest stuff. We will teach these simple techniques then feed reps into our warmup. I am in the Kolat camp in that wrestling warmups are unnecessarily long.
We need to focus our energy on wrestling, and drilling can be a great warmup. So our warmup is generally going to review drilling. If we had been working on high crotches and head outside D the last week, in our warmup, they’re going to be getting reps there to continue to refine that technique as we move on to the next stuff.
We will do this first semester, then the second semester, we will talk more about wrestling “theory.” Now that we know they have the basics down, we will open up the book and give them more ideas and options to play with..
We want our guys to be able to pick and choose what they like and feel comfortable with. To do that though, you must have an understanding of the basics. We said on the first day when we explained this plan, “You must know the rules in order to be able to break them.”
About communication...
Make sure we communicate these stories to these guys so they feel like they are a part of the process. When they see the bigger idea, the entire system makes more sense.
Letting athletes know “Why” is overlooked by many coaches. Athletes hate being treated as if they are stupid. When plans are explained, they get it and work harder.
With all this said, there is lots of room for adjustments. Dan Gable regularly talks about the willingness to flex and change whenever you see fit. We don’t want to be too rigid.
We change whenever we see fit, but we make sure that we have goals and a general thesis that we are working on to achieve all goals in a given year. We must use our structure to our advantage and never let that structure use us.