MIND & MOVEMENT PLAYER ANALYSIS

Name: John

Team Sport: Basketball

Player Position: Wing

Player Achievements: All-Conference/ Honorable mention All-State

Player Profile

Characteristics: It’s important to develop an understanding for the personality traits of your athlete. This will help you organize the direction and teaching style to use when training them.

John is a 19-year-old weighing 195 pounds he’s a sophomore basketball player for division II College.  He carries 3.2 GPA and is studying in the field of business. John is very motivated to perform to the best of his ability.  He has high expectations and often worries whether or not he’s meeting them.  John has good social skills and communicates well on and off the court.  He tends to be open and honest about his thoughts and feelings regarding issues.  John is sensitive to criticism and constructive feedback (at times he becomes defensive).

Player Analysis: The following is a summary of the results gathered from the player analysis performed after interviewing John’s game on 4 occasions.

Strength & Conditioning: First, you determine the athletes overall strength and their ability to utilize that strength within their game.

John was very dedicated in the weight room; he could bench 275 pounds, squatted 400 pounds, had excellent shoulder strength and good hands.  John’s weight room training gave him great confidence. He was more aggressive on both the offensive and defensive side of the game.

Movement Analysis: John took short choppy steps when moving; his first step was slow and covered little distance.  He bent at the waist and this would place him off-balance, and affected his ability to see the floor and make good decisions with the ball.  It also caused problems with his jump shot. His timing was off and he would push the ball.

Mental Skills:  These skills focus on what a player does off the court to improve their ability to: visualize the game, mentally prepare, motivate themselves, and manage their emotions and negative thoughts.  Next, how well do they think and move while performing the sport.  Examples; the ability to read, create plans, execute those plans, and evaluate their own performance.  You need to consider these factors when evaluating a player’s performance. As a player, you want to understand how they can help improve your level of play.

Basketball Skills:  These refer to the fundamental skills that a player possesses.  For example; the ability to shoot, pass, dribble, rebound, defend, and score from the perimeter or the post area. You’ll need to evaluate these skills.  It’s important to evaluate the players overall performance from both the defensive and offensive perspective.

Offensive Analysis: John has good fundamental skills and solid perspective on how to play the game.  His weakness was learning to flow and move without the ball.  At times he rushes his shot and becomes overly anxious to score.Ê At times, he would report being unable to visualize. The game thoughts seemed to be racing through his mind.  Usually fear or worrying pushes your thoughts into the future and prevents us from focusing on what’s happening in the present.  This leads to making poor decisions on the court.

Defensive Analysis:  John anticipated well, which allowed him to steal the ball and take charges.  His biggest challenge was defending smaller, quicker players. He needed to improve his quickness, especially his first step.  For his size, John is a great rebounder.  Finally, he wanted to work on his transitional game. He needed to get into the offense quicker and do a better job of creating good looks on the fast break.  A great opportunity, because of John’s ability to rebound from the wing position and lead the fast break.

Training Program:  Given the same information, a training program (generated from the Mind & Movement System)was put into place to make John’s weaknesses his strengths in the up-coming season.  the first phase was to teach John how to move.  Once he mastered the mechanics and footwork, the SmartVest with 6 pounds was added to his workouts to start building explosive power and better body control.Ê The plyometric and speed programs produced great results.  John added 6 inches to his vertical jump and erased 4 tenths of a second from his 40 yard dash time.  The combination of speed and quickness improved his ability to defend smaller players.  The second step was focusing on the his mental skills. We worked hard on teaching John how to slow his mind down.  This allowed him to more easily process what was happening on the basketball court.  The ability to more effectively read competitive situations helped John to make better decisions. He tapped into the creative moves he had learned through the basketball-training program.  The following is the workout schedule created for John.

Plyometrics:    2 x Week

Speed and Agility:  3 x Week

Individual Basketball Skill Workouts:  3 x Week

Strength and Conditioning:  3 x Week

*We started out with 6 pounds and every 3 weeks added 2 more pounds to the SmartVest.  We used the 6 Kg medicine balls and the agility ladder three times a week.

Performance Feedback:  After a summer of training with the Mind & Movement Training System, John achieved all performance goals we had established. He gained great confidence with reading, creating, and executing his moves.  As a college freshmen, John earned a starting position and consistently led the team in all major statistical categories.