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The Basketball Podcast: EP401 with Gerard Hillier on Modern Player-Centered Coaching
In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, Gerard Hillier joins The Basketball Podcast to share insights on modern player-centered coaching.
Gerard Hillier is a significant voice in sharing progressive coaching ideas around modern player development. He’s currently the coach education manager at Knox Basketball Incorporated in Melbourne, Australia.
In addition to his role at Knox, he’s also a Basketball Immersion content contributor and Director of Asia and Oceana region, and a consultant to the Fiji 3X3 national teams. Prior to Knox, Hillier has contributed significantly to Australian basketball at the regional and national levels, holding various coaching and development roles.
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Gerard Hillier Quotes:
“The engagement online has been phenomenal. Communicating and contact with coaches from all corners of the planet, just sharing ideas. It’s amazing how many people are really getting on board with a gamified approach and a constraints-led approach and their thirst for more knowledge, which has been great. I’ve got as much out of it as I’ve given to others, it’s been really rewarding and fun.”
“I was talking to the CEO of Knox Basketball and we were talking about the need for coach education. Our club’s got 12,000 plus members and . . we’ve got 16 domestic clubs underneath our banner which all have teams and then we have the representative side of things which is I guess similar to AAU type setup . . .We saw a huge need to educate the coaches. My big thing is you can only teach what you know. Upscaling and equipping our coaches with as much knowledge as possible then flows onto the players.”
“Knox took the leap. I believe they’re the first club in Australia to have a full time coach education manager. And it is, it has been a hectic 15 months delivering. I think we’ve delivered over 30 coach education clinics and about six accreditation courses in those 15 months.”
“We are working with our current coaches that we’ve got at Knox and helping them gamify and have a bit more of a progressive approach to player development and coach education in that space . . a big thing we came up with was . . our principles of play. It’s some concepts that are common throughout our entire program. So, every season they carry over to the next team and we’re not starting from scratch again.”
“We’ve already started collecting data and analytics to put together. There will be about six or seven key things we’re going to study for the length of the season to try and use as proof that the ecological dynamic approach works and is more efficient in the player development side of things.”
“We go in depth and explain every single drilling activity the first time we do it so we can capture what we’re trying to get out of that, what the intent of that activity is but then also the intent of the constraints that we use while we’re using them and we link that back to game film.”
“For me, ecological dynamics is allowing players to explore and discover their environment . . allowing them to develop their own skill set or their own abilities without explicit instructions. When we remove defense or remove decisions from things, it’s very explicit. There’s not a lot of decision making. They don’t have to be adaptable. It’s very black and white. So, ecological dynamics is a little bit messier while you’re learning but you have defense in there, you have decision making, you have perception-action, coupling with the information they’re taking on board and what they’re seeing and then, based on their abilities, they will then act accordingly.”
“So, that’s ecological dynamics: using constraints, manipulating the environment, but allowing players to explore, self-discover and self-organize within that environment.”
“Transition defense is one thing that gets hurt really badly with the stop/start nature of training. So for us, we want to go as long as we possibly can without stopping any activity. Allow them to interact with the environment and learn as much as they can but stay mentally engaged for longer periods of time. Now at the end of a two- or three-minute burst, we may stop and say you’ve got a shot clock timeout which is 24 seconds, but it’s player-led huddles.”
“Part of that process is helping the parents understand and educating the parents about what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re going to do it.”
“We’ve got player diaries that the players are filling in after training and games. Like take just some dot points. What you did well, what you might need to review and work on. What’s one key concept that we worked on during the game? And look, there might be five dot points.”
“For us, practice is very scrimmage-based. Where’s the session going? Asking the assistant coaches, ‘What are you seeing? What constraints can we use to manipulate the situation?’ The players really enjoyed it. And a benefit of that approach was their development fast-tracked far more than what was happening prior to that change.”
“Domino frequency for us is the amount of time from transition to when we can then get the defense into rotations . . The players are so used to setting up an offense, so they pull the ball out . . For us, we want to know how quickly we can get defense into dominoes, which hopefully is immediately out of transition. But we’re going to time that.”
“We’ve modernized a lot of the shell drill. So, instead of multiple passes and then eventually you get to live, the coach will throw the ball out from the baseline. On the flight of the ball, he’ll hold one hand up, open hand, open palm, which is straight into pass and cut actions or hold double fist up, which is starting the drive and kick game. So, eon the flight of the ball, we’re then straight into our shell drill. Now, anytime a player puts a ball on the floor, if the defender can stop them from getting one foot in the paint, defense gets a point.”
“A lot of the advantage-based drills we have on offense, we flip it. Just think about what you are trying to achieve on offense, reverse the rules, and now it’s defensive-focused.” For a long time, I really overthought CLA on the defensive end and I was trying to create something that didn’t need to be created. So, I just sat down, looked at a lot of the advantage-based drills and then flip the advantages so they became defensive.”
“One of the main questions I ask our coaches is, ‘What is the intent of this activity? What are you trying to achieve by doing this activity?’ Now, I’ll write down. My training session plans are quite basic, four to six dot points of what we want to achieve. But I’ll write down what the intent of each activity is and then after training, I’ll then go through and write what the actual outcomes were and did we meet the intent. I think so many of us do activities and drills that aren’t actually relevant to our team or they’re not relevant to the game, but we do them because . . we’ve seen them before, we’ve done before . . But are your activities having the desired effect? I’ve probably stripped my drill book back or activities book back by more than half of what I used to have.”
Gerard Hillier Breakdown:
Gerard Hillier Selected Links from the Podcast:
Gerard Hillier
Knox Basketball
Dyson Daniels
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