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| Vol.3.119 | |
You? Practice?by Vince PoscenteAuthor of The Ant and the Elephant, Invinceable Principles and The Age of Speed If you play, do you practice in advance? This question popped into my coconut recently. I was sitting on the bench between shifts. One of the guys on our hockey team blurted out that he wanted to know how to skate at full speed and do an accurate slap shot at the same time. I turned to him and said that I could teach him, if he wanted to come practice with me Wednesday morning. "Oh, I don't have time to practice. My plate's pretty full." No surprise. This is a pretty common approach in rec league sports. Players normally aren't practicing players. Is this acceptable if the team is counting on you to contribute? No friend of mediocrity I chatted with the weakest player on our team. His skating skills need work and I offered to meet him for some extra practice time. His first response was that he had no time. "But practice ice is 6 am. What time do you have to be at work?"
Of the sixteen guys on our team, four guys take the time to practice. Each of us concur - when it's game time we notice skills are better. In a hockey game you might take a shot a half dozen times in a game. On the practice ice you can take 100 shots. In a game you might make a handful of backhand passes. During practice you can make 100 backhand practices. The list goes on. Now, it's your turn. Do you show up and hope quality skills appear? For recreation, let's put non-team sports aside. Golfers have their driving ranges. Tennis players have a wall or the neighbor's yappy dog. Lovers...well, practice all you like there Sparky. In team sports or at work, practice has a whole new level of gravitas. It could be sales. It might be leadership. Parenting. Customer service calls. Practicing is left to the realm of learning as you go, training right after you get hired, continuing education credits (hardly practice but close). You can even rely on the college degree you got a couple of decades ago (lame). We're talking practice. Role playing. Scenario planning. Fire drills. Duck and cover. Practice! Hey, I know this is easy advice to bang onto a keyboard. When the alarm goes off at 4:45 am for me to drive to a cold rink an hour later to put on all sorts of stinky equipment followed by a bunch of self imposed hockey drills - I can think of all sorts of reasons why staying in bed would be much more desireable. You know the drill. It takes extra effort to be extra good.Show up practiced and prepared. The team is counting on you. Until next week, it's full speed ahead,
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© 2010 Vince Poscente. All Rights Reserved. |
He was cornered. It turned out this was the nudge he needed. Since our conversation he has been practicing once or twice per week. In the last couple of games the benefits are obvious.