How to use the Sessions app to track player development sessions.
This article will cover 5 important facets of the Sessions app:
- Why Sessions is essential for staying on the same page
- How to log a player development session
- Setting up your team to use Sessions
- Customizing Sessions to fit your needs
- How to generate buy-in from players and coaches
Why Sessions is essential for staying on the same page
One of the most common mistakes small sized organizations make is assuming that everyone is on the same page because they all meet frequently and constantly discuss their objectives with one another. Where things breakdown most frequently is when everyone walks away from a conversation, meeting, practice or film session hearing something slightly differently than everyone else.
For example:
A Luceo client team once had a situation where the head coach gave his staff three specific points of emphasis that he wanted them to work with the players on. Over the course of the first few months of the season the team saw improvement in the first point of emphasis, but not the other two - this despite constant discussion about all three.
Looking for an answer to why this was happening, one of the assistant coaches went into the Session's app to look at the amount of time the staff was spending teaching each of these three key points of emphasis. It Turns out that the staff was spending over 70% of the time teaching the first point of emphasis - likely assuming that the other members of the staff were addressing the other two.
The issue was quickly identified once the team thought to use the information in Sessions to try to identify the problem. More frequent review of the Sessions information as part of a regular staff weekly review could have solved the problem much sooner. The end result was a team loaded with talent that ended up underachieving and costing many excellent coaches their jobs.
How to log a player development session
The following video will show you how easy it is to use sessions in order to avoid situations like the one above:
Setting up your team to use the Sessions app
It's super easy to add players and staff members to your team in order to log their sessions, here's how:
Customizing Sessions to fit your needs
Our client teams use Sessions in many different ways - player development, basketball IQ, strength & conditioning, general event attendance and more. Sessions is 100% customizable to your needs:
Getting Buy-in from coaches and players
There's a silver lining to the cautionary tale told above. The assistant coach who found the issue in the staff's teaching of the three points of emphasis was the same one who stepped up and elected to use Sessions as part of his daily workflow.
Because of this, he had a detailed breakdown of all of the work and planning he put into his job, which gave him a portfolio of work that stood out from his peers when he went looking for his next job.
Now he uses the same information to incentivize his players to get their sessions data logged in order to help them build their own portfolio's that help them stand out from the crowd when they hit the job market. The lesson here is simple - Sessions allows you to "track the process" of the work being done to avoid being judged for the quality of your work based solely on your team's win/loss record.
Too often players and coaches have little ammunition to defend their body of work when they don't have bottom line results to make the case for them - for players that can be limited playing time or poor statistics on a team that doesn't fit well together. For coaches, it can be guilt by association for being on a team that doesn't have the talent to compete.
Sessions gives both coaches and players a means to build a body of work that demonstrates their work ethic and development efforts regardless of circumstance.