Applied Sports Science is a pure exercise in improvement. If the players get better and the coaching gets better and the organization gets then the team gets better, and that last step is on display for everyone and anyone to see.
The thing I’m trying to understand about Applied Sports Science is how all of the different facets (training, sports medicine, sensor technology, data analysis, coaching, nutrition, performance psychology, front office management) come together in the best possible circumstances. My question: If practice is a crucial setting for teams to improve, how are teams innovating in what they do pre-practice, in-practice and post-practice?
Teams that can improve at improving realize higher-order gains that can, potentially, accelerate their progress toward whatever their full potential is.
Basketball, college and professional, get in the majority of their practice during an intense pre-season, going on now. Once the season starts the league schedules impose themselves, and the result is, in many cases, a highly variable, mostly non-repetitive pattern of games, travel and, rarely, practices. Soccer and football give teams something more structured that helps teams and players create in-season habits that are more structured. More structure means more room for proactive habits to take hold, as opposed to simply reactive behaviors that come from constant change in personal and professional environment.
A dichotomy exists for teams: Emphasize structure and try to scaffold a stable, predictable life for players and coaches, or embrace chaos and to instill flexibility and coping mechanisms. The trick, it seems, is to do both optimally in order to minimize the stress from all of the variability and simultaneously improve resilience to deal with it.
Practice comes with its own tradeoff, mostly the stress that comes from the workload on players and the risk of overuse it can cause. That cost comes against all kinds of Applied Sports Science benefits, across the full range of facets. Basketball teams that can put together their sports science minds to figure how to practice more are making an important first step towards getting the most from their sports science and getting the most from their players, coaches and organization.
NBA teams that have a Development League team close enough to their city to have enough players available to practice semi-regularly seem to have huge advantage (Spurs, Knicks, Mavericks, Thunder, Warriors, 76ers, Cavaliers, Rockets, Lakers, and maybe Kings, Celtics). Also, teams that strategically rest players can also use the tactic to increase its quantity of practice time. It will be interesting to see if teams use those strategic rests to lessen the schedule variability and impose predictable day-to-day, week-to-week routine, for at least some time interval within the long NBA season.
The closest thing to a best practice that I have come across is the World Cup teams practices where heavy time constraints prompt close-as-possible collaboration between coaches, players, staff and management. Tactics, conditioning and team-building all come out of tightly-packed practices that are followed (and/or preceded) by strength training and recovery routines that are player-specific and closely monitored so that data analysts can work in parallel to cycle through plans for the next practices and, ultimately, for games that have high, high stakes.