subject: The Checkerboard Coaching Technique SM [print this page] The Checkerboard Coaching Technique SM The Checkerboard Coaching Technique SM
The Checkerboard Coaching Technique SM
The CCT (Checkerboard Coaching Technique) has taken 32 years to develop and will take this short article to explain. No matter what you wish the CCT applied to it will optimize the performance of any player, team, coach or person it is applied to.
We all know what a checkerboard is. To start take the imaginary board you have and fill each space with the portion of your game you want to improve or analyze. After your board is filled with as many spaces as you care to fill, chose the 20 percent of those items that are the most critical to your performance and place them in sequence from most important to least. Now take the most important or first on the list and ask yourself what is the most effective 20 percent aspect of your performance. Understand that area and expand it. Expand the opportunity to use it.
Conversely apply the same approach to the team you face or the opponent. This time fill the board with the twenty percent areas of their most vulnerable areas of performance. Once done expand each area. Develop your approach or your opponent based upon that twenty percent area. Build your winning strategy to attack only at that area.
I have two practical applications. One is a college football team I worked with. They had lost several games and were looking for a solution. I emailed the coach and he allowed me to visit with him. I told him to take all the offensive plays he ran all season and place them in a list with the offensive yards in sequence gained for the season to that point on a list. The list was the most yards gained to the least. Place the top yards gained first to the least. In the next game run only the plays that gained the most yards in the game plan. They won the next game, their first of the season by a wide margin.
The second application was in NHL hockey. I live in an NHL city and it was the playoffs. Their opponent beat them all year. I applied it to goal scoring. I simply told the GM through fax that if he would study the opposing goalies season of games played, he would find a twenty percent area that the goalie was most vulnerable. Find that space and tell the players to shoot only there. They won in six games and in the last game scored six goals on eight shots.
The point here is that the law of the significant few also know as the 20-80 rule, can be applied in sports, but in a larger sense to all things. You can Google the 20-80 rule to discover what it is. It is simple math applied to coaching and it works very well. I am convinced from these two examples that any team can win any game through its ultimate application.
