Hoping It Sticks
Day in the Life of a Collector
You saw the clip last night. Some D1 staff running a tight little small-sided game, players flying around, looked sharp, and you thought yes, that one, we’re doing that tomorrow. So you ran it. And it kind of just sat there. Energy was off, kids going through the motions, and you couldn’t figure out why because it worked for them.
Here’s why. You copied the answer without the question.
That game exists because that staff looked at their team and found a specific problem and built that game to fix it. What you watched was their answer to their question. You ran it rep for rep and got nothing because your team was never asking that question. The game was never the thing. The decision making that led to the game was the thing, and that part doesn’t show up in the footage. You can’t screenshot the seeing.
What the clip quietly turns you into is a collector. You start building practice by shopping. What game am I running today. And the job actually runs the other way. What did I see in my team that needs solving, and what can I build that leans on it. Those are opposite motions. One starts with the drill and goes looking for a reason to run it. The other starts with what you saw and goes looking for a design.
And it’s not just games. There’s the play collector too, same disease in the other hat. The one who’s never out of the next latest greatest set, all of it free and a thumb-scroll away. He thinks he’s the strategist, the X and O guy, the one with the answers. The game collector thinks he’s the modern one, ahead of the dinosaurs. Opposite identities, both certain they’re nothing like the other guy. Running the identical move. Shopping instead of looking at their own team.
It’s throwing mud on a wall and hoping it sticks. No aim. Just fling it and pray.
The supply is what makes it endless now. It used to be hard to be a collector, you had a couple DVDs and a clinic a year. Now there’s always one more set, one more game, one more clip queued up for tomorrow. The access didn’t make coaches better. It just made it easier to never look at your own gym.
This is the part that doesn’t make the highlight version. People think the method is the small-sided game. It isn’t. The method is the seeing. Kerri Kuzbyt puts the job in four words. Coaches are problem creators. Players are problem solvers. Your job was never to find the perfect game. It was to look at your own gym, find the problem worth solving, and build something that hands it to your players. Then get out of the way and let them solve it.
The clip says all of that. It’s somebody else’s solution to somebody else’s problem. You can’t borrow a problem worth solving. You have to see it first.
Get the seeing right and the games barely matter. You’ll make a decent one on the fly.
Get it wrong and the best game in the world is just somebody else’s practice.
Try these and see if they stick
Offense is facing defender, can foot fake and twitch before attacking. Add weak side defender. Move offense to different spots for every rep.
Peter Rajniak Roll Ups
Designed to improve connection, sequencing, and an efficient path into the shooting pocket. Ball stays on your body. Roll it up into your pocket.
Peter Rajniak 1 Hand Form
Sorry! I have to use a line from the movie Wayne’s World. Watch and Learn!
Peter Rajniak explains the importance of organizing the ball efficiently before energy goes towards the basket.
Hand and body under the ball
Behind the wall it all goes live. Ball, defender, finish, every rep. Creating space, tight spaces, straight lines, the Shot Ready movements, all against a live defender. Because everything changes when the defender is real. This is where you go find out.
