How to Have Productive Basketball Film Sessions
Video is one of the most valuable modern technologies available to coaches. I can’t imagine not having video of a game to review after the fact. You miss so much in the heat of the moment, and being able to go back and review a game is invaluable. And not just for coaches, but for players as well.
Earlier in my coaching career, I attempted to have film sessions with my teams showing the entire game. I quickly realized that this wasn’t a great way to do this, since very few of the youth today have the attention span to sit through footage of a 32 or 40 minute game – especially if they are not playing.
My next attempt was to write down timestamps of places in the video that I found interesting, which I could share with the team. This was better, but moving the video “scrubber” to certain points in the video was awkward.
With our first team using the Hoopsalytics system, we were able to mark specific events or sets, and add comments to them. We did this across several games, and each clip appeared in a sequential list, with the comment attached. This proved to be the most successful way to do this, as our film sessions were well organized, only 15 to 20 minutes long, but very engaging and substantive. No matter how motivated the players were, that amount of time seemed to be the sweet spot for high school kids.
The latest version of Hoopsalytics uses this same system, with the new option to tag specific players along with the comments. We’ve heard from coaches that they want to be able to do one-on-one film review with some players, and being able to filter the film sessions to a specific individual is really useful. Plus, this is super-simple to organize with Hoopsalytics.
Watch this video to see what a Hoopsalytics film session looks like, and how easy it is to create clips and target comments to specific players:
Have any questions, or suggestions on how to improve this system? Reach out and talk to us!