It's all about the eXPerience

The more familiar with a situation you become, the quicker, the better your decisions will be. The best decisions aren’t made with your mind but with your instinct

Lionel Messi ¹

Although the great Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi made these remarks a few years ago, I only recently came across them. They are the perfect little segway into another story I had been thinking about for this blog post, the purpose of which is to unpack the meaning of ‘XP’ in ‘ShootXP’.

Another Great

About 20 years ago I had the good fortune to spend some time with one of the greats of another team sport. Upon his retirement the head coach of the team I was involved with essentially setup an ’exit interview’ with this player to glean as much as he could from his wisdom and experience. One of the little things he said really stuck with me…it was about how he learnt to excel in a specific game situation. His explanation was quite short and remarkably similar to what Messi has said above - basically he learnt from the experience of being put in that situation many times in matches over a 15 year career.

I clearly remember thinking at the time - “therefore shouldn’t practice provide numerous opportunities for players to experience specific game situations, in addition to what they are naturally exposed to in a match?”.

It might have been an overly simplistic takeaway at the time, as my understanding and exploration into how players/teams become good, and what type of practice environment can assist that, was in its relative infancy. Yet 20 further years of inhabiting this space sees me still drawn back to that conversation, whilst having learnt there is much craft and complexity involved in how you design practice sessions and facilitate player development around this elegantly simple concept.

So, there is some context for why ShootXP has the ‘XP’ - it is a nod to the value in creating eXPeriences so that players become “more familiar with a situation” and improve their ability to adapt in and to those situations. To learn to functionally adapt² players need to not just eXPerience, but eXPlore and eXPeriment within those situations. Ultimately, this can lead to (adaptive) eXPertise…you get the idea 😉.

The Practice Analytics features of the ShootXP app can provide rich insight into the above aspects in relation to shooting. At this point in time, our app is the first and only practice tool where the analytics have been intentionally designed around contemporary perspectives in skill acquisition and the wisdom of world-leading practitioners in the field.

Gamification

Experience points (XP) are generally awarded for the completion of missions, overcoming obstacles and opponents […] When a sufficient amount of experience is obtained, the player ’levels up’

link for the above

‘XP’ also draws inspiration from the video/console gaming world, where Experience Points (XP) are the gateway to ’level up’, which is the tagline for ShootXP. We have built gamification mechanisms into the ShootXP app , with players being assigned badges for eXPerience | eXPloration | eXPerimentation, and also for displaying shooting eXPertise.

Something that video/console game designers do extremely well is create highly engaging eXPeriences that are expertly crafted to create appropriate challenges and progressions on a journey towards mastery. There is a lot to learn here, particularly when contrasting with the predominant approaches to practice, player development and coaching in basketball (check out our AAA Player Development Environment principles if you haven’t done so already, and this super insightful post on gamification from highly regarded basketball coach Dr Brian McCormick).

Please get in touch if you would like our support to ’level up’ your player development environment - the combination of our professional expertise, guiding frameworks/principles (“AAA” , “XP”, Constraints ) and use of the ShootXP app can unlock a whole new world of possibility! 🙂