Graham Titus (2027) scored the ball in a variety of ways at the RYZE Hoops Team camp last night. ➡️@GrahamTitus11 💻 ryzehoops.com/post/team-camp…

ksu mix

The most underrated skill in basketball isn't shooting. It isn't ball handling. Dare I say, it isn't even defense. It's learning. One finding from psychology comes from the work of cognitive psychologist Michelene Chi. When researchers compared experts and novices, they found that experts didn't just know more information. They organized information differently. That might sound like a small distinction, but I think it's incredibly important. This is the reason why a chess grandmaster can glance at a board and recall far more information than a novice. At first glance, it sounds like a memory test. But it wasn't really a memory test. The masters weren't remembering more. They were seeing more. They had spent thousands of hours learning which patterns mattered, which pieces were connected, which positions were dangerous, and which ones weren't. The board wasn't a collection of individual pieces anymore. It was information organized into meaningful chunks. How does this relate to basketball? Well, a freshman sits through a scouting report and hears ten separate pieces of information. A veteran sits through the same scouting report and hears ten pieces that fit into an existing framework. It's easy to look at that and assume the veteran just has a higher basketball IQ. Maybe. But the veteran immediately connects those ideas to things we do and things he's already seen. The information has somewhere to go. A different way to organize it. And because of that, he can learn it faster. But it didn't start that way for him and that's the part I think coaches often overlook. But by March, what separates teams isn't always talent, athleticism, skills, technique, etc. It's how quickly they can learn. How quickly can your team absorb a scout with one day prep in a tournament game? How quickly can they adjust in a big game out of a timeout? The best teams I've been around were the teams that could take information from a film session at 12 PM and apply it by 7 PM. Which has lead me to believe every program should have a learning roadmap alongside its offensive and defensive roadmaps. Because if learning is a skill, then maybe we should be training it the same way we train shooting, passing, and defense.

KJ Sledge is a BUCKET GETTER