John Calipari has eluded to a different way of conditioning and said last night during the postgame press conference that he would post on his website today what he has been doing.
Here is an excerpt:
Instead of beginning the year with players to build around, now you’ve got to start by quickly evaluating what each player needs, their skill set and how you have to deal with them as an individual. Every one of these players needs me in different ways.
You have to convince them how hard they have to work consistently. That means play to play, day to day, week to week – not when they feel like it.
I must get through to the team that my job as a head coach is to care about each one of them and love them. Their job is to care about each other and love each other.
All three of these things go hand in hand, but it’s hard to do when you are starting over with a brand new team with brand new players. That’s what we have faced this year.
Because we have very few returning veterans that our new guys can imitate or mimic, we haven’t gotten the level of work – conditioning, toughness, effort and exertion – that we need and we expect. That is not an excuse for our record. I’m proud of how far we’ve come and excited about where we will finish, but I’m just stating facts. We don’t have guys who have been in the system that can show them how hard they have to work. I have had to convince our guys that they aren’t working hard enough because they’ve been under the impression that they are. Each individual thinks they are working hard.
To help me do this, each player is now practicing and playing in games with a device that measures their exertion rate, sport zones, caloric expenditure and heart rate.
The device gives us the ability to monitor and check how much effort players are giving in real time. Because we are able to read their heart rates, now we know who is maxing out in practice and who is hiding, who thinks they’re going hard and who isn’t, who is able to push themselves through pain, and who has mental toughness to be special.
Everybody perceives his exertion level differently. Some feel they are working extremely hard and they’re not, and others perceive that they’re not working very hard when they really are. My hope is to get everybody in that second category. I want them to realize what their exertion level is in games compared to what it is in practice, and this device helps us do that.
You can read the entire article on CoachCal.com.
