The biggest thing to happen to basketball since the hole in the peach basket!

Canada Basketball recently launched Game Plan, an online portal that provides basketball coaches with tools that enhance the planning and execution of the training they deliver to their athletes. Game Plan also fully integrates NCCP delivery allowing coaches to access workshop calendars, request evaluations, download and submit portfolio evaluations, and much more. Furthermore, it’s free for NCCP coaches!

Game Plan is the brainchild of Dawn Smyth, the Manager of Coach Education and Development at Canada Basketball. Just shy of three years ago when Smyth joined the organization, she noticed that their coaching resources, while plentiful, were being distributed through archaic means – a problem magnified by the vast Canadian territory. It was time, as Smyth put it, “to shrink our geography.”

The focus of Game Plan’s content is training. The vast resources include an enormous drill library, skill-set videos by national team coaches, and a web-based Jes-Soft drill builder that are all designed to bring the focus back to the skills and to dim the lights on competition. “It’s going to make practice exciting again,” said Smyth.

It was essential that all of this pre-packaged content didn’t take away from the coach’s ability to be creative though. The drills are built as basic templates that coaches can manipulate by adding decision-making elements, influencing pressure, and changing environmental variables for different levels of the Long-term Athlete Development Model (LTADM). Edits to drills built in the integrated Jes-Soft application can then be saved to the coach’s account for use in future practice plans. Version “2.0” of Game Plan is set to include a drill-sharing feature that will allow coaches to contribute to the drill library for use by their peers nationwide.

Beyond execution tools like practice planners and annual plan builders, Smyth wanted Game Plan to aid in communication. With performance planning and monitoring being done by national team coaches, implementation being done by club coaches, and high school coaches needing to be kept in the loop, there was a real need to be able to communicate between the different levels of the game. Now, at the touch of a button, coaches can email, share, or tweet things they’ve built in Game Plan. The system bridges the gap between planning tools like Training Peaks and Polar ProTrainer, and team communication portals like Teamer and Team Snap.

Game Plan’s reach uncovered another challenge – ensuring the tools were powerful enough for national team coaches and simple enough for community and club coaches. Consultation with coaches at all levels ultimately produced tools for-coaches, by-coaches, because, as Smyth put it, “we want the coaches to know how important they are to the NSO and P/TSOs and we want them to be engaged so that we can continue to be one of the best basketball nations in the world.”

Game Plan content was designed to add value for coaches already engaged in the NCCP. It’s not re-hashed NCCP content, it’s aligned and adds to the experience coaches get in their coaching workshops. The performance planning and annual plan tools, for example, have done away with the Excel spreadsheets that have consumed more of a coach’s life than they’d like. There’s now more room for goal planning, creativity, and that which ultimately really matters – coaching on the court. “Game Plan reinforces good habits that start with NCCP workshops,” explains Smyth. In essence, you already know how to use it, and that’s going to contribute to its success.

NCCP alignment and enhancement doesn’t end there. Canada Basketball has fully integrated the role of the Coach Developer into Game Plan. “Instead of coaches requesting portfolio documents from their PSO, the PSO shipping them out, the coach completing and returning the documents to the PSO, and then the PSO executing a similar back-and-forth with the Evaluator and finally Canada Basketball, the coach can select an Evaluator from the Game Plan portal and be instantly connected,” explains Smyth. This is a huge step forward in NCCP delivery; it means a more streamlined process for the Coach Developer, and less administrative burden for the organizations. Learning Facilitators will have access to class lists; workshop pre-tasks will be available to coaches in Game Plan, and there will be more time for practical sessions during workshops. Game Plan will also render a modified version of a coach’s Locker transcript and identify missing certification components. All this, Smyth declares, “will absolutely make a difference in the number of coaches who ultimately get certified. Having the next steps clearly identified and being able to locate workshops nationwide is going to have a huge impact.”

Smyth is excited. Her men’s and women’s high performance programs are using the planning tools just like the club and high school coaches. The community coaches are building drills and practice plans. And most importantly, coaches are flocking to Game Plan. 506 coaches have registered in the first 19 days and they’re logging-in daily to explore content and tools. This is only the beginning – with more content, updates, and collaboration through all levels of the sport, including the CIS, Game Plan is poised to keep delivering for coaches across Canada.

Game Plan launched on February 12th, 2015 and a 5-year subscription is free until April for coaches who’ve previously taken a basketball workshop. New coaches, or coaches subscribing after April, will receive a 5-year subscription for $49.95. For more information on Game Plan or to register, visit www.Basketball.ca, or www.basketball.ca/en/coaching-resource/game-plan.