Preparation

Obviously, with the "Adjustments" and "When does a run begin" posts, I am thinking a lot about game management these days. This post is about preparation and, as usual, is basically a comparison of our sport to other sports. Certainly, football gets a lot of press about the importance of coaching, specifically as it relates to preparing the teams for upcoming games. I think baseball does this as well, primarily it seems, around tweaking the lineup based on who is pitching. I am unaware about the amount of preparation that goes into sports like soccer, hockey, and korfball.

I would hazard a guess that there is little or no advance preparation in our sport at this point. Cash27 alluded to this in my "Adjustments" post when he said that one of his teammates does a 10-second scout of the team they are about to play. While this is quaint, funny, and probably even an appropriate amount of scouting for our unsophisticated times, it seems that we are putting a lot of pressure on ourselves by requiring a high level of game time scouting.

I spoke to Josh Greenough about this, and he described how he used film to break down the O, D, and tendencies of Pike for Nats 05. He said to me that Jam was very prepared for their game, and that they were able to set-up the match-ups that they wanted ahead of time. He did not go so far as to say that the preparation was THE reason that they had a lot of success in the game, but he would admit that it helped a lot.

I think using film to scout will become more commomplace with time. I also think "real" scouting at tournaments might become a job. Now, in today's environment it might be easy to say "Hey, we play these guys all the time. We know what they will do". This might be the case, but there is probably a similar familiarity in the NFL. Bill Belichick has a remarkable record against teams that he is seeing for the second time in a season (this past weekend notwithstanding), and I am sure that they pour over the film just as much for the second game.