Plan to teach Basketball Lay-up

The layup is an open, gross, serial, internally paced skill. The athlete will first need this serial skill broken into its sub-skills; dribbling, catching, jumping and shooting. During this early stage, the athlete will require lots of demonstration of the skills and given a change to mass practice each one. Feedback will be external and focus on performance, not results. Feedback will also need to be both concurrent and delayed. The cognitive learner does not know what the skill is meant to feel like and need to develop good technique before worrying about outcomes.

Once each of these skills is learnt in isolation and performed at the associative stage, they should begin to be pieced together, joining two-step jumping and shooting, and dribbling to the catch and two steps. Again feedback will be external and focus on knowledge of performance, while utilising both concurrent and delayed feedback. These would then be joined together and taught as the one skill. With feedback becoming progressing to be more results based and delayed as the athlete improves. Massed practice would be best used once the skill is combined.

Finally the skill will begin to be used in game situations to develop the athlete’s decision-making, strategies and tactics regarding when to do a lay-up and when to use a jump shot or pass the ball. Feedback will become much more internal and results based as each layup will either score a basket or not. Feedback will also progress to focusing on the performance elements rather than the performance of the layup.

The layup is a complex serial skill and takes much time to master. If the athlete is determined and focused then more massed practice can be used. If they are intelligent and confident, then they will respond more swiftly to feedback provided by the coach. If the athlete does not have much motivation, distributed practice should be used, which will delay the development of the skill. If the athlete is less determined and is not reliable in turning up to training this will also slow the acquisition of this skill.