Why Copying Drills Without Context Is Killing Your Coaching Development — A Deep Dive Into Ecological Dynamics With Mitch Kach
Most coaches think they're implementing a better approach the moment they find a great drill online. They screenshot it, save it, run it at their next practice, and wonder why the results don't match what they saw. I've watched this happen over and over again — and honestly, I've been guilty of it myself. When I heard Mitch Kach break this down on the podcast, something clicked. The drill isn't the point. It never was. And until coaches truly understand that, they're going to keep spinning their wheels.
Mitch is a trainer and coach from a small town in New Hampshire — 7,000 people — who went on to play professionally in Colombia, France, and Norway before building a serious training business back home. Eight years in. Growing fast. His whole mission is bringing ecological dynamics and Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) principles to coaches in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming or overly academic. What struck me most was how grounded he is. This isn't someone who read a textbook and started posting theory. He lived it. He competed. He figured things out the hard way.
The Environment That Made Him — And What It Got Wrong
Mitch grew up competing against his dad and older brother every single day under the same roof. That constant competition shaped everything. It made him obsessive about finding better ways to improve, especially when the gym wasn't always available and basketball wasn't the dominant sport in his area. That drive eventually got him to a prep school in New Hampshire with excellent coaching from an X's and O's perspective. But here's the part that got me — they practiced five-on-zero for two hours every single day.
Five. On. Zero.
And they won. A lot. So what does that tell us? Mitch's take is honest about it: they won because they eventually played actual basketball and had better players. Not because the method was superior. This is something I think about a lot — how often do teams succeed despite their training methods rather than because of them? Winning masks a lot of bad habits. It masks poor development frameworks. It makes coaches think the process is working when really the talent carried them through.
Mitch knew something felt off even then. And that feeling followed him across three countries and a professional playing career. That kind of self-awareness in a player — the ability to question a winning system — is rare. It's also what makes him worth listening to now.
The Drill Trap: Why Copying What You See Online Isn't CLA
This is where the conversation really started to pull me in. Mitch made a point that felt almost uncomfortably accurate. He said that when coaches post drills online — even really good ones, even ones that fall under a Constraints-Led framework — other coaches see them and think, "That's it. That's the thing. Let me just plug that into my practice." And that assumption, he argues, is one of the biggest things holding the field back.
When I heard this, I immediately thought about how this plays out at every level. A coach watches a video, borrows the drill, runs it with completely different players in a completely different context, and wonders why it doesn't land. The drill becomes a copy-paste solution to a problem that was never fully diagnosed in the first place. You can't separate the activity from the environment it was designed for. You can't separate it from the players standing in front of you, their specific limitations, their specific needs, what they did yesterday, what they're ready to process today.
This connects to a broader conversation happening in basketball development right now — one about whether structured, predetermined approaches actually serve players or just make coaches feel organized. If you've ever explored why modern basketball demands a shift from set plays toward genuine player development, you'll recognize the same tension Mitch is describing here. The system should serve the player. Not the other way around.
What Mitch is really saying is that CLA is less a library of drills and more a mindset. It's about your ability to read what's in front of you and adapt in real time. The rules of a drill barely matter unless you understand why those constraints exist, who they're designed for, and what problem you're actually trying to solve. That requires a coach who is genuinely present — not just running a script.
The Pact That Changed Everything: Never Run the Same Drill Twice
This part of the conversation genuinely surprised me. This past summer, Mitch brought together a small coaching staff at his academy — a strength coach who had been his own coach in high school, and a former playing teammate just transitioning into coaching. Creative group. Good chemistry. And they made a single rule for the entire summer: never run the same drill twice.
That's not a small commitment. That's every single session, every single day, forcing yourself to design something new. I don't fully agree that this is practical for every coach in every environment — especially coaches working with young kids who need repetition and familiarity to build confidence — but I absolutely understand the point it's making. It's a constraint placed on the coaches, not just the players. And that's a fascinating inversion.
Mitch mentioned being influenced by Noah Lorch, a name that's becoming more recognized in the CLA space, and you can feel that influence in how seriously he treats the design process. This reminds me of the conversation around how one training switch can completely reframe a coach's entire career — because sometimes it's not about learning more content. It's about disrupting your own default patterns.
The outcome for their players? Total engagement. Every session. Because there was no muscle memory of "oh, this is the drill we did last Tuesday." Players had to be fully present, fully thinking, fully processing. That's the environment Mitch wants. That's the environment he believes produces real skill — not the kind that looks good in drills, but the kind that holds up when the game speeds up and decisions have to be made in fractions of a second.
And if you're thinking about what that looks like in practice — specifically, how you'd structure activities that push players to make quicker decisions under real pressure — that's exactly the territory Mitch is operating in. It's not about fancy drills. It's about designing situations where the right decision emerges naturally, because the environment demanded it.
Creativity Isn't a Gift — It's a Practice
One thing Mitch said early on stopped me cold. He pushed back on the idea that creativity is something you're either born with or you're not. And honestly? I needed to hear that. Because I think a lot of coaches — myself included at times — use "I'm just not a creative person" as a quiet excuse to not try harder.
His constraint was simple. Don't repeat the same drill twice across an entire summer. That's it. And what happened? He started going to bed thinking about basketball differently. Not watching film, not drawing up plays — just lying there mentally pulling drills apart and asking why did that work? Why didn't that one? That kind of obsessive curiosity is where real coaching growth lives.
When I heard this, I immediately thought about how often coaches recycle the same five drills because they're comfortable, not because they're effective. There's a safety in routine. But routine can quietly become a ceiling. If you're wrestling with why modern basketball demands a completely new approach to player development, then clinging to the same practice structure year after year is part of the problem you're trying to solve.
What struck me most was how low the barrier to creativity actually is once you see it through his lens. Change the start position. Move where the defense comes from. Adjust how a player scores. Suddenly you've got something completely different. It's not reinventing the wheel — it's just turning it a slightly different direction. That's accessible to any coach willing to pay attention.
Prepared But Not Planned — The Hardest Thing to Trust
The London camp section of this conversation genuinely unsettled me. In a good way.
Mitch and Ricky went into each session with zero fixed plan. No predetermined warm-up. No set drill sequence. Just an intention to observe, react, and adjust. And when the gym got changed on them — twice — they just pivoted. Smaller space? Do more shooting. Different environment? Read it and respond.
I've seen this play out personally. Some of the best practice moments I've ever been part of came from something going sideways and a coach being sharp enough to lean into it instead of fighting it. But most coaches — and I get it — feel exposed without a plan. There's something vulnerable about walking into a gym and saying "I'm going to figure this out as I go."
Ricky's phrase that the podcast host quoted really landed: prepared but not planned. That's the distinction. You're not winging it. You've done the thinking. You understand the principles deeply enough that you can apply them in real time without a script. That's a very different thing from just showing up and hoping for the best. It's actually closer to how quick, confident decision-making works in basketball — the player who's done the reps doesn't need to think about what to do next. They just see it and go.
And here's what I found genuinely interesting: research Ricky referenced suggested that coaches who arrive with a rigid curriculum can actually restrict growth. I don't fully agree with this as a blanket statement — I think curriculum matters at certain developmental stages — but the principle underneath it is worth sitting with. Are you planning for your players, or are you planning for your own comfort?
What Happens When Two Coaches Both Need to Shut Up
This part of the conversation was my favorite. Honestly.
Mitch and Ricky — two experienced coaches, both used to commanding a full court alone — had to learn to step back and let each other lead. And both of them ended the first day feeling like they'd done nothing. Both texted each other saying essentially the same thing: I think I can do more tomorrow.
That is so human. So relatable. And so revealing about what ego does to our ability to observe.
Mitch made this point that I keep turning over in my head: when it's your own constraint that you've just implemented, you're emotionally invested in whether it works. You want to see it emerge. But when your co-coach does it, you can watch with more detachment. Less ego, clearer eyes. You see the environment more honestly. There's something in that worth applying way beyond basketball — but inside it? It's huge. It's the difference between a coach who actually listens during timeouts and one who's just waiting for the players to stop talking so he can deliver the plan he already had.
Once they found their rhythm — Mitch going more theoretical, Ricky anchoring things in application and ten-plus years of lived experience — the collaboration clicked. Two different entry points into the same philosophy, producing something neither could have done alone. That's what genuine co-coaching looks like. Not two people sharing a whistle. Two people genuinely expanding each other's perspective. And if you ask me, that kind of intellectual honesty between coaches is exactly what changes a coaching career — not a single eureka moment, but the slow, humbling process of learning to see what you've been missing.
Why Resource-Limited Countries Need Smarter Training, Not More Training
Here's something that hit me hard when I heard this part of the conversation. In the US, a kid might have access to thirty quality courts within a fifteen-minute drive. Thirty. In the UK or Norway, players are lucky to get two organized practice sessions a week — and that might be the only gym time they see. Full stop.
When I heard this, I immediately thought about how completely different the math is for these players. An American kid who spends two hours doing form shooting is still probably logging another two hours of free play, pickup games, and three-on-threes the same day. The repetitions balance out. But a British player who burns their only two hours a week on spot shooting and predicted moves? That's not a training plan. That's a ceiling.
And then there's the Instagram problem. This is something I think about a lot. Coaches and players in the UK are looking at content from US-based accounts, seeing flashy traditional drills, and assuming that must be the blueprint. What they're not accounting for is the ten thousand hours of informal play that American player already has banked before that drill video was ever filmed. Context matters enormously. The drill isn't the point — the cumulative environment around it is. If you're running the same cone drills you saw go viral online, you might be optimizing for the wrong thing entirely.
What struck me most was the phrase "efficient with your time." That's not just advice for developing nations in basketball — that's the whole argument for constraint-led approaches in a nutshell. If transfer to real game situations is the goal, and you only have two hours a week to get there, you cannot afford to waste a single minute on training that doesn't actually transfer. That's not a preference. That's math.
NBA Players and the CLA — The Stigma Problem Nobody Talks About
I'll be honest. I wasn't expecting this part of the conversation to be as interesting as it was. There's an assumption — and I've made it too — that elite players would be resistant to unconventional training methods. That they'd show up, see something unfamiliar, and walk out.
Apparently, the opposite is true. Once a player goes through a full session, they're hooked. They feel the difference. They can't always explain it, but they keep coming back. I find that genuinely fascinating. Because we're talking about professionals who have done traditional training their entire lives, and within one workout they're already sensing that something is different — that this is closer to what the game actually demands of them.
The barrier isn't the training itself. It's the top-of-funnel content. A somersault drill on Instagram looks ridiculous out of context. Of course it does. But dismissing the entire methodology based on one clip is like watching a single play from a game and deciding the coach has no system. Some of the most sophisticated coaching minds have had to rebuild their understanding from scratch before they found what actually works — and it rarely looks pretty in a fifteen-second clip.
The Duncan Robinson example is compelling not because of the association, but because of the pattern it represents. Players at the highest level are getting results. College players went from sitting at the end of the bench to playing significant minutes. A high school player went from obscurity to earning a scholarship in a single summer. I don't fully agree with the idea that initial buy-in is the only obstacle — I think there's a real institutional resistance from coaches and programs that aren't ready to question their methods — but the player side? Once they feel it, they believe it. And in a sport built on feel, that matters more than any whiteboard explanation ever could.
The broader conversation here is really about whether modern basketball is finally ready to shift from systems-first thinking to genuine player development. I think it is. Slowly, unevenly, and with plenty of resistance — but it's moving. And the coaches who figure this out now, who stop defending tradition for tradition's sake and start asking what actually transfers to game situations under pressure, those are the ones who are going to be ahead of the curve. Whether you're training in a professional facility in Miami or a community gym in London with one court and two hours a week, the question is always the same: is what you're doing actually making players better when it counts? That question doesn't care about geography. And neither does the answer.
Want the complete picture? Read our full guide: The Complete Guide to Ecological Learning Approach in Basketball Coaching
