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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]At my nearest public swimming pool there is the slow lane which is for anyone who takes over 2 mins to swim 50m. The time for the medium lane is 1-2 min and fast is under 1 min. That is a very logical breakdown which allows for pretty much any adult amateur to train at the level they are at.

Couldn’t schools have a class of team that has standardised benchmarks instead of tryouts! Say for basketball they have to sprint 10 laps of the court while dribbling the ball under a certain time and any kid that meets that standard is allowed. That would create a high bar of performance without the cut throat competition. [/quote]

PP, like many people, you seem to think that basketball is an athletic pursuit like track.  Actually, at the HS level, it’s a little bit about skills that have been trained for many years, but much more about intelligence, executive function, attention, quick learning under pressure,  quick decision making, and the determination to persist in the face of aggressive defense and heavy contact.

Basketball tryouts are kinda like what you describe, except instead of evaluating fitness and one skill, they evaluate multiple skills, the ability to follow complex rapid fire directions, and the ability to learn quickly.  And they go on for multiple two hour or more sessions.  And all this is under pressure of fatigue and sometimes under the pressure of really intense physical defense.   Tryouts my son participated in over the years included:

- 3 and 5 man weave (a bit like what you described, except that kids run in a fairly complex pattern and must pass to teammates also running in a complex pattern and make a shot when they reach the basket).  Done to tire kids out so you can see how they perform when tired and if they are in shape, but many kids fail to follow the pattern or pass to the wrong kid and get cut for that. 
 
- 3 on 2/ 2 on one (more full court running and dribbling, except that kids must switch instantly from offense to defense and recognize an advantage in numbers as the makeup of their team changes on the fly mid drill).  Also a way to tire kids and at the same time an intelligence test.

- pounding 2 balls with ball handing moves (skill ball handling combined with exhaustion). The hard part of this is that when kids mess up a ball goes rolling through the other kids, messing them up and making the kid who lost the ball look bad, so kids feel pressure doing this.

- full court chair drills (full court dribbling, with specific offensive moves like crossover and in and out or spin moves at each chair). Skill and fitness test.

- scrimmages with unfamiliar, changing teammates where kids have to remember who is on their team and know how to get the ball. Tests skill, basketball IQ, command presence, and, often, character.  Kids frequently get cut for trying to cheat in various ways or lack of introspection (i.e. failing to gauge correctly how the other kids see them).
 
- learning and executing plays. A test of recall, listening, humility (aka “coachability”),  executive function, and knowledge of the game.

The fact is that at a big high school, there are a lot of tall, athletic kids and a lot of kids who can learn skills like dribbling while sprinting and looking up.  Where kids tend to fail at tryouts are

- An inability to follow the language of the game. When teaching plays, coaches use compressed shorthand like: “the 3 sets the screen, fakes the roll, then pops, so the 1 has the option of him or the weak-side corner.” Some kids are lost at the language level before skill even enters the picture.

- Timidity in the face of aggressive defense

- Inability to learn drills or plays and remember where to be in the face of both boredom (two hour tryouts at least) and high pressure (screw up and you’re out).  This is why tryouts are really mostly mental.

- Inability to remember who they are guarding and what position they are playing.  When teams are constantly shifting and kids get tired, you see a lot of this in scrimmages. Again, it’s mostly mental.

Beyond a basic level of skills, kids that don’t make the team tend to lack the required  vocabulary, attention span, basketball intelligence, executive function, and determination.  [/quote]

Bro shut up. Jerry stackhouse had an iq of maybe 60[/quote]

So did your Mom but that didn't stop her either.
[/quote]

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