COACHES CORNER Video study & scouting work National Freestyle Coach Bruce Burnett, the 2016 USA
Wrestling Man of the Year, has a successful career in coaching at the high school, college and international level. Burnett is in his second stint as the National Freestyle Coach, and also has also won big on the Div. I college and the high school level. A key tool he uses to help his athletes and teams win is extensive video study and scouting. Burnett has seen strong results from this effort at every level he has coached.
Q: What is the importance of video study and scouting
for elite-level wrestling? Burnett: At the elite level, it is imperative. You have to have it. Whether it is the coach doing it, I believe the athlete needs to do it also. For me on the elite level, it is huge. But I will tell you right now, I did it as a high school coach. I was probably one of the first guys in the country that carried around one of those big old video cameras. I coached football too, and film is so important in football. What I found is that you have a tendancy to make mis- takes. You see something, you think you saw something, and when you get the video, it wasn’t quite exactly what you saw.
Q: What are the key reasons for extensive video study? Burnett: I have three reasons, really. I evaluate our ath-
letes. It’s not rocket science. I try to find out how they scored exactly, how they got scored on exactly and figure out why it happened or why it didn’t happen. Video will give you that. It is not guesswork. You can’t say, I think he was leading with his right foot. Well, watch the video. Was he in a right-foot stance, or did he square it up? That’s the first part of it, evaluating your athlete and find out exactly how he scored and how he got scored on, because if you score more points than your oppo- nent, you win. The second thing is I gather statistics. They are huge. I
want to know how many times they are in a front headlock, how many times they scored from the front headlock, or how many times their opponent scored when they were in a front headlock and how many times there were stalemates. Statistics will tell you the positions they get in over and over. You don’t have to guess if he shoots a high crotch or a swing single and which is his best takedown. Figure it out. If you shoot 20 high crotches in 10 matches and you get three scores and your opponent gets three scores and the rest are stalemates, well, he might shoot a lot of high crotches but it is not a high percentage. You may find out he only shot eight head-inside single legs and he scored six times, his opponent never scored and the other two were stale- mates. And, by the way, you can find out through statistics and video study why they were stalemates, whether it was the oppo- nent’s good counter offense, or counters, or your good setups, your good shots, your good penetration and then your good fin- ish. Stats are very important. The third reason to do it is scouting. It is not the first reason,
but it is an important one. Here’s what I will tell you. I want to know if a guy leads with his right foot or his left foot or if he is in a square stance, whether or not he is a counter-offense guy or an offensive machine. That dictates how you are going to approach a match. Even on this level, I have a lot of athletes who say “I don’t want to know what the guy does because it will interfere with what I want to do. I just want to go wrestle him and do what I
32 USA Wrestler
do.” I give them a little bit of time to think about that, and then I am going to come back to them. I have done it many times in my career. If you are going to get into a fight, would you want to know if the guy had brass knuckles, a knife, a semi- automatic, a baseball bat? That’s all. Because, when you go into the fight, you want to know what his weapon is. It is that simple to me. It’s not to change what you do, but maybe, if you shoot a high crotch with your left hand and he is leading with his right foot, that means you have to shoot across the guy’s body to get that high crotch. If you know that ahead of time, you know you have to circle to the left and maybe the guy brings his foot up, or you push-pull. Scouting becomes very important. I keep all those stats, I keep all the scouting forms. When I evaluate our athletes, I do it from a scout- ing standpoint of how, if I had to wrestle you, how would I do that? We try to continually get them better and video review for me is the best way to make that happen. It’s not guesswork with me. If an athlete starts to argue with me, it is pretty easy for me to pull out the stats and say, “You were in this position 25 times and you scored two times and your opponent scored eight times and probably it is not a good position for you to be in, or you better get better in it.”
Bruce Burnett Q: How many bouts do you need to see in order to cap-
ture information that you can use in preparation? Burnett: Here is what I really try to do. I think you have to have
a minimum of five. More importantly, you have to be able to say, “Don’t send me a match where you ran a clinic because you were so much better than the guy. I only want good people, your best competition.” I prefer to have a minimum of 10 matches. You can do it with five, but you don’t always have the full picture. I need to find 10 matches where somebody has been pushed to the limit. Whether it is a loss or a close win or you know the guy is a World medalist, those are the ones I want to break down. Because the goal is to win a medal; you want to get on the stand and be a World and Olympic champion. So, those guys you have to be able to beat. To do that, you have to understand “How am I going to beat this guy?” This guy is really good. I will give you an example. Frank Molinaro lost to the same
Cuban he beat this year at the Pan Am Championships. He did it because he broke the opponent down, and realized if I get caught in this position again, that guy is really good. I can’t get there and if I do, I have to be able to defend it. Frank was able to work on the technique to stop the move and the guy got into the same position that he lost before and this time he won the position. We can fix things. We can only do that through video review, figuring out how did we get beat, what was the position we were in, what were the techniques to counter it?
Q: How do you approach video study of your wrestlers,
and what is the best way to share information with them? Burnett: First of all, I try not to give them too much informa-
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44