The best competitors across esports and traditional sports are the ones who are the best at pushing themselves to improve. Setting goals allows competitors to have focused practice, where they improve on individual skills and accelerate their personal growth. If a competitor doesn’t set good goals, they’ll go through unfocused practice, which makes it more difficult for them to improve. Let’s go over a couple of principles you should keep in mind when setting a personal or team goal.
When setting goals for yourself, try to reduce a problem to its simplest, most direct form. Solving complex problems can require a lot of individual effort and knowledge, which puts more strain on players. What’s more, if a problem is misdiagnosed, a complex solution to that problem can exacerbate the issue at hand. With simple goals, students can approach a roadblock in their growth from a wider range of angles, allowing students to lean into their strengths as players to improve holistically.
Try to set goals that are easy to statistically track. To be clear, statistics aren’t always 100% reliable, as there are many variables that can skew data. That being said, it’s easier to track a goal that has a corresponding stat you can chart than it is to track a goal that’s hard to demonstrate. Seeing signs of growth throughout the process of improving is important since it’ll help reinforce the good habits you’re trying to build. Remember, pay attention to how often you do something, not how often you don’t do it.
Choose one thing to improve on for a goal; don’t try to do too much at one time. The point of setting goals for a practice or for a week is to grind and improve specific aspects of your game. If you have too many components to a goal it divides your attention. It’s better to focus on one thing at a time, so you can give that ‘one thing’ your undivided energy.
Here are some examples of goals set by student athletes. Take time to look at each example and talk about whether or not it’s a good goal.
Example 1: I’m a League of Legends player, and I want to work on my positioning.
Example 2: I’m a Rocket League player, and I want to get better at managing my fuel for mid-air shots and passes.
Example 3: I’m a NBA 2K player and I want to get my shooting percentage up by 10%.
Example 4: I’m a Hearthstone player and I want to work on my mulligan strategy for a specific match up.
Don’t be afraid to call out players if they’re not setting good goals. Setting goals is CRUCIAL for player development, so when a student sets poor goals, they’re setting themselves up for poor practice and growth.
Example 1 is extremely vague to the point where it’s not a good goal. This student should be more specific with the context of the goal: Are they dying too much due to poor positioning? Are they struggling with knowing where they need to be on the map? What’s more, concepts like “positioning” are important in-game but don’t exactly have a corresponding stat. Once the goal becomes more focused, the student should find a corresponding stat to work with.
Example 2 is much better at being direct about the problem, but is too open-ended and unfocused to be an effective goal. Shooting and passing the ball are two separate areas of player skill, so lumping them together makes it harder for the student to meaningfully improve on either of them. This student should pick one of those goals and stick with it, since the corresponding statistics, fuel levels, and shooting percentage, are easy enough to track.
Example 3 has a lot of good things going for it: the goal is simple and direct, the goal is focused, and the goal has corresponding stats.This goal is vague, however. There are several ways a student can improve their shooting percentage, not to mention the goal doesn’t specify if the student means overall shooting percentage or a specific shot, like three-point percentage. If the student can clarify how they’re looking to improve, this goal is in great shape.
Example 4 has everything going for it. It is a goal that’s simple, direct, and focused, with tons of stats corresponding to it (win rates for specific mulligan strategies) that can be obtained through practice or by research, and it has a specific and relevant application.
There are a couple of ways you and your team can practice together throughout a season. We’ll go over some of the most common types of practice here, but feel free to do whatever you think makes the most sense for you and your team.
Scrimmages, or ‘scrims’, as they’re commonly referred to as in esports, are organized practices where two separate teams or people compete against each other in a non-official setting.
Queue Practice is less organized, but is an alternative if you can’t find scrims and want to play against other humans.
Whether you play in unranked or ranked queues is up to you, but remember that the purpose of practice is to grow and learn, and not necessarily just to win. If you play ranked, some of your players might get apprehensive because they don’t want to lose their rank that they’ve worked hard to obtain. On the other hand, some players find it too hard to take normal queue games seriously. Try to find a compromise or a balance in your team so everyone can get as much out of practice as possible.
Walkthroughs are practices where you and your team go into a custom match and practice specific sequences or setups. Walkthroughs, or “training mode,” can be useful to grind specific things out so you or your team can get comfortable with preset plays before you use them against human opponents.
Don’t use walkthroughs too often. Players need to play against other players to grow. There’s only so much theoretical preparation a coach can do for their players to make them better; it’s impossible for a coach to prepare for everything. When used in conjunction with scrims and Queue Practice, though, walkthroughs can be a valuable tool.
VOD Review is not technically practice, as the players won’t be playing the game but instead watching a video replay. It is, nonetheless, a good use of practice time. VOD Reviewing can teach players and teams a lot that might otherwise go unnoticed if the team focuses solely on playing the game.
VOD Review is last on this list because it shouldn’t be the go-to practice style. After all, you need your gamers to play the game in order for them to get better. Make sure you make time for everyone to do review together, though, in addition to whatever required review your coach asks of the players individually.
So, we’ve talked a lot about individual aspects of practice, but let’s put it all together here to give you an idea of what an average practice schedule looks like.
For the sake of this example, let’s say your team competes in a league that plays official matches on Sundays. If your team only meets three days per school week, your schedule might look something like this:
Monday: VOD Review/Walkthroughs (2hrs)
Wednesday: Scrims (if possible) / Queue Practice (2hrs)
Friday: Scrims/VOD Review
Sunday: VOD Review and Scrims/Queue Practice to warm up for competition.
Each team will have different challenges and needs in making schedules, so don’t worry if your team’s schedule doesn’t look like the example above. Notice how there are at least three flexible opportunities for VOD Review each week. A team doesn’t need three VOD Review sessions, but should try to do one or two per week.
Early in the week, when the team is setting a team goal, is a good time to do things like review and walkthroughs to prepare everyone to put what they’ve learned to the test in scrims or queue practice. You’ll want to reserve VOD Reviews for scrims and official competition, since queue practice can be hit-or-miss in terms of strength of competition.
Try to avoid VOD Reviewing stompy wins where your team rolls over the competition; focus instead on games where the team could’ve played better. If a player doesn’t want to relive a particularly tough loss, they need to understand why that loss happened to prevent it from happening again.
If your team already has practice protocols, take a moment to write them down so that everyone is on the same page. The activity of writing down your habits can be a catalyst for adding new ideas or else streamlining existing ones.
Encourage your players to warm up together with fun game types or exercises. Establishing a fun and positive atmosphere encourages players to take the initiative to warm up. Coming into practice with good energy can help your players get in a good mindset to have fun and grow.
Sometimes, your players will have a rough day and be overly-critical of themselves. If this happens, make sure you involve the rest of the team in finding positives for that player. Make sure you don’t end on a low note, try your best to have your students end each day on a high note or a positive they can take into the rest of their day/next team meeting.
Don’t be afraid to call out players if they’re not setting good goals. Setting goals is CRUCIAL for player development, so when a student sets poor goals, they’re setting themselves up for poor practice and growth.
Example 1 is extremely vague to the point where it’s not a good goal. This student should be more specific with the context of the goal: Are they dying too much due to poor positioning? Are they struggling with knowing where they need to be on the map? What’s more, concepts like “positioning” are important in-game but don’t exactly have a corresponding stat. Once the goal becomes more focused, the student should find a corresponding stat to work with.
Example 2 is much better at being direct about the problem but is too open-ended and unfocused to be an effective goal. Shooting and passing the ball are two separate areas of player skill, so lumping them together makes it harder for the student to meaningfully improve on either of them. This student should pick one of those goals and stick with it, since the corresponding statistics, fuel levels, and shooting percentage, are easy enough to track.
Example 3 has a lot of good things going for it, the goal is simple and direct, the goal is focused and the goal has corresponding stats. This goal is vague, however. There are several ways a student can improve their shooting percentage, not to mention the goal doesn’t specify if the student means overall shooting percentage or a specific shot, like a three-point percentage. If the student can clarify how they’re looking to improve, this goal is in great shape.
Example 4 has everything going for it. A goal that’s simple, direct and focused, tons of stats corresponding to the goal (win rates for specific mulligan strategies) that can be obtained through practice or by research, and a goal with a specific and relevant application.
Not every team will have good practice habits. If your team develops bad habits, try to express your concern in a way that is respectful of them as athletes. It might turn out your athletes have a different idea of how to train than you. That’s fine, so long as everyone can come to an agreement. The underlying purpose behind these practice habits and tips is to make your practices as efficient as possible, but don’t be afraid to slow things down if your team responds better. As always, do whatever works best for your players and staff.
If you have a good understanding of all of these kinds of practice, try to challenge yourself!
See if your team can successfully do one of each of these kinds of practice in a short period of time.
Queue Practice
Scrimmages
VOD Review
Walkthrough
British Esports Association’s Practice Info & Guidelines
Practice guidelines from the British Esports Association. You’ll see some of the themes from this page expanded upon in upcoming chapters and sections.
Pathway Esports Discord Server
Use the Pathway Esports Discord server to help you find scrimmages and fill your other practice needs with other Pathway Esports users.