Practice Planning with AI (Drills + Flow)
- Joseph Vachon
- Apr 25
- 3 min read
Updated: May 8
By Coach Vachon
I actually started using AI for practice planning at the end of this season. I hadn’t even thought about it before — not seriously, anyway. We were talking about AI in our school’s tech committee, mostly around how students were using it to cheat and how we could prevent it. But then, the conversation started shifting. People began to talk about the benefits. Someone was even coming in to speak about it. That’s when I decided to dive in.
At the time, I was looking for drills for areas I hadn’t focused on before. I asked AI, and it gave me some decent stuff.
One of my strengths — from being in IT for so long — is knowing how to ask specific questions. I’ve been doing that since the Yahoo search days, back when asking the right thing made or broke what you’d find. I assumed everyone was good at that... turns out they’re not.
So when I realized that prompting is basically just asking smart, specific questions — I thought, “Wait a minute. I might be really good at this.”
When I started getting drills, I didn’t stop there.
If it didn’t give me what I wanted, I asked again.
I phrased it differently.And boom — there it was.
By the end of the season, I wasn’t just planning practices — I was using AI to organize drills, focus on priorities, and even rethink what I thought we needed.
At one point, it told me I should be doing a lot more game-situation work, which I wasn’t planning for. I was thinking, “No — we still need to fix our offense.”
But I gave it a shot. We ran game situations in games — just twice — and while it wasn’t perfect, it was necessary.
The girls had more confidence in what was coming, even if we weren’t great at it yet.
It also gave me practice timing layouts. I’d always done that myself — but the AI’s timing actually ended up better than mine. I still used a bunch of my own stuff, but I sprinkled in AI drills and it worked. Players I’ve coached for years were suddenly seeing something different — it wasn’t the same old practice.
The whole thing had better flow.
It felt more fluid.
And I even pulled out some of my old conditioning drills, because the AI told me we still needed them — at that time of year.
They ate it up.
Here’s the theme you’ll hear from me in every post about AI, with any subject including Practice Planning:
A prompt creates an AI assistant focused on what you care about.It’s not just giving answers — it’s learning with you.
And if you challenge it, it gets better.
One example: I told it we run a 1-2-2 half-court zone.
It couldn’t figure out why we didn’t have a middle defender.
It kept pushing back, like that couldn’t possibly work.
I spent 15–20 minutes explaining how we run it.
Now? It gets it.
It even calls it my school’s name 1-2-2 Zone — and it gives me drills that fit that exact style.
I don’t even think it believes me still...
But it works.
Ready to Try It Yourself?
You don’t have to be a tech expert to use AI prompts — you just have to be a coach who asks the right questions.
That’s why I created two free tools to help you get started:
✅ Download 6 Free AI Coaching Prompts
These are the exact ones I use every week — for practice plans, game prep, and real-time adjustments.
🎓 Join My Free Course: AI for Coaches 101
Learn how to write better prompts, build plans faster, and use AI the way real coaches actually need it.
Want to go deeper?
$9.99 Basic Pack – 15 ready-to-use prompts across key coaching areas
$29.99 Premium Pack – 25 advanced prompts for strategy, leadership, and planning
Custom Prompts – built specifically for your team
This isn’t about replacing coaches.
It’s about making you more prepared than ever.
Start with the free prompts and course.
Let’s build from there.
– Coach Vachon
Comments