Conversation 32/43 The uncomfortable truth is that you cannot prove a player has learned during your lesson. You may see improvement. You may see greater consistency. You may see the player perform the movement exactly as you requested. But that is performance during practice—not necessarily learning. Learning is non-linear. It may emerge gradually over weeks, months or even years. Progress can plateau, regress and reorganise before becoming visible. Yet coaches feel pressured to produce instant results. Parents want to see improvement. Head coaches want evidence of progress. Players want to leave feeling successful. So we create practices that make improvement easy to see. We remove the opponent. We reduce uncertainty. We decompose the movement. We feed predictable balls from a basket. The player quickly begins to look more successful—but success within a simplified drill does not establish that learning has occurred. The real test is whether the player can use what ...