The trap
No part of your game is perfect—there's always room to improve. The same is true for any team. So the real question isn't whether to improve but where to focus.
Most don't have a deliberate strategy for this. Instead, priorities get shaped by circumstances—by whatever happened most recently. A football coach analyzes last weekend's match, spots the defensive breakdown that led to a goal, and spends the next week drilling that exact situation. It feels productive. It feels responsive. But it's often the wrong choice.
This is recency bias at work: letting the last thing that happened dictate the next thing you work on. It creates a kind of reactive chaos—constantly shifting focus based on whatever's freshest in memory rather than what actually matters most for improvement.
The opposite trap is just as common. Some coaches and athletes cling rigidly to a fixed philosophy: "This is how we play" or "This is what I need to work on." There's value in having principles, but when philosophy becomes dogma, you lose the ability to adapt to your actual situation. You keep hammering away at what you've always hammered away at, regardless of whether it's the highest-leverage place to invest your energy.
Too flexible, and you're blown around by every result. Too fixed, and you can't see what's actually in front of you. Neither approach optimizes for improvement.
The framework
Whether you're an athlete or a coach, you need a way to think about improvement—a mental model that enables you to focus where it matters and eliminate distraction. The BSW framework facilitates just that—here's how it works:
The basics
The first area to focus on is your basics. These are the actions you perform most often. A small improvement here compounds quickly because the volume is so high. In football, that's the simple pass—something every player thinks they can do, but where a 1-2% improvement adds up over thousands of touches. In volleyball, it's passing and serving. Every single point involves a serve and a pass. Get marginally better at those, and your overall level rises almost automatically.
Your strengths
The second area is your strengths. This one's easy to forget. You assume your strengths will stay strengths. But if you neglect them, others catch up. A year from now, what used to set you apart might just be average.
Think about Steph Curry. He was always a good three-point shooter. But when you're already good at something relative to your peers, it's tempting to shift focus—to shore up other parts of your game. Curry could have spent those years working on his vertical or becoming a better finisher at the rim. He didn't. He doubled down on the three-pointer and became not just good but the best ever. That decision changed basketball. The trap for most athletes is that once you're good at something, it's hard to picture what the next level even looks like. That's exactly when you need to re-imagine your goals. If Curry had defined success as 30% from three, he'd have stopped improving. Instead, he kept asking: what if I could hit these shots contested? From five feet deeper? That's how a strength becomes a signature.
There are two reasons to keep investing here. First, your strengths exist for a reason—some combination of natural ability and accumulated practice has made you better at these things than most. That same advantage means you'll likely improve faster in these areas than in others. You've already proven you can.
Second, your strengths are what make you hard to play against. They expose opponents to something they rarely face. Look at Arsenal's corners right now—they've become unusually dangerous from set pieces, and that's partly because opponents simply aren't used to facing a team that good in those situations. Strengths like that win matches precisely because they're uncommon.
Your weaknesses
The third area is your weaknesses—the parts of your game that opponents can expose, the gaps that repeatedly put you at risk of losing. Not minor flaws, but genuine vulnerabilities. If you're a tennis player with a backhand that breaks down under pressure, that's what I mean. If you're a basketball team that consistently gets outrebounded, that's a weakness worth addressing. The goal isn't to chase every imperfection, but to identify the few things that are actively costing you.
Look at Liverpool under early Klopp. They were thrilling going forward but leaked goals at the back. That defensive fragility was what stood between them and winning titles. Addressing it, eventually through signings like Van Dijk and Alisson, transformed them from entertainers into champions.
Or consider Giannis Antetokounmpo. His free throw shooting has been a genuine liability—so much so that opponents built entire game plans around fouling him intentionally. "Hack-a-Giannis" became a real strategy. That's what a true weakness looks like: something opponents can actively exploit to beat you.
What to ignore
Any good strategy is as much about what you leave out as what you prioritize. Saying yes to the basics, your strengths, and your weaknesses means saying no to other things. So what should you ignore?
The things you're okay at
If you map out your game, roughly a quarter of it will be genuine strengths, another quarter will be real weaknesses, and about half will land somewhere in the middle—areas where you're competent but not exceptional. That middle 50% is where you should spend the least time. Unless something falls into the basics category, being "okay" at it is usually good enough. The returns on improving from okay to slightly-better-than-okay just aren't there.
Edge cases
These are the rare, complex situations that might come up once or twice a season. It's tempting—especially as a coach—to build systems that prepare players for every scenario. But this is where overfitting happens. You sink hours into teaching responses to situations your players may never encounter. And even if they do, there's a good chance they won't remember what you taught them because you've tried to teach too many things.
The better move is usually to trust the basics. A player with strong fundamentals can improvise through an unfamiliar situation better than one who's been drilled on a dozen edge-case playbooks they half-remember.
Prioritization is a skill
Knowing how to improve is itself a skill. Deliberate prioritization doesn't come naturally—it's something you develop through practice, just like any other part of your game.
If you want to start building that skill, answer these three questions:
- Basics: What skills do you perform most frequently in a match? What are the core actions you'll use every time you compete?
- Strengths: What are you uniquely good at? Where do you have a natural edge over others at your level?
- Weaknesses: What are you worst at compared to your competitors? What parts of your game can others expose to outcompete you?