Here’s one in a long line of drills that say they are to work on “reaction”. While I think it can be quite useful for platform control and manipulation, that’s as far as I’ll go.

As you can see from the post text above, they say this is all about reacting rather than reading. I’m going to strongly disagree with that. And this comes from someone who once upon a time tried to do things where players had to only react, not read. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work here.

Why?

Because as soon as the ball enters the player’s field of vision, they are reading its flight and judging the angle its going to come off the wall. It’s 100% anticipation. Reaction with out reading implies having no visual cues to allow anticipation. That is not the case here.

So basically this drill features players picking up information from entirely different cues than they would in a game.

Yes, there are drills where players are “blind” to any potential cues. But as I’ve written before, the idea that they improve reactions is misguided. We want to develop reactions from the start, not the finish.