Take a look at your key ring. It doesn’t matter if it’s your car key ring or your work keys. Take a look and see how many keys are on it. Odds are, there are at least three. That’s the average. Even with today’s keyless, electronic fobs for cars, nearly every person carries a house key and at least one other key on their ring, maybe a post office box key or a padlock key for the gym.

The interesting thing about our keys is that we often have that one key that barely gets used. In fact, most of the time we have one key that we keep without even knowing what it opens! We just can’t bring ourselves to throw it away, worried that it opens something important and we’ll need it one day.

Every key has a purpose. That key that barely gets used opens something that is needed at some point. That’s why it’s kept. Is it any less important than the house key or car key we use every day? Not on the day it’s needed!

A key’s true value is felt when it’s needed and can’t be found. You drive to the post office only to realize you don’t have your box key. All the wanting in the world will not produce your mail. Imagine having a precious piece of jewelry or valuable documents in a bank safe deposit box, only to lose the key. All that potential sitting behind a little metal door you can’t open. It might as well be worthless. Sure, there are steps to gaining access through the bank manager, proving your identity, yada, yada. But you get the point.

An athlete’s skills are much the same as a set of keys. Some keys get used every day. The big skills, the ones you like to work on, the ones that show up first on the stat sheet: those are the house keys and car keys. They are very important and must be kept up. But the little skills, like the little keys that are seldom used, still hold great importance on an athlete’s key ring. Take, for example, a same-hand, same-foot finish around the rim with your weak hand. Maybe it’s not something you use every game. Maybe you rarely, if ever, attempt it on purpose. And then there is that one game where that move is the only move. You reach for that little, mysterious key on the ring. Will it open the lock? Will you be able to finish that shot?

Athletic skill work boils down to identifying all the locks you will face. You have to have a key for every lock. We don’t have keys made for locks we don’t have. We focus on the locks we know we’ll need to open. Athletes have to study their game. They have to know all the locks they will face, and they have to earn the keys through preparation.

This is where honest data helps. For example, Ballogy’s AI shot tracking and heat maps show a basketball player exactly which locks they’re opening and which ones they aren’t, and AI Coach turns those gaps into a plan, so the seldom-used keys get cut long before the game that needs them.

Big keys, small keys, daily-used keys, or seldom-used keys all have equal value and purpose. The moment a key is needed, it is the most important key of all. It is the ONLY key that will work.

As an athletic director, I was given a grand master key. It opened every door in the district. That was nice because I only had to carry one key. It wasn’t magic. It was someone’s work behind the scenes, preparing every door to unlock with that master key just like it would with its own single key. An athlete’s skill set can be just like that grand master key: every facet of the game developed so that every lock opens.

Fill your key ring with the keys you need for your game. Work on the little skills as purposefully and intently as the big skills. Prepare behind the scenes to build a grand master key that opens every lock. Give yourself the confidence that when that lock shows up in your game, you have the key on your ring to open it. That is the key to success.