What a Simple Japanese Drum Prop Has Taught Me About The Art of Non Verbal Coaching Based on an Iconic Scene from a Movie…

In an age of AI, sensors, apps and high-tech training equipment, could one of the most powerful coaching tools simply be an object that reminds you what you already know?

By Chris Gaynor | SnookerZone

A few days ago, I bought a den-den daiko on eBay – a famous prop used by an iconic actor of his time.

I hadn’t planned on discovering a new way of thinking about snooker and coaching. I simply wanted one because of my interest in The Karate Kid Part II and the famous scene in which Mr Miyagi uses the small Japanese drum during Daniel LaRusso’s fight with Chozen. A bit of memorabilia.

Then it arrived.

I picked it up, turned the handle and immediately noticed something I hadn’t fully appreciated from all the years I’d watched the film.

It’s loud. I mean, LOUD…SO loud you have to go outside to use it properly…

The beads strike the drum with a surprisingly sharp, repetitive sound.

It almost wakes you up.

And suddenly I understood that scene in The Karate Kid Part II rather differently.

The Drum Isn’t Just Showing Daniel a Technique

At the climax of the film, Daniel is in serious trouble.

This isn’t a karate tournament. This isn’t a training session. This is a real fight.

Daniel is exhausted and appears close to defeat.

Miyagi cannot walk over and start giving him a coaching lesson.

Instead, he produces the den-den daiko.

The drum sounds.

Daniel looks towards Miyagi.

Miyagi turns it from side to side.

And Daniel remembers.

That’s the part that struck me.

On the surface, we can watch the scene and think:

Drum turns left and right. Daniel remembers the left-right movement. Daniel uses the technique.

But I now wonder whether there’s something more interesting happening.

The drum isn’t really teaching Daniel anything.

Daniel has already been taught.

It’s triggering a memory.

The sound gets his attention. The object reconnects him with his teacher. The movement reminds him of his training.

In perhaps the most pressurised moment imaginable, Miyagi doesn’t give his student more information.

He brings him back to something he already knows.

And that got me thinking about snooker.

What Happens When a Snooker Player Forgets What They Already Know?

Anyone who has played competitive snooker will probably recognise the feeling.

You’ve practised well.

You know your technique.

You know your pre-shot routine.

Then match night arrives.

You miss one.

Then another.

Your cue action becomes slightly quicker.

Your grip tightens.

You start trying harder.

And before long you’re attempting to fix something that perhaps didn’t need fixing in the first place.

I’ve experienced this myself.

Some of the most useful coaching advice I’ve received has ultimately been incredibly simple:

Head still.

Pause.

Deliver through the ball.

Basics will always win.

The problem isn’t necessarily knowing those things.

The problem is remembering them when pressure arrives.

So what if snooker had its own version of the den-den daiko?

A Den-Den Daiko for Snooker?

I’m not suggesting that someone sits in the corner of a Snooker Club banging a Japanese drum every time someone misses a red.

Although that would certainly make a league night interesting.

What interests me is the principle behind it.

Imagine a very simple physical coaching aid.

A miniature cue.

A pivot.

A pendulum-like movement.

Set it moving and the cue swings smoothly backwards and forwards.

Nothing complicated.

No electronics.

No app.

No Bluetooth.

No statistics.

At first glance, you might assume its purpose is to demonstrate a pendulum cue action.

And perhaps it could help with that.

But I’m becoming more interested in another possibility.

What if its primary purpose wasn’t instruction at all?

What if it was a trigger?

Don’t Teach. Remind.

Imagine a player regularly using this little object during coaching sessions.

Every time the coach sets it moving, the player associates it with three fundamentals:

STILL.

PAUSE.

THROUGH.

The player then gets down and plays.

Again.

STILL. PAUSE. THROUGH.

Again.

Eventually, the object and those fundamentals become associated.

Then comes a difficult practice frame.

The player’s timing disappears.

They start forcing the cue.

Rather than giving them another five-minute technical explanation, the coach simply sets the little cue moving.

Back.

Through.

Back.

Through.

The player sees it.

And remembers.

That, to me, is the interesting part.

The device hasn’t analysed anything.

It hasn’t told the player their backswing was 0.3 seconds too fast.

It hasn’t calculated acceleration through the cue ball.

It has simply said:

Remember your basics.

Sometimes More Information Isn’t the Answer

We’re living through an extraordinary period for sports technology.

We can film ourselves in slow motion.

Apps can analyse movement.

Sensors can measure performance.

AI can identify patterns and provide feedback.

I’m fascinated by that technology myself.

But there’s a danger in assuming that more information automatically produces better performance.

Sometimes a player already has enough information.

Perhaps what they need is the right information brought back to them at the right moment.

That’s what I now see when I watch Miyagi with the den-den daiko.

Daniel doesn’t need a lecture.

He needs a reminder.

A Coin Taught Me Something Similar

This isn’t entirely new territory for me.

When I developed my Coin Balance Cue Trainer, the underlying idea was deliberately simple.

Put a coin on a small platform attached to the cue.

Then cue.

If the movement becomes excessively jerky, tilted or forceful, the coin provides immediate physical feedback.

There’s no computer analysing the movement.

There’s no sensor.

It’s a coin.

Gravity does the work.

The idea was to demonstrate something about gentleness, stability and smooth cue delivery through an incredibly simple physical object.

And now this little Japanese drum has made me think about the other side of coaching – simplicity.

The Coin Balance Cue Trainer provides feedback.

A den-den-daiko-inspired snooker device could provide recall.

That’s an important distinction.

One tells you something.

The other reminds you of something.

Could Simplicity Be More Powerful Than Technology?

Perhaps that’s the bigger question.

Look at a den-den daiko.

It’s hardly sophisticated technology.

A little drum.

A handle.

Some string.

A couple of beads.

Yet put that object into the hands of a teacher and suddenly it can communicate rhythm, movement and — at least in my interpretation of The Karate Kid Part II — memory.

There’s something rather beautiful about that.

We keep looking for increasingly sophisticated ways of teaching people.

Perhaps occasionally we should travel in the opposite direction.

Strip the coaching technology back.

What is the one thing the player needs to remember?

Can an object represent it?

Can a sound represent it?

Can a movement represent it?

Can a word represent it?

And can that become so familiar through practice that eventually the player doesn’t need an explanation?

They simply recognise the trigger.

Every Player Could Have a Different Trigger

This is where the concept becomes even more interesting.

For one player, the trigger might represent:

Slow backswing.

For another:

Relax the grip.

For another:

Keep your head still.

And for someone struggling mentally:

Stay patient. Stay involved. Don’t panic.

The physical object doesn’t necessarily contain the lesson.

The player gives the object meaning through training.

That’s exactly why I don’t think a potential snooker version needs to be technologically sophisticated.

Its power would come from association.

You practise the fundamentals.

You associate the visual cue with them.

Then, when things begin going wrong:

See it.

Remember.

Reset.

The Player Could Eventually Become Their Own Coach

There’s another possibility.

You might not even need another person to provide the trigger.

A player could develop their own tiny physical or visual reset.

Perhaps it’s touching thumb and forefinger together while sitting in the chair.

Perhaps it’s looking at a miniature cue-shaped object in the cue case between practice frames.

Perhaps it’s one particular word.

The important thing is that you’ve already established what the signal means.

You aren’t standing there thinking:

“What was tip number four on that 17-point YouTube coaching video I watched last Thursday?”

The signal immediately takes you back to:

My basics.

And perhaps that’s where the idea becomes more than a gadget.

It becomes a coaching method.

The Irony of the Den-Den Daiko

There’s another reason I love this.

In The Karate Kid Part II, Chozen mocks the den-den daiko as though it’s nothing more than a child’s toy.

That’s quite appropriate when you think about how people sometimes react to unfamiliar coaching equipment.

Put a strange little pendulum cue on a table in a snooker club and I can already imagine some of the comments.

“What’s that supposed to do?”

“How’s that going to make you pot balls?”

And probably a few comments that aren’t printable.

But perhaps that’s missing the point.

An object doesn’t have to look complicated to communicate something powerful.

AND REMEMBER, KARATE KID 2 HAS GONE DOWN IN FOLK LORE AS ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC FILM TRILOGIES OF ALL TIME. ALONG WITH GODFATHER, AND OTHERS…

“The Karate Kid isn’t simply remembered as a successful film of the 1980s. More than four decades later, its phrases, characters, training methods and imagery remain embedded in popular culture — and in 2025 the original film was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry.”

It has literally gone down in folk lore. Nearly 50 years on and you can still pick up a den-den daiko and find a new interpretation of how it was used in the film. Film fans will understand this. Karate Kid fans definitely. Snooker ones, ummmm, maybe not. I am all three. SO I definitely do. But some snooker fans may not because they only see snooker, they don’t see anything else. And that’s sad. They don’t see the bigger picture. They just see a table and 22 balls. You have to think outside of the box. They don’t use their brains enough. They’ve been too soaked up by just playing it, and not using their brains.

An simple object is just as powerful as any app, sensor, or AI powered tool.

A coin.

A simple pendulum.

The question isn’t:

How technologically impressive is this?

The question is:

Does it make the player remember what matters?

Maybe That’s What Great Coaching Does

The more I’ve thought about this, the less I think this idea is really about inventing another snooker gadget.

It’s made me think about coaching itself.

When a player is struggling, there’s a temptation to give them another instruction.

Then another.

Move this.

Change that.

Adjust this.

Think about that.

Before long, the player is standing over a straightforward red with twelve different thoughts bouncing around their head.

Maybe sometimes the best coaching intervention is considerably smaller.

A movement. BACK. PAUSE. THROUGH. BPT.

A word. SPAGHETTI VONGOLE…(with the cue action mimic)

A visual cue. HAND BACK – PAUSE. HAND THROUGH.

Something that says:

You’ve already learned this.

Trust it.

Go back to your basics.

Miyagi doesn’t need to fight Daniel’s battle for him.

He can’t.

All he can do is give his student something that reconnects him with his training.

What struck me most about the den-den daiko in The Karate Kid Part II is that Miyagi isn’t really teaching Daniel anything new in that crucial moment. Daniel already knows the technique; he simply needs to remember his training.

The sound of the drum gets his attention, the left-right movement triggers his memory, and his training takes over. In that sense, I see the den-den daiko almost as a non-verbal coaching instruction: “Remember what you already know.” “Remember your training.”

That idea fascinates me in relation to snooker, because under pressure a player doesn’t always need another technical lesson. Sometimes they simply need a trigger that takes them back to their basics.

Daniel has to do the rest.

And perhaps that’s one of the most powerful things a coach can ultimately give a player.

Not dependence on the coach.

Not endless technical information.

But the ability, when everything starts going wrong, to find their way back to what they already know.

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The Den-Den Daiko Effect

Perhaps there’s a name for the idea:

THE DEN-DEN DAIKO EFFECT

Trigger → Remember → Reset → Perform

And perhaps somewhere inside that concept there’s a very simple new snooker coaching aid waiting to be built.

A miniature cue.

A pivot.

A smooth movement.

Nothing digital.

Nothing particularly sophisticated.

Just an object carrying one message:

REMEMBER THE BASICS.

Because sometimes the smartest coaching technology in the room…

might not be technology at all.