March 20 Tom Izzo Quick Strike A video of a Full Court Transition Play

March 19 Billy Gillispie: Practice Like a National Champion Article from the Team Scout website

March 18 8 Leadership Lessons from Mom Article from the Janssen Center for Sports Leadership

March 17 Underneath the Basket Out of Bounds Play Diagram from Coach Creighton Burns’ Newsletter

March 16 The Basketball Coach’s 3 Most Costly Mistakes Article written by Coach Randy Brown

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of resources for basketball coaching including basketball practice, basketball plays, basketball drills, basketball quotes, basketball workouts, basketball poems, and more!

But, the most enjoyable part of working on the site has been having the opportunity to correspond with basketball coaches and players from around the world and at varied levels of coaching through the site.  It has given me another reason to stay in touch with former players who are now coaching, coaches I have coached with, coaches I have coached against, and coaches who publish other basketball websites.  I have even developed a friendship with Coach Josh Stinson from Perfect Practice as we have worked together on HoopClinics.

My goal each week is to throw out some ideas in the daily e-mails from various coaching topics, some that I have used and some that I don’t use, but that I hope the visitors to the site and the newsletter subscribers might be able to use.  Each week my plan is to vary what I send out, but to put out a defensive topic, an offensive topic, a drill, something on leadership/inspiration, and something on program development.  I know that not every e-mail is going to be used by every coach every day, but I hope that by offering a variety, everyone can find something they like and that fits their coaching situation and the abilities of the players they coach. I strive to mix up the delivery method and offer some videos, some written ideas, some of my interpretations and adaptations of coaching concepts, some ideas from other websites or newsletters, and anything else I can think of to offer variety and that you might find useful.

I have done my best to keep up with the feedback and requests.  I appreciate all of them, and know that it is one area that I want to improve on in the coming year.  Please feel free to leave an ideas that you would like to see explored in the coming year in the comments below.

There have been a couple of side benefits from doing this project.   One is that I have been discovered on face book by several students that I taught as a classroom teacher and friends that I had lost touch with.  I have enjoyed corresponding with them as well.  The second is that we are putting together a reunion for this coming summer of our players, managers, and coaching staff from a school that I coached at 10 years ago.  I am really looking forward to that!

For the most part, things have gone well.  There are always problems in any project and I am still learning how to get all of the e-mails through and help each of you be able to open the videos.  I know that many servers block some of the channels that I use because others use them to send out offensive and unsolicited e-mails.  I will continue to work to improve those things.

I do thank you for the time that each of you have taken to look at the site and the e-mails and for the feedback you have offered.  Please leave a comment below if you have any suggestions for the coming year.  I still have a long way to go to meet my goals of the number of visitors per day and the number of subscribers to the newsletters, so anything you can do to let others know about the site who might be interested in taking a look would be appreciated!

Brian

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of resources for basketball coaching including basketball practice, basketball plays, basketball drills, basketball quotes, basketball workouts, basketball poems, and more!

I have not written much on the blog during the month of July because Coach Josh Stinson from www.perfectpractice.net have been working on a partnership that we are calling Hoopclinics. The first product of our partnership will roll out this Friday, August 1. We will be announcing how and where you can see it on that date.

On a personal note, I would also like to take the chance to congratulate Jon Everingham, who I had the pleasure to coach as his assistant high school coach, on becoming the new head boys’ coach at Dekalb High School. Dekalb is a large classification school in northeastern Indiana whose most famous basketball alumnus is Luke Recker who was the 1997 Indiana Mr. Basketball and then played at Indiana and Iowa collegiately. Good luck Coach!

As all of you who are coaches know, there are very few relationships and friendships that mean as much as the bond that forms between players and coaches. To me, that is the best thing about coaching and what makes the difficult times worth it. The memories of the good times together are priceless and then being able to stay connected today is so much easier with web 2.0 and the various social medias, instant messaging etc… i never thought that I would have a facebook page, but I have really enjoyed being able to stay in touch with a lot of players that I coached.

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for the HoopClinics info on Friday!

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

I just wanted to take a few paragraphs to recap some of the highlights of the month of June and look forward to where we are headed in the coming months.

June was a very good month at the Coaching Toolbox. It was our fourth month online and each one seems to be getting better than the month before. We know that typically, basketball coaching sites do not get as much traffic in the summer as they do during the rest of the year, so we want to thank all of you who have been visiting and supporting our site. Our e-mail list continues to grow and we are excited about the opportunity to interact with more coaches and players. Please e-mail us or leave any comments that you want to here on the blog as to how we can make the site better for you.

We began the month with the release of our first e-book 130 Great Ideas to Get a Lot More Accomplished in Practice. It has our best ideas on how to make basketball practice better.

With a lot of help from my wife, we added a Facebook Page and have already attracted some fans on the page. If you have an account, you can click on Facebook Page. To me, the most enjoyable part of doing the site is the interactions that I have had with coaches and players from all over the world. I even e-mailed back and forth with a coach that I found out was my cousin’s college roommate! I have also appreciated the contributions that you have made. Myles Robinson has contributed some ideas for basketball players, one of our basketball quotes, and a basketball workout. You all have been a fun group to get to know!

We felt that our only teleseminar for June was a great one and we were very appreciative that Coach Bruce Weber of the University of Illinois took time to talk to us about making basketball practice more competitive.

One of the last things that took place in June is going to have a very positive impact in the coming months. Our relationship with Coach Josh Stinson of Perfect Practice is going to be a very good one for everyone and we hope most of all it will be good for the basketball coaching community. We will be posting more information about our current project in the coming weeks.

Well, I guess that is enough reminiscing about June, I better get to work if we are going to make July even better than June!

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

I know it has been way too long between posts and I guess as the saying goes, “excuses are like noses, everyone has one, and they smell.” Maybe I should add that to our basketball quotes section! We have been working on a couple of projects, and took a few days off too. Hey, everyone needs a vacation, even coaches!

We are very appreciative to all of you who have purchased our e-book–130 Great Ideas to Get a Lot More Accomplished in Practice. We sincerely hope it will make a difference in your basketball practice next season.  We have had some problems with the shopping cart which we have spent a lot of time working to correct. We think that we are close to having it worked out. And as luck would have it, we have not been having as many problems with our purchases the last few days. I guess that’s the way things work.

We have been working on some new basketball drills videos to put on the site and those should be posted within the coming weeks.

We have spent a lot of time working with coach Josh Stinson of Perfect Practice on a project that we think is really going to be some good content for our visitors. Coach Stinson and I are both excited about this project. If you haven’t been to his site, it is definitely worth the visit. He has a lot of great basketball coaching content for basketball coaches of all levels. He has a newsletter that you can sign up for and receive a free 36 page pdf e-book on his version of the 2-2-1 full court press. You will find the newsletter that you will then begin receiving to be a very valuable basketball coaching tool as well.  Click on this link to see his site:  Perfect Practice

Josh has put together 25 minute video about the flex offense. You can watch it here: Josh Stinson Flex. It is one of the best put together coaching resources I have seen. Even if you don’t run the flex offense, it is worth taking a look at. I hate to admit it, but it is a lot better presentation than our animated basketball plays version of flex. It has definitely given us some ideas on improving the animated basketball plays section of our site.

I promise that it won’t be so long next time between postings. Our next one will be our June wrap up.  Thanks for your patience!

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

We stated that one of our goals for The Coaching Toolbox in May was to increase the traffic on the Toolblog. We did that, and went through a couple of set backs. We lost all of the comments that you left, which was one of the setbacks. We appreciated those comments very much and it was not our intention to delete them. I am not sure what happened, but my theory is that I did it accidentally when trying to delete some spam. I am looking into how I can back up our blog data, even though it is hosted on our server and not on my system that I do the posts from. Live and learn. I better go back and read my Tool of the Day dealing with playing through mistakes. Anyway, we are working to make this a useful site to all of you and again, thanks for the comments while they lasted. We hope to get those flowing again this month.

Last week our focus was on posting some ideas to make your basketball practices better with ideas for establishing the mindset of a champion in everyone that takes the practice floor every day in your program. This week it will be back to the random ramblings, just like normal…

Just to keep in the spirit of the NBA finals, starting last Thursday, our basketball quotes will be from Laker and Celtic greats–we will alternate each day until the finals are over. I guess we are lucky that they both have a history of quotable players and coaches. I really enjoyed those matchups in the 80s, probably partly because we in Indiana were proud of Larry Bird. Prior to that I remember rooting against the Celtics when I was very young because I was a Milwaukee Buck fan as another one of our Hoosier legends, Oscar Robertson, was finishing up his pro career. I don’t really have a favorite in this series, I would just like to see it go seven games and go down to the last possession of the last game. That isn’t too much to ask for, is it?

Thanks to all of you for supporting The Coaching Toolbox. We are striving to keep posting useful ideas that we have come across for you. It just isn’t going up as fast as we would like, but I guess that striving to improve and become the best you can be is really what basketball is all about.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

We have summer written our “workout” plans and goals here at the Coaching Toolbox, just like we are encouraging basketball players and basketball coaches to have as well. We hope that we can all work together and help each other to reach our goals. We are busy completing writing our goals for the month of June and are looking forward to each of you being a part of those goals with us.

Certainly, we are going to continue with everything that we have been doing, and are looking to add one more way for our visitors to contribute ideas. We have read and responded to all of the e-mails that you have sent with suggestions, have improved the quantity of our blog posts and appreciate the comments that you have left. One goal for June is to double the number of guest contributions that we are able to post, so if you have anything to contribute, it would be great to hear from you. We want to continue to work at building a community of basketball coaches and basketball players who are dedicated to sharing basketball ideas.

We have had some requests for more information in the form of e-books and we are currently working on that project. We will have our first finished product, ideas for improving basketball practice, ready early in June.

The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.

Our rule is that a player must come out who picks up the third foul in the first half.  Some coaches have a steadfast rule of two fouls in the first half and you sit.  We understand the thinking of sitting him or her with two, but feel that it is crucial to have your impact players on the floor for as many minutes as possible.  More than likely, you are going to take each player out at some point during the first half, and that time that the player with two fouls sits out for rest is all we feel is needed to protect another foul.

The philosophy we employ is that we want to squeeze every second of playing time that we can.  If after reviewing the stat sheet at the end of a game and we see that a player sat out more than the normal rest due to fouls, but only ended up with three or four fouls, we like that player should have played more rather than sat. 

With four fouls our rule is bring them back with 4:00 to go in the game.  At that point, offense/defense substitutions and substituting foulers if the situation calls for it is the way to go.  Let us know how you handle foul trouble and hopefully someone can benefit from what you think.

Thank you for supporting our site and being patient with our growing pains.  It has been a lot of fun putting it together and having an opportunity to correspond with some really nice people.  We had almost 7900 visits in April and are on a pace this first week of May, if we can maintain it, for 10,000 this month.  Our Tool of the Day now has 648 subscribers and grows daily.

The Xs and Os of Basketball is a great forum with several discussion topics going at once including career advice, technology, transition offense, half court offense, zone defense, a forum to trade coaching resources, and many other intersting and useful topics.

We broke our record for visits on Friday April 18, with 933 visitors. The previous high we had for one days was 383. With that increased number of visitors, we now have 278 subscribers to our Tool of the Day e-mail. Our total visitors for April is over 4,000, so we hope that we will be able to reach our Goal of 6,000 visitors for the month. For those of you who have visited our site, we appreciate you looking at our information. For those of you who haven’t, drop by The Coaching Toolbox and take a look!