Coaching Toolbox Blog

The Coaching Toolbox turned one year old on March 1 and I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the first year of the site.  This has always been one of my favorite times of the year with high school tournaments in full swing and NCAA March Madness just around the corner, so it seemed like as good a time as any to get the site started at this time last year.  I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I started and I have learned a lot about building and maintaining a website and about life on the Internet over the past year, in addition to continue to learn about the game of basketball and coaching it.

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!