Filing Cabinet

These basketball coaching thoughts came from Army Men’s Assistant Zak Boisvert’s PickandPop.net site.

Got a chance to spend some time talking/studying some some great coaches this past month. Below are the favorite things I stole:

Billy Donovan, Oklahoma City Thunder Head Coach: Character from outside the lines drives winning inside the lines.

Flip Saunders, Minnesota Timberwolves Head Coach: It doesn’t matter what position he plays. He’s a player. Good teams have guys that can play multiple positions. It makes them harder to guard. Besides, it’s not what position you play. It’s what position you can guard.

John Alesi, Baruch College Head Coach: On a flat hedge versus a midddle ball screen, bigs have a tendency to just keep on dropping (back pedaling). As that hedge man, you must stay parallel, string him out and hold your edge.

Bobby Petrino, Louisville Head Football Coach: Feed the peasants during practice. Get everybody reps, develop guys, spread the ball around. But in-game it’s about getting the ball to the guys who you trust to make you your money (get the ball to your playmakers).

Stan Van Gundy, Detroit Pistons Head Coach: If you sit back and look at the teams that are really good defensively, you see length. That length makes a huge difference what you can do defensively.

Mark Daigneault, Oklahoma City Blue Head Coach: The pros are different. In college/high school, if you slip on player development and focus on the technical, your players are simply never going to be good enough. You’ll execute but the players simply won’t be good enough to get you to the top of your league. Never forget the development side, never neglect to teach.

Micah Hayes, PGC Basketball: If you had enough time to shot fake, you had enough time to shoot.

Pat Clatchey, Mount St Joseph Head Coach: Sometimes the best thing you can do for a young player is give him someone to look up to. Maybe you’re telling a JV kid he reminds you of a varsity kid when they were the same age, maybe it’s texting one of your starters to watch an NBA/college star closely.

Mike Young, Wofford College Head Coach: Stress to your players the importance of BLOBs. There are around 6 points available each game. Make sure your players understand that being good in this area can make the difference between winning and losing.

Jared Grasso, Iona College Associate Head Coach: Make sure as a coaching staff that you are always talking about to your guys about the importance of work ethic, the shape you need to be in, and the importance of daily work.

Chris Harney, St. Mary’s Head Coach: When playing zone, you must be be faster going in (retreating as ball is reversed away from you) than you were coming out (to closeout).

Chip Kelly, Philadelphia Eagles Head Coach: If your system isn’t a QB-friendly system, get a new system.

John Gallagher, Hartford Head Coach: The longer you go in the season, the smaller you play (in order to get your best players on the court).

The following are more bullet points from the Billy Donovan Player Development Article.

Individual instruction is a year-round project at Florida. If you’re only running skill sessions outside the season,
your players’ games will suffer.

You CANNOT rely on your practices to keep your players’ skill sets polished. Do yourself a favor and chart how many shots your guards get up during your next 2-hour practice.

Chart everything during individual instruction.

Post all shooting % numbers (post daily-weekly-yearly)

Great to be able to point to tangible evidence when trying to explain to a kid why he’s always open.

We don’t want to put our players in a box, but we want them to have a realistic understanding of where they’re at.

Hates shooting for the sake of shots (“Getting shots up” makes me sick)

Competitive pressure or goal pressure

Game speed + charting of all shots taken!

If there are 2 or more players in a drill, the players pass (coaches don’t)

Bad passes take guys out of their shots

Throw to inside shoulder

We want to fatigue our shooters.

“Beat the pass”…shot-ready

1:00, make as many shots as you can (whether it’s from one spot or going back-and-forth between two spots).

These are some of the notes presented by Matt Doherty at a PGC/Glazier Basketball coaching Clinic.

Matt is the former Head Coach at Notre Dame, North Carolina, Florida Atlantic, and Southern Methodist. He currently is a scout for the Indiana Pacers.

The Art of Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Presenter Matt Doherty (Indiana Pacers Scout and former D1 Men’s Head Coach)

Coaches are in the people business

The art of coaching vs. the science of coaching

The art of coaching is more important. X and O’s are secondary.
Without the players feeling good about being a part of the team,
the X and O’s don’t matter.

This is not about us (the coaches)

People will judge you on first impressions and then discount you going forward.

– First 90 days on the job (or the first few weeks of a new school year for high school and middle school coaches with incoming freshman and all new players & parents)
-If you come off as rude, but you are not, people will use that as your default personality even if you are a good person in the future

Servant Leadership

– Serve the people you are leading
– What is in it for them?
– How are you going to make their lives better?
-Off the court you do what is in their best interests. On the court you do what is in the team’s best interest
-Be the model they can respect and look up to when it comes to drinking, cursing, womanizing, and all areas of behavior
-They are watching how you treat people -­‐ family, janitors, women, your children
-Ask your players and assistant coaches what they need to be successful and then do everything you can to provide those things.

Communication

50% Body Language
35% Tone
15% Content
Stand behind players
Praise in public, criticize in private

Primal Leadership: The Art of Emotional Leadership is a great book for leaders
Leadership is a learned behavior

Praise the actions you want repeated

Skill set often flips when you are an assistant and become a head coach.  You have to move into new areas of responsibility and will need to delegate which involves giving up some control.

Spend time with your people and connect
– Sit down
– Get on their level (physically)
○ Eliminate all distractions
– Have a sitting area without distractions

Staff meetings

-Include everyone when possible
-Ask the youngest assistant to answer first as he/she might have the best answer and then won’t be intimidated by someone else’s answer
-Agree to disagree but when you leave that room we are all on the same page

Hire coaches that are loyal to you.  You can teach someone how to guard PNR, but can’t teach them to love you

Let players decide on things that don’t really matter to you

-Meals
-Practice times
-Uniforms, sneakers, practice gear

Have a mission statement

-Develop young people
-Positively impact the community
-Win Basketball Games

Year end evaluations
○ You write things down
○ Staff rights things down
○ Put a list together and you both sign it
○ Unemotional event
○ File it
○ Intermittent meetings during the year.
○ Coach your coaches

These are some of the notes presented at a PGC/Glazier Basketball coaching Clinic.

Secrets to Getting Your Players Minds Right and Motivation

Speaker Scott Savor (Owner/President Secrets in Sports)

Don’t separate the mind from the body
What is going on in your mind is a big deal.
Play present: Where are you? (I’m here) What time is it? (It’s now)

Challenge yourself every day not to be boring to your players!
A coach must be an introvert and an extrovert and know when each is required
When a player or coach doubles their volume, they double their value
“How dare you not change when the environment demands it.” Nelson Mandela

In 2009, the average teenage attention span was 12 seconds, not it is 8 seconds
Catch a players’ eye and command their ears

When a coach or a player messes up:

1) Forget fears and feeling and redirect energy
2) Focus on what is in front of your face
3) Do the next best thing

Demand that players with their eyes and toes (10 toes to the speaker), as well as their ears
We teach what we do, but we reproduce who we are

In 2014 the number one lack of motivation for players was lack of interest or boredom

Consider providing some autonomy at times (not all the time) such as “What drill do you want to do next?”

At the end of practice, ask for requests for a drill or two for tomorrow’s practice

Find ways to measure mastery so that players can see their improvement.

Help players understand the purpose in what you are doing.

Use countdowns such as “30 seconds left in the drill!” or counting backwards on a set number of executions in a drill (example: defense needs to get 7 rebounds to complete the drill, “6 more” after the first rebound). It helps maintain focus. Can’t use this all the time, but use it once or twice a practice. Come up with other ways to use counting backwards in your drills.

Use the Edison rule: “Make all plans and problems public.”

Give reminders to each other of what cannot be forgotten or overlooked. It’s not always what you don’t know yet, but the important things you have forgotten that holds you back.

Here are some more of Scott’s thoughts on coaching

Look at your program, at your practice, your games from both the balcony and the floor at once.

Helping players play present: Where are we? “Here” What time is it? “Now”

When a mistake is made, forget feelings and fears and redirect your energy. Focus on what is in front of your face and do the next best thing.

These are a few of my takeaways from my latest reading on Bob Starkey’s HoopThoughts. If it is not on your regular reading list, I recommend to add it. There are great articles on all aspects of coaching basketball.

From his articles on Kevin Eastman

Special players hold themselves accountable…

…don’t blame others first; instead, they look first for what they contributed (or did not contribute) to the situation.

…don’t complain; instead they look for ways to correct things that aren’t working.

…don’t procrastinate; get things done now.

…always give more than they ask of others.

…always look to take on as much as they can handle, rather than look to pass things on to others all the time.

…are constantly trying to improve their game as they can bring more to the team and constantly fulfill their role.

…are self starters and study the game (and themselves) enough to know what needs to be done; then do about doing it.

…do the un-required work, knowing that it simply needs to be done — extra shots, extra weights, extra film watching, etc. without constantly needing to be told by a coach.

…hold others accountable for their jobs and roles because they know the importance of accountability as it relates to winning; this creates a collective responsibility.

…always be among the most trusted players on the team — by coaches and players.

Characteristics a coach needs. One or more are characteristics that I think may be overlooked.

1. Respect -­‐ I believe that the greater respect the coach commands, the easier it is to ensure buy-­‐in from his or her players. And the more often you can get your team to buy in, the more you’re going to see them do what you want them to do. I’ve always tried to gain respect by outworking others in the business and trying to learn as much as I can at the place and position I’m in. Work ethic and this continuing search for knowledge have been keys to my ability to gain respect.

2. Relationships -­‐ I believe relationships are the foundation for success in any field. As a coach, you need to get to know your team, get to know about your team, talk to your players in good times and bad, let your players know you care about them, and develop a trust with your players.

3. Curiosity -­‐ It seems to me that the most successful people in any business have an insatiable intellectual curiosity about their field. They talk to the best in the business, they read about others, they listen to CDs and DVDs, they want to know what the best are doing and how it can relate to them and their programs, and they are curious to know what you know and how it can fit in to enhance their program or business.

4. Ability to motivate -­‐ Motivation is an aspect of coaching that requires coaches to constantly “read” what’s needed for their team and any given player on a daily basis. It also requires a great deal of thought and study in order to find new ways to accomplish these tasks. Find out what makes a player tick and then create ways to motivate him to get the most out of him each day. And be able to recognize when it’s a new day that needs a new motivator -­‐-­‐ even for the same player who responded yesterday!

“No matter how much we know on any subject, there’s always more to learn. Make the time to read, to study, and to think; each of these is important to your development. We all need to keep up with what’s going on in our field, too. I’ve found that news and magazine articles can be as helpful as books in this regard. The key is to keep searching so that you stay gain knowledge, improve, and stay relevant!”

Coaches expect and demand things of our players — especially those things they can control like attitude, effort and intensity. And then he talked about how we must demand it of ourselves first:

1. Coaches must maintain their intensity everyday.
2. A coach can never get bored.
3. The intensity that a coach brings to the floor helps the player have a more intense workout.
4. Coaches have body language too. Be careful of your body language, and how it could be interpreted by your players.

From Jack Clark, Cal Rugby Coach
(From an article written by Jen Sinkler)

“You and I could go to the sports page today and open it up and see some sports team calling themselves a family. It’s what everyone does nowadays — they call themselves a family. In reality, it grates on me a little bit because my concept of family is unconditional. There’s my screw-up brother down in Huntington Beach. I love him, but you don’t want him on your team, I promise you. Family means unconditional, whereas high-performance teams are highly, highly conditional organizations.”

“I think what matters most — outside of talent — would probably be the culture of the team: developing a really resilient, embedded team culture around performance. It’s like anything else: You’ve got to rep it. You’ve got to talk about it on day one and day five and in the middle of the season and at the end of the season.”

I think this is an underrated and overlook part of culture. I once heard Doc Rivers say, “You have to protect your team culture. This battle is waged daily.”

In other words, culture, to be successful must be intentionally thought out, planned and executed by all those involved

“We believe in constant performance improvement. We say it’s not just enough to win. That’s kind of an old thing. If you go back to legendary basketball coach John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success, you can get some performance over results. It’s there. We believe that and we believe that we should be getting better. We think that we should accept that burden. If we’re going to work at this as hard as we’re working at it, then we should be getting better from week to week, month to month, match to match. There should be improvement.”

Some thoughts from Hall of Fame Coach Hubie Brown:

1) Developing practice intensity
2) 5 Things to do in a timeout
3) Handling traps

These three videos were taken from Coach Lee DeForest’s Hubie Brown 9 hour video clinic. You can find out more about it by clicking here: Hubie Brown Video Clinic

Please make sure your sound is on to see the videos.

 

Click the play arrow so see the drill. T

he drill is a You Tube video, so you will need to be able to access You Tube to see the drill.

Hubie Brown on Practice Intensity

Hubie Brown 5 Things to Cover During a Timeout

Hubie Brown on What to Do with a Trap

These three videos were taken from Coach Lee DeForest’s Hubie Brown 9 hour video clinic. You can find out more about it by clicking here: Hubie Brown Video Clinic