45 Thoughts Basketball Players Must Hear

These are 45 of the 366 thoughts for basketball coaches to share with players that I have compiled.

If you would like to download the entire eBook with all 366 thoughts for players, I would like to ask you to help me let other basketball coaches know about my email service.

1. Toughness is a skill and can be practiced and improved like all other skills.
2. “You should always want your coach to be critical.  It gives you an opportunity to learn and to overcome adversity.” Steve Nash
3. The more things you can do, the harder you are to keep out of the lineup.
4. You either get better or we get worse. You don’t stay the same, so we have to use every practice and workout to get better.
5. Concentrate on effort and execution; the results will take care of themselves.
6. Proper form and a strong work ethic plus preparation and repetition is the formula that makes a great shooter.
7. No excuses, no explanations.
8. Buy in or buy a ticket.
9. Good teams and players give second efforts, great teams give 3rd, 4th, and 5th efforts.
10. The only way for an individual to improve is to work at an uncomfortable pace in practice and during the improvement season (April-September)  If you aren’t uncomfortable, chances are you aren’t improving.
11. Contact from the defense is never an excuse to lose the ball.
12. “There is do and do not, there is no try.”  Yoda in Star Wars
13. “The game honors toughness.” Brad Stevens
14. Expect to get hit hard when you take the ball to the basket.  Don’t get upset.  The best revenge is making the free throws.
15. A player’s goal every practice and every improvement season skill workout should be to improve yourself for the benefit of the team.
16. Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.
17. “Don’t mistake routine for commitment.”  Tommy Amaker. Don’t just show up, but give it everything you’ve got, every single time.
18. Fouling negates hustle.
19. “Anyone who doesn’t make mistakes isn’t working hard enough.”
20. There are two pains in life, the pain of discipline, and the pain of regret. Take your choice.
21. Your energy level is controlled by your thoughts.
22. We rate ability in people by what they finish, not what they start.
23. Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities.  They vary in their desires and how smart and hard they are willing to work to reach their potential.
24. The best offensive players have ball in their hand as long as they need to…not as long as they want to.
25. “Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.” Michelangelo
26. Play Hard, Play Smart and Play Together”. Hard means with effort, determination and courage; Smart means with proper execution and poise, Together means unselfishly, trusting your teammates and doing everything possible not to let them down.
27. “We all need a daily check up from the neck up to avoid stinkin thinkin which ultimately leads to hardening of the attitudes.”  Zig Ziglar
28. “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”  Epectetus
29. You don’t have to be bad to change.  All too often, people resist change because they assume it means they were not OK to begin with.
30. It takes 21 days of conscious repetition before anything becomes a habit.
31. “False Hustle = cheap fouls, lunging, reaching, etc.” Billy Donovan
32. If you think small things don’t matter, think of the last game you lost by one point.
33. Teamwork: The fuel that produces uncommon results in common people.
34. Good enough is neither.
35. R.E.P.S.- Repetition Elevates Personal Skills.
36. “A person really doesn’t become whole, until he becomes a part of something that’s bigger than himself.”  Jim Valvano
37. “Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”  Jose Ortega y Gassett
38. “Your toughest competition in life is anyone who is willing to work harder than you.”
39. “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get from it, but what they become by it.” John Ruskin
40. The best way to improve your shooting percentage is to take better shots.
41. Life is like a bucket of water.  We are a part of the whole.  But how big is the hole that is left when we take away a large cup of water?  The hole suddenly fills up and…so life goes.  The nature of life is that there is always someone who can and will take your place, when you think you are irreplaceable.
42. It’s not the hours you put in, it’s what you put in the hours.
43. Victory or defeat is not determined at the moment of crisis, but rather in the long and unspectacular period of preparation.
44. “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” Jacob August Riis
45. This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.  There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.  Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.  Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.  Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job.  Everybody thought Anybody could do it but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.  It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

These are 45 of the 366 thoughts for basketball coaches to share with players that I have compiled.