That Basketball Life

 The 5th of the 5 Pillars of Process is Trust.  Trust is a 2 way street.  The players on the team have to trust the coach and the coach needs to trust the players.  There is no compromise in this relationship between players and coaches.  If a player does not trust the coach the pillars and the team crumbles and vice versa.  This entry is about this trust and how to build, and nurture it. To start with, players need to trust the coach.  Players begin to trust the coach when they hear his voice and respect and are willing to do what he wants them to do.  Every practice drill the players do, they do with effort and skill because they want to please the coach and do everything they can to stand out.  When the coach is in the room and ready to speak they are ready to listen and adsorb everything that he has to say.  How does a coach gain such respect from his team?  Below are a few criteria: Set expectations and rules from the very firs...

Below are 3 lists that I have created which will help greatly with ball handling.  Phase 1 is the easiest and phase 3 the toughest.  All 3 are advanced so the ball handler who is new to the game will have some difficulties doing the phases.    

 I've been coaching for a very long time but I've always made it a point to approach coaching with the attitude of  "you don't know everything."  I was coaching a game last night and my team was giving up a lot of height to the opposition.  At the same time, the other team were not good shooters from the outside so we decided to play a 2-3 zone and pack it in.  This would serve the dual purpose of having all 5 of our boys crash the boards and protect the paint from the height difference we were dealing with.   The zone worked fairly well.  The rebounding was okay and the outside shooting by the other team kept us in the game as it was poor.  At about the 3 minute mark of the 4th quarter we found ourselves down 6 points and we decided that we would no longer be in the packed in zone but would rather go man to man and extend full court.  This change of defense caught the other team off guard and got me thinking.  How much did the chan...

The 4th Pillar of Process is teamwork.  Like all of the pillars, teamwork is very important.  With teamwork, the group of individuals which make the team form one cohesive unit.  Without teamwork, the group of parts remains a group of individual parts not coming together for a common goal.  The biggest destroyer of teamwork is hidden agendas, followed by cliques, selfish individuals, and coaches with hidden agendas.  These team wreckers can cause huge problems with your team and you need to be aware of them and nip them in the bud.  Let's talk about each of them individually and then discuss how we can build teamwork and nurture it. Hidden Agendas - Hidden agendas are plots by players on the team to exclude or undermine the success of one or more of their teammates.  The reason for such actions can be jealousy, uneasiness that the other player may shine and be better than them, or simply bullying in another form.  Whatever the reason, it needs to ...

 The 3rd Pillar of Process is evaluation.  Evaluation is a very important pillar because as a coach you need to be evaluating your team, it's individual players, and yourself objectively very often during the year.  The evaluation needs to be brutally honest but delivered in a way where it does not disturb the energy of the team.  In short, execution + evaluation = progress and that is what we strive for. There are 3 areas of evaluation involved when talking about the pillars.  The 3 areas of evaluation are the team, the individuals, and the coaching staff.   When dealing with the team, the coach needs to evaluate 2 areas.  The first is if the identity of the team has been properly identified and that the team style of play we are implementing properly highlights the teams strengths while concealing it's weaknesses.  When evaluating this part of the of the team before the season starts you have to look at scrimmages carefully.  Put the k...