Effort, Execution, Evaluation, Teamwork, and Trust - The 5 Pillars of the Process

 With my last blog entry we introduced the idea of the process.  I also mentioned the 5 pillars of the process and how important it was for every player on the team to focus on the process and to let the wins take care of themselves.  Getting into more detail I mentioned that the process has 5 pillars: effort, execution, evaluation, teamwork, and trust.  What I will do next is discuss these 5 pillars in more detail.

Energy:

Energy is very important and hard work will affect both practice and games in a positive way just like laziness will infect both practice and games.  I've had good teams that were lazy and lost and I've had average teams that worked hard and overachieved.  The one thing a coach needs to realize is that players cannot turn effort on and off.  Players will play the way they practice.  If you practice with effort you will play with effort.  As a coach you need to make sure this pillar permeates all aspects of practice.  It's all about effort.  As a coach, I hate wasting practice time having the kids run sprints.  However over the years I've come to realize that in order to get supreme effort from your team, they need to be in shape.  This is why we run conditioning drills with and without the ball and try to play fast through all of the drills in practice.  This helps accomplish two things.  The first thing it does is allows energy to permeate throughout practice and makes players understand what playing fast is all about.  The second thing it does, is it helps conquer the one thing that always seems to be the enemy of sustained effort and that is having the physical fitness required to exert max effort for a complete game.

We teach players that nobody can take their effort away from them.  If they play a more talented team they may get beat just on pure talent alone but we always try to explain to them that if they bring energy to a game they will always make things difficult regardless of who they play.

We also explain to our team that energy can be both positive or negative.  There are 3 types of negative energy.  The first is defeatist energy.  Nothing is more defeating to a coach than hearing his players be negative.  Hearing players talking about a tough game in a negative fashion hurts a team.  We try to explain to our team that having a defeatist attitude requires as much energy as positive energy but it provides negative results.  The same thing happens with overconfidence, which is another negative energy which damages the team by having them overlook the opposition and not giving them enough respect.  Laziness, as mentioned earlier is the 3rd type of negative energy and allows bad habits to form in a team and can affect both practice and games.

Execution:

Execution is about running the offense, defense, transition, and out of bounds plays.  The cleaner the team executes, the fewer turnovers the team will have, and the more shots they will take increasing their chance of winning.  On defense, if the team executes well and with effort they will force turnovers, they will rebound, and they will disrupt the other teams offense and create more chances.  To simplify things during game days, we tell our team that our goal for every game is to take more shots than we give up.  This tells us a lot about a game.  It tells us if we got out-rebounded, or if we forced more turnovers than committed.

Execution is about running the team concept, it's also about executing the fundamentals.  Work on free throws and layups and then move out to jump shots.  Your focus should be on the plays and executing them perfectly rather than the results.  

When it comes to execution, the mental part of the game is as important as the physical.  The team needs to understand the concepts you are running, why you are running them, and when to run them.  Understanding why the plays are run is important because it makes things easier to learn them.  Repetition is another thing which helps with execution.

One concept that we use with our team related to execution is what we call stacking.  The whole idea of stacking relates to putting together a good practice where the team plays hard and executes what the coaches ran for that given practice.  Once that practice is over the coach will tell the team whether the practice could be stacked or not.  As the season goes on each practice and each game will be stacked or discarded.  We as coaches like to announce whether practices can be stacked.  We find that the effort to stack practices and games help motivate the team to do what needs to be done to make practices and games as fruitful as possible.

Evaluation:

Evaluation is the third pillar.  It is just as important as the other 4.  The reason it is important is because every game, every practice, every workout you have, provides you feedback on how the team did, what the team needs to work on, and how much effort they are exerting.  Properly evaluating your team and yourself are of great importance to the success of any team.  The feedback you get from practice and games means nothing unless you address the negatives and nurture the positives.  You can't stack good practices or games together without brutally honest evaluation and you as a coach should not discard bad practices as those are the ones which may have many answers for you.

Additionally, evaluation goes hand in hand with execution.  Coaches need to evaluate how the team executes and make the necessary adjustments to correct any execution issues the team has.  A good equation we like to use is execution + evaluation = evolution.  If your team executes and the staff properly evaluates what the team is doing wrong then the team evolves.  As a coach you want nothing more than your team to improve as the year goes on.

A good example of evaluating your team is below:

A coach got the opportunity to coach a team and was excited to get started.  He had some great ideas on how what he wanted to teach them on offense and defense and even wanted to show them how to run a simple secondary break.  In his mind he said that he would dazzle the parents of these players with his knowledge and ability to teach these great plays.  As practice started, he started to realize that his team needed a lot of work with the simple things.  His team had problems finishing at the basket, his team had trouble dribbling the basketball, his team had trouble making a shot.  As he began evaluating his team, he started thinking that it might be better to spend valuable practice time working on the fundamentals.  He decided to ditch the idea of teaching many plays on offense and defense and decided to keep things simple by running practices which consisted of 1v0 layups, dribbling, and shooting and slowly exposing the team to 1v1 situations as well as SSG's eventually building to 5v5.  The coach evaluated the ability of his team and he decided to change his plan to one that would better help his team improve.

Teamwork:

Teamwork is about making sure every player and coach on the team is on the same page, that everyone is working for the same cause.  Just remember that the cause is not winning it's about following the process as a team.  It's about picking each other up when you have a bad play, drill, or practice.  It's about supporting each other.  It's about believing in yourself and your teammates.  There is no room for negativity. 

Starting from day 1 of practice we promote supporting each other.  We tell our players that we do not allow cliques on our team. Everyone on the team should be prepared to participate in drills with everyone else on the team for the whole season.  We start every practice with everyone on the team greeting every one of their teammates.  To keep things interesting, we introduce a handshake and then add a new piece to it every week.  We also end every practice with a goodbye greeting.  We do this to remind the players every day that we are one team, and everyone is important.

Another exercise that we do involves having each player take the time to write something positive about each teammate.  Once they do this, they give the paper to the coach who will organize everything and prepare a comment sheet for each player.  These comment sheets are then distributed to each player.  These comments then give each player a feeling of something positive that each of their teammate have to say about them.

One final thing we do to promote teamwork is to organize team outings outside of basketball which can help the team bond outside of the gym.

Trust:

Perhaps the most important pillar of the process is trust.  The best way for a coach to earn his players trust is by having them win.  There is nothing better than winning to keep everyone happy.  Trust interacts with the other 4 pillars and without it all the effort on the other 4 pillars means nothing.  A player needs to trust his coach and a coach needs to trust his players.  Without this trust, players will not respect the coach.  Without trust, players will have doubts about what the coach is saying.  Trust is so important because without it the coach is not a leader.  Have you ever noticed at the end of a coach's reign when the losses are piling up how you get that feeling that the players have tuned the coach out and are no longer playing hard for him? Essentially, he has lost the team.  This is because the trust between the player and the coach is no longer there. As coach, the ultimate trust you will show to your players is accepting their feedback.  Let them talk to you.  Let them make suggestions.  Do not be afraid to ask your players what they are seeing on the floor.  Do not be afraid to ask them for practice drill inputs.  By considering their contribution you are having them invest in the team.  If they are invested in the team, then they truly feel like they are part of that team.  One of the things I like to do is to start practice with a conversation about the team's school day.  This shows them that I care.  I ask them how their weekends were or if they are touching a basketball at home during free time.  This shows them that I care.  I also try not to exclude anyone from the conversations, so I show that I have no favorites.

The same can be said about a player.  The player has to earn trust of the coach.  The coach has to feel comfortable playing the player or he won't play him.  The coach has to be able to trust that the player is a good teammate, or the coach can't play him.  players do this by coming to practice and showing effort on drills and understanding on offense, defense and out of bounds plays.