That Basketball Life

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 be uprooted and nipped in the bud. 

 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 kids in situations where you can have ques

   

Pillar 2 of the Pillars of Process is Execution.  Execution is broken down into a few categories.  First are the fundamentals which are broken down into team and individual. After that the fundamentals can be broken down into the physical and the mental.  The next item to be addressed is establishing the identity of your team.  The final point of discussion will be the idea of stacking good games and practices together in an effort to improve. The fundamentals can be broken down into the team and the individual.  Execution is very important to take place on both levels but the 2 are taken care of differently.  On the team level, the whole idea is to play fast so you want to keep things simple and make sure the first layer is grasped before you proceed to a more difficult layer.  If  layer is introduced too early, it can cause the team to bog down and start thinking too much.  When you think on the court, you tend to slow down which is something you don't want.  Introduce all the th