That Basketball Life

There are 4 ways to build a player's confidence.  The 4 are listed and explained in detail below. Talk about the butterflies in the stomach - Explain to your athletes that butterflies in the stomach is the fight or flight response reaction your body is giving you due to the task at hand.  You're body is telling you to evaluate the situation at hand and letting you know that whether you choose to run or fight it is ready to give you everything it has to help you out.  Your body is basically telling you "hey I know there is a challenging situation your are about to face, so I want to let you know that I'm ready to run or stay and fight.  It's your choice."  Another way to think about this is that if you didn't care you wouldn't have butterflies but since you do care you're nervous. Preparation - When you talk to pro players about what goes through their mind when they are preparing to take the last shot of a game, almost all of them say that they fal...

One of my favorite parts of coaching is the actual development of players.  In the many years I have spent coaching, I have had the pleasure to coach kids who were willing to put in the work and who saw benefits from it.  My job as skills coach is to keep the players improving.  We have spoken before about getting players to go beyond their comfort zone into an area of the unknown. An area that may seem awkward to them at the beginning but with constant reps will get easier and more instinctive. The area of unknown has to be very carefully determined.  The area identified can't be too difficult for the kids to perform or else they can get discouraged.  On the other hand, the area can't be too easy as to not challenge the kids.  In order to do this properly there is a sequence that needs to be followed.  The sequence is challenge, evaluate, adjust, execute, and repetition. The first step of the sequence is to challenge.  Set up some basic drills th...

 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 ...