Growth demands learning. Is it better to be vulnerable or validated?
It depends...on which helps pull another rabbit from another hat.
Coaches have escalating goals - good practices, improved play, winning games, winning seasons, league titles, championships. What if we knew which tools aid ultimate goals at the expense of lower ones?
Celebrate bad early losses to preempt painful late ones. Choose one:
- Undefeated regular season, win three playoff games with sectional game one point loss at the buzzer
- Regular season losses dispensing lessons leading to sectional title
Some teams win too many noncompetitive games and lose out on learning to win close games. Sacrifice lesser losses for bigger wins. "I missed the rabbit but bagged the deer." A weak schedule can bite us.
Mean losses justify end wins.
Don't bury the metaphorical hatchet. Use it to cut dead limbs or sculpt beauty from ugliness.
It's easy to reject pain. Comforting. But we have to exorcise self-destructive behaviors defining defeat. How?
"No pain, no gain."
- Lack of knowledge - teach and study
- Lack of experience - "I didn't know that could happen."
- Lack of conditioning - condition within practice, with the ball
- Lack of effort - reassign minutes to higher motor players
- Lack of judgment - practice and study video (? study practice video)
- Lack of belief or acceptance - "what happened didn't happen"
With proper analysis and correction, improved performance should follow although to what degree variable.
Develop a process.
- What problem or problems caused us to lose? "NFL Monday"
- Share and discuss those problems.
- Retrain players (easier said than done).
- Measure the response (e.g. turnovers, bad fouls, bad shots, bad decisions, transition scores allowed, etc.)
Lagniappe. Must see video from Basketball Immersion... why? It helps us offensively with concepts or defensively because most teams use spread offenses in some format or another.
Maybe the best way to study would be to go to youtubetrimmer.com and break out some of the actions you like (see below).
Lagniappe 2. Diagram from Auburn "Flex Like" set starting as 1-3-1
