Total Pageviews

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Basketball: Death By a Thousand Cuts or These Dozen

A thousand things go wrong when coaching. The sum can kill you. Many of them are not preventable.

Death by a thousand cuts was a form of ancient oriental torture and execution. Which is fitting...

1. Lack of talent. What coach has told you, "I have too many good players." The easiest 'out' for a coach is the talent excuse. Sometimes it's legitimate. Player development is a skill worth growing. 

2. Communication. Communication can go wrong between coach and player, coach and assistants, player to player. Those fall into basketball and non-basketball issues. Sometimes people "tune out" others. One college team splintered when straight and gay players couldn't play together. Keep our ears to the ground. 

3. "Page turning." James Patterson says of his books, "the pages turn themselves." In basketball, that's a problem when everyone is "not on the same page" and when people can't "turn the page" after issues arise. 

4. "Sniveling rivalry." Ever had a team where Pietra was jealous of Paola? I can't tell you how often I've heard complaints in the stands about a player's role or their shots. Madeleine Blais' exceptional book In These Girls Hope Is a Muscle documents how solving the rivalry helped unify the Amherst Hurricanes.   

5. Palace intrigue. Coaches undermine other coaches in hope of advancing their careers. Carl Pierson's The Politics of Coaching lays out the many scenarios where conflicts and coups arise. 

6. Force majeure. Sometimes "Acts of God" disrupt a season or a program. One team had a key player with a severe ankle sprain in consecutive postseasons. We lost a future D1 player two weeks before the opener with a season-ending knee injury. 

7. "Death from above." A former state coach of the year confided that an unhappy parent's sizable donation to the school got him canned. The most sensitive nerve in the body? The money nerve. Touch it and everybody jumps. 

8. Selfishness. When "the book" becomes more important than the scoreboard, ugliness happens. Some are saying the Spurs wouldn't pass to Wemby. I call that 'scorebook over scoreboard'. 

9. Identity crisis. Teams need to know who they are. Are they balanced, a running team, pressing team, defensive stalwarts? Some teams find neither an identity nor success. There's no easy answer but strong player-led leadership helps. 

10."A Sense of Where You Are." John McPhee wrote a book about sixty years ago about Bill Bradley and the Princeton Tigers. Bradley knew who he was and what was needed..."set a schedule for himself that he adhered to for four full years—in the school year, three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day.” Don't expect once in a million commitment from our players. And don't apply NBA concepts and statistics to our youth teams. Know where you are. 

11. Low basketball IQ. You know it when you see it. When my daughters were being looked at by then Tufts coach Carla Berube, she said, "they know how to play." 

12. Turnovers. My coach said, "the ball is gold." Perhaps less optimistic is, "turnovers kill dreams." If you believe in analytics at all, you know the math. Dean Oliver is working on a sequel to "Basketball on Paper," which will surely address this. With middle school players, when we tracked team turnovers, we reduced them about twenty percent. Accountability had an effect. 

Lagniappe. From John Karalis at Boston Sports Journal, "Looking good against a bunch of guys who will never make it in the league doesn’t mean a player will look good against a bunch of guys who have been very successful in the league. It just means they have a chance to prove themselves against better talent." 

Lagniappe 2. Rotella. 


Posted by at