Don Meyer discussed the three phases of coaching - blind enthusiasm, sophisticated complexity, and mature simplicity. The game is neither simple nor easy, but work to make it simpler and easier. How can we translate words into teaching youth?
Add value to get buy in. Emphasis and priorities. The first priorities are family and school. Basketball is always secondary.
The emphasis is progression of fundamental skills. Find drills you like that reinforce concepts and skills.
Spacing is emphasized at the initiation of the warmup drill.
Combination (Multipurpose)
Dribble, backdribble, crossover, repeat. Pass, cut hard into give-and-go to finish.
Shooting. Patron saint of lost causes is enforcing warmups and form shooting.
Skip ahead to about 1 minute. I want players to make 3-5 consecutive form shots and then step back about two feet and repeat. This presumes we've already reviewed proper technique. Herb sharing technical video goes a long way in this regard.
Communication. In addition to increasing "talk" on the floor, close the loop with feedback. Years ago our high school team lost a championship game because we failed to confirm "obvious" strategy. Leading by one late with little time left a player took a shot and missed only to see the opposition score at the buzzer to win. There's a story about a father who asked his son to wash his new car and gave him a bucket, sponge, soap, and rags. The son used the abrasive side of the sponge and ruined the finish. The father was angry and yelled at the son. Shortly thereafter, he apologized. "It's my fault; I didn't teach you the right way to do the job."
Bob Knight has an exercise where he calls a timeout during practice, diagrams a play, and then distributes paper and markers to every player to draw the play. Coach and players get immediate feedback of who listened and processed the information.
Track. A coach held tryouts and recorded measurements of speed, strength, and vertical jump. When his child didn't make the team, an angry parent questioned the coach's selections. The coach answered that in addition to struggling in her play, the player finished last in each measured metric. Damon Runyan wrote, "the race is not always to the swiftest or the battle to the strongest, but it pays to bet that way." "Coaches' eyes" are more objective than parents'. But tracking helps prove it.
Rich Hickey shared, "Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around."
