Who is our audience? An NBA conversation has different depth than occurs in middle school. Both are valid, but stay in our lanes.
Don't lose your audience. A senior physician asked a clinical fellow (advanced trainee), "what is the speciation of the organism?" The fellow answered, "I don't know." The Great Man (world famous doc) said, "You don't know because you don't care." Don't publicly humiliate subordinates. I don't remember the fellow, but I'll never forget the senior physician. There's no excuse to "lose" players, especially youth.
"Everybody knows that." Coach Wooden reminds us, "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts."
"Zone defense doesn't work in the pros." Why don't more NBA teams play zone defense? We can postulate that the spacing, ball movement, and perimeter shooting of NBA teams beats the zone. Is that true? Pro sports are copycats and dead dogs. Kevin O'Connor addresses the use of zone defense, highlighting brief successes by the Nets against James Harden and the Rockets. "Houston plays at a slow, deliberate pace, runs pick-and-roll on nearly every possession, and passes the ball less than all but one team in the NBA (Oklahoma City). But they dribbled less and passed more against Brooklyn. The freaking Nets made the freaking Rockets totally change their hallmark style simply by running a zone."
Defensive communication - ELO, early, loud, often - just happens. Al Horford says (Boston Sports Journal), “Today I wasn’t very happy with my performance. I felt like I wasn’t that presence I needed to be on the defensive end, and it was a lot of miscommunications. And I take blame for that, and I need to be better — "
Be concrete and consistent. "Don't confuse players." Drop to the level of the ball. If you're at the nail, you can help on the drive, limit penetration, and still recover.
The help cannot get beat. "The ball scores."
We're too inexperience to have this defensive sophistication (tagging cutters).
We need a "system of help" understood by everyone. We're not there.
Ego blocks our communication, our connection, our teaching. Choose to overcome obstacles. “Overcoming obstacles is a discipline of three critical steps. It begins with how we look at our specific problems, our attitude or approach; then the energy and creativity with which we actively break them down and turn them into opportunities; finally, the cultivation and maintenance of an inner will that allows us to handle defeat and difficulty”. ATTITUDE, CHOICES, EFFORT.
Authenticity is great, unless we're authentically jerks.
Lagniappe:
You've all seen Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success. A former player's mother informed me that her daughter carried it to school EVERY DAY in her gym bag during high school. Her daughter is now a second-year at the Naval Academy.