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Friday, September 27, 2019

Basketball: Leave Your Comfort Zone

"My name is on plenty of wrong papers." - Albert Einstein 

In Tribe of Mentors, Tim Ferriss asks Janna Levin about failure. "We discourage failure and by doing so we subtly discourage success."

Life overcomes a failure narrative. A child walks after falling on many tries. An Olympic gold medalist figure skater endures 20,000 falls. J.K. Rowling had her first Harry Potter manuscript rejected over a dozen times. Obstacles are the way. 

In medical training, we expressed it as "See one, do one, teach one." 



Challenge players to leave their comfort zone. Higher tempo, combination moves, advantage-disadvantage, and constraints in space and time all grow players. Becoming comfortable with discomfort means playing harder, faster, in dicier situations. It can mean scheduling better competition, especially on the road, and taking your lumps. 

For some players, it means "playing up" above their AAU age. For others, it means playing against your older brothers or your father. For many, it means playing the guys at the park, not with buddies. For the UCONN women, it's their nemesis, the men's team assembled to battle them daily. 



Drills like "Celtics 32" give players opportunity to establish their personal best and to compete against teammates (team best). Adding time constraint ups the difficulty. 



"Gauntlet" exposes players to four levels of pressure. Defenders stay in their area and offense must advance the ball. I usually limit ballhandlers to one or two dribbles per catch. Defenders rotate up and the offense becomes defense. 

We tell our story every day. Capture and expand on ideas. Elevate players. Stay humble. Beating on inferior competition reflects vanity. To raise others up, grow ourselves. 


Lagniappe: via @BBallImmersion (Diamond sets)...this might also be a fine drill. 
Lagniappe 2: Dean Smith run-and-jump via Coach Collins. Our young players were not ready to implement this last season. 

Lagniappe 3: We choose one or the other every day.