Wednesday, December 8, 2021

What Baking Wizard Joanne Chang Can Teach Basketball Coaches Plus Great Coaching from Ty Lue

Master analogies. Baking, coaching...it's not that different. Joanne Chang went from Harvard to developing a baking empire in Boston and shares lessons on MasterClass. What specifically can she teach us? (Second chance at the recipe HERE)

Develop essential tools in your kitchen. Not a stand mixer or offset spatula, but methods, for example:

  • Advantage-disadvantage (e.g. five v seven full court)
  • A drill book 
  • Shell drill variations
  • Special situations practice (e.g. during O-D-O scrimmaging)
  • Constraints of space, time, score during practice

Read the recipe from start to finish before beginning. You may find you don't have all the needed ingredients or accessories (e.g. oven thermometer). 

  • Study before planning and preparation
  • Daily film study

Be present...enjoy the journey (cooking can be as fun as eating)


Don't give up. "Fall down seven times, get up eight." Even when cookies aren't "perfect" they're often good.

  • Model resilience 
  • Bring energy and energize our teams every day
  • Coaching kids? "Never be a child's last coach." 

Learn from our mistakes.

  • Lessons are unavoidable. Repeating them is avoidable. 

Bring your creativity. Make your own amazing recipes.

  • Be open to new ideas from any level.
  • "Never be the first to add or last to remove" tools (e.g. midrange scoring)

"Ovens all bake differently." 

  • All courts are not created equal. Be aware of boundary issues (sidelines near or far from stands), lighting, dead spots. Our high school court has one 'closed' and one 'open' end. Shooters are more likely to be short at the open end. 

Have fun. Love what you do. 

Lagniappe (something extra). UCONN's Paige Buecker's experienced a "tibial plateau fracture." There's chatter that it was an incidental finding on an MRI as they were looking for other joint pathology (meniscus tear, ligament injury). "We'll see how it goes" 

Lagniappe 2. Great option as a slipped "out" screen sets up a dunk off a slip after Iverson action.