Monday, December 5, 2022

Room for Improvement

Coaches are educators. Teach! Traffic in specifics. 

To bring our best self, seek improvement. While doing so, seek understanding not validation.

Coach Sonny Lane set clear priorities for taking care of business:

  • Home and family
  • School
  • Basketball
Elite coach Dawn Staley of South Carolina initially struggled at the University of Virginia. In an epiphany, she realized she had to care about school as much as she did about basketball. 

To capture your best success, here's a little advice. Write better. 


This small book helps...here are a few annotations:

1. Use a thesaurus (I didn't know thesaurus means treasury) to discover the ideal word. 

Basketball - "have a lexicon of your basketball terms"

2. Keep a dictionary nearby to aid 'assiduous' study. Assiduous is a word that appears on SATs and similar tests. 

Basketball - your language gets everyone on the same page

3. Spell correctly...especially names. "Our name is our most personal possession."

4. "Read, read, read, read, read." - Werner Herzog   Read widely. Recently I reread Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. 

Basketball - read a book as a team, Jay Bilas's Toughness or Legacy by James Kerr are ideas. 

5. Explore a new class. I'm taking one by former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on MasterClass.

Basketball - Watch Steph Curry's MasterClass on basketball 

6. Listen and network. As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot by just watching." 

Basketball - write an area coach and build relationships

Here's a note I received, "Ron,

Thanks so much for your email!  We love ____ and I am looking forward to seeing her play soon. This is a lovely recommendation, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate the feedback. I hope to meet you at one of her games…"

7. Research. Think critically. We're wired to hear or read and accept as true. "You can't believe everything you read on the Internet" - Abraham Lincoln

Basketball - Research a topic we don't know much about. Use the Feynman technique - name, explain, research, simplify. 

8. Think it through. Write in your head. Ideas come from everywhere. Thresh them out. 

Basketball - Be open to new ideas, from other domains, other sports, other coaches. 

9. 0,0,0. Find your coordinates for reading, writing, studying. David Mamet had a cabin in the woods. Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) had a writing desk. 

Basketball - Dedicate "thinking time" for brainstorming. 

Take pride in your accomplishments at home, in the classroom, and on the court. "There is no ability without eligibility." If you can learn basketball or cooking, you can decipher calculus or American History. 

Lagniappe. Drew Hanlen on beating perimeter pressure

Lagniappe 2. Assess whether a move is right for you. 

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