“If you concentrate on your preparation then the games start taking care of themselves.
— Hoop Herald (@TheHoopHerald) November 28, 2023
Accountability means holding yourselves to the standard that you guys deemed to be important.” - Jay Bilas
(Via @TheCoachJournal 🎥)
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As a developmental basketball coach, I preached "T-I-A" - teamwork, improvement, and accountability. For us, accountability meant holding yourself to a high standard of attention,preparation, and effort. "Control what you can control."
We control our attitude, choices, and effort. Here's an excerpt from Ryan Holiday's "Discipline is destiny."
“He had beaten the Nazis and occupied Germany.
He had published his memoirs and made a fortune.
In 1949, all that was left was to conquer himself. So after a lifetime of battles, in a lifetime of battles of will, Dwight Eisenhower gave himself the order. Quit smoking.
And just like that, he went to battle with a thirty-eight-year habit. In the scope of his life, this may not seem like much, but every addict knows that it can be harder to conquer an inner demon than any external enemy... biographer Jean Edward Smith wrote, “A lifetime smoker of three to four packs of cigarettes a day, Eisenhower quit cold turkey . . . and never touched a cigarette again.”
To be accountable to a standard, invest more time and spend less. Maybe it's too much texting, television, or social media.
Maybe it's not enough of other needs - sleep, hydration, better nutrition.
Coach Bob Starkey shared Kevin Eastman's thoughts on accountability here in 2012. Here are three highlights:
...do the un-required work, knowing that it simply needs to be done -- extra shots, extra weights, extra film watching, etc. without constantly needing to be told by a coach.
...hold others accountable for their jobs and roles because they know the importance of accountability as it relates to winning; this creates a collective responsibility.
...always be among the most trusted players on the team -- by coaches and players.
Lagniappe. Eat higher nutrient food using the "Nutrivore score." "The score is calculated as the sum of each nutrient relative to its RDA or AI present in 100 grams of the food, divided by the amount of calories per 100 grams." It's a nutrition "bang for the buck." The low scoring foods are white flour and sugar-based.
Lagniappe 2. It's not trickery; it's consistency. Do the work.
"It's just consistency.
— The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) December 2, 2023
It's just good old fashioned 'do the work' every single day. Days that you don't feel like doing it, you show up and you do it.
And when you do that -every day- for a long period of time, you wind up having a success that goes on for quite a few years." pic.twitter.com/SfbJe3BNHn
