Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Basketball: Coaching Hacks

Learn from everyone. Younger coaches can teach old buzzards, too. Find something to add to your toolbox. 

1) Take a picture of it. Showed a young coach a play diagram and she flipped out her cellphone and took a snap of it. Who needs pencil and paper? 

2) Capture a memory. See a great play on television? Note the quarter and time and there's a better chance to retrieve it from game highlights on sites like YouTube. 

3) Write it down. With tens of thousands of daily thoughts, don't lose a key one. 


4) "The director is the keeper of the story." - Ron Howard   Keep your story portable and editable. Google Drive is great for our drill book, playbook, practice schedules, teaching videos, and more. 

5) "Never be the first to add or the last to delete." This comes from the world of medicine. New drugs and new procedures steadily appear. Does that always make them superior? Flex offense was developed over fifty years ago but still shows up at multiple levels of play. 

6) Develop your lexicon/terminology. Call it UCLA and we're looking for the basic UCLA cut. Do better than '5 Out'. Use your imagination. 


7) Learn it all. Some say the 24 second shot clock revolutionized the NBA game. Where did the 24 second shot clock come from? During the 48 minute NBA game it was originally believed that ideally about 120 possessions occurred. 

48 minutes x 60 seconds = 2880 seconds
2880 seconds/120 possessions = 24 seconds. Voila! 

8) Make exceptions. We called our delay game "Four" after Dean Smith's famous offense masterminded by Phil Ford. 



9) Simplify. Clever might confuse our players instead of the opposition. "100" = 4 in base 2. 1 = 1, 2 = 10, 3 = 11, 4 = 100. These are kids not mathematicians. Recall Don Meyer's wisdom about the development of coaching from blind enthusiasm to sophisticated complexity to mature simplicity. 

10) Read. "Ideas are the currency of the future." Don't be trapped in the past. 

Lagniappe. Once in awhile, everything goes our way. 
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