Monday, June 24, 2024

Basketball: Find An Unconventional Mount Rushmore Coaching Staff

Our Mount Rushmore of Coaches (MROC) can include anybody from any sport or even any domain. It adds value as a thought experiment. Everyone's experience, attitudes, beliefs, and values differ. 

John Nash ("A Beautiful Mind") won't be on mine but might be on another's. Coaching is more than barking out instructions, Xs and Os, teaching resilience, or player development.

Develop a personal MROC or a team MROC. There's no single way or "right answer." An analogy might be Lincoln's Team of Rivals with Seward, Chase, and Bates. 

I favor using a Warren Buffett 25-5 or manageable 12-4, starting with a dozen and winnowing to the Final Four. Your list will not converge with mine (alphabetically). You likely never have heard of some.

1) Geno Auriemma

2) Jack Clark (Cal Rugby Coach)

3) Dr. Fergus Connolly (Human Performance expert)

4) Richard Feynman (legendary physics teacher)

5) Dr. Faith Fitzgerald (Professor of Medicine)

6) Doris Kearns Goodwin

7) Garry Kasparov (World Chess champion)

8) John McLendon 

9) Gregg Popovich

10) Dean Smith

11) Ed Smith (former English cricket selector)

12) Bill Walsh

What criteria or exclusion belong? Choose your absolutes. Not saying mine deserve weight. 

  • Character
  • Leadership
  • Communication
  • Teaching ability
  • Inspiration
  • Diversity 
  • Problem solving
Would it be 'reproducible'? Would I choose the same four each time? Would the product be more than the sum of the whole? Would I need a basketball coach or with an elite group of leaders be better off without 'conventional wisdom'? 

Doris Kearns Goodwin (historian): 


Coaches have a responsibility to team and truth. Remind ourselves that winners write history. Imagine if the south has won the Civil War or if the Nazis won WW2. 

Dr. Fergus Connolly (Human Performance expert)

Connolly, author of Game Changer

Theory and analytics matter, but games are won by real people, the athletes competing on the field. The ability to build their skill, strategic knowledge, athleticism, and psychology into better performers separates champions from wannabes. 



It doesn't matter if the coach has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game if she can't transmit a usable portion to her team. 

Ed Smith

"He decides that the main problem in English cricket is what he calls “bureaucratic inertia”: the tendency of institutions to think too much like institutions, hidebound by convention and groupthink."

Conventional wisdom isn't always conventional or wise. Watching non-shooters jacking up threes applies NBA statistics to skill-challenged young players. Who owns the responsibility, the players, the coaches, both? Coaches preach defense and bury defenders on the pine. 

"Smith urges us to stop viewing player performance in isolation – a tougher task in cricket, which is essentially a sport built on individual statistics – but at how players seemingly contribute to the strength of the unit as a whole."

Dean Smith

Coach Smith blended humanity and a mathematics education. He acted boldly to integrate the ACC with the arrival of Charlie Scott. He selflessly encouraged Michael Jordan to leave early for the NBA. His Tarheels won two NCAA championships long after he was burned in effigy during his first season. 

He innovated at practice (shot quality scoring), offensively (Passing Game offense, Four Corners offense) and defensively (run-and-jump defense). 

In many ways, the discussion above is facetious, because only Dean Smith even fits the description of a coach. Raise consciousness as to desired qualities of coaches. The more we know, the more to apply for our players. 

Lagniappe. Use our imagination to improve shooting. 
Lagniappe 2. What is our coaching identity? 

Lagniappe 3. Origins of success. 

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