Saturday, July 13, 2024

Basketball: Ideas for Coaches

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal." - Picasso

Don Meyer kept three notebooks - one for basketball, one for general information, and one for appreciation that he annually gifted his wife. What ideas can be gifted to coaches?

1) Keep a 'commonplace book'. It's a personal diary that allows us to keep information that we come across that adds value. It could be anything. A blog could serve the same function. 

2) "Jar of Awesome." Keep a jar of awesome recording 'great stuff' that happens on slips of paper. 


3) Season notebook. Every season deserves a notebook. I haven't done that but my coach did and I'm grateful he lent me the 1973 Season version with every story from the local and area papers. 

4) Coaching 'history' notebook. As a part-time coach, you won't generate as many clips, cards, photographs and other memorabilia that a full-time coach will. Letters from players, families, and teams from a past season have value. 

5) Gratitude journal. Harvard Professor Shawn Achor advises tracking gratitude. Record three items each night before bedtime. Today, I watched over a couple of grandchild toddlers for a few hours and both they and I survived. I am grateful. 


Happiness is more likely to lead to success than vice versa. Being positive in the Super Bowl of daily work helps performance. 

6) Playbook. I've used FastModel for years as my "Playbook Archive" and shared many actions from all levels of play in this blog. The coach's job is to "advance the story" and that often happens by reducing input not adding. "Less is more." 

7) Drillbook. See Playbook. 

8) Teaching concepts. It can get overwhelming but maintaining "Google Sheets" with concepts (links) you feel valuable and sharable add value. 

9) Mentoring page. "Mentoring is the only shortcut to excellence." What belongs on our 'core ideas' of mentoring and receiving mentoring? Part of that is "making friends with the dead." Wooden, Newell, Dean Smith, Bill Russell are all examples. 

10) Rethinking Scorecard. Sometimes we're wrong or mistaken. We 'miss the offramp' on the highway. Find an exit ASAP. Adam Grant, author of "Think Again" advises to track our active rethinking. In the screenshot below, Shawn Achor advises us to "reject failure" with new paths. 


Miscellaneous. Analogy

Northwestern Professor: Dedre Gentner
Book: Range
Molecular motionBilliard balls
ElectricityFlow
Evolution
Viruses, antibiotic resistance
Escape velocityTraining
Rehabilitation
Bruce Jenner Protocol
Positive feedback
Praise generates hard work
Negative feedback
Fed and Interest rates
Copycat phenomena
"Big Three" of team construction
SpacingGrowth of plants
Playing in trafficGetting run over
Buttons (dustbuster)
Don't always do anything (exponents and subscripts)
Computer home screen organizer
Use the Trash button
FamilyTeams
Detail
Photography vs pixellation
Organizational structureHub and spokes
Errors
Bricks along the pathway to truth?
Growth
"If they don't bite when they're puppies..."
Growth 2
Escape velocity from ordinary to excellent
Failures
Numerous - Hindenburg, Waterloo
Trending versus consolidation
Stock price charts and changing it up
Fractals
Success on different time frames
Defensive recovery
Relationship to football and basketball
Step by step
You can't fall up a flight of stairs
Danger of unquestioned authority
Milgram experiments (Yale)
The ball has gravity
Spacing overcomes gravity

Lagniappe. Drive and kick. 

Lagniappe 2. It's not about being the smartest guy on the court but making our players that.  

Lagniappe 3. Another shooting drill.  

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