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Friday, November 14, 2025

A Basketball Code*

*Adapted from my Melrose Volleyball Blog

Your playing career flies by. Even the best players face setbacks - illness, injury, slumps, or personal challenges off the court.

Develop a code - your metaphorical armor. Find words that steady you when things get hard. Here are a dozen to consider:

Accountability
Answers
Branding
Competitive Character
Experience
Habits
Impact
Standards
Teamwork
Toughness
Urgency
Value

Accountability

Accountability means being responsible for your actions and their consequences. Raise your level of accountability to meet your personal and team standards. Growth starts with ownership.

Answers

Become an answer. Sport challenges everyone to perform - to earn playing time, roles, and sometimes recognition. Coaches, teachers, and employers all want answers, not excuses. Be the person who solves problems, not the one who creates them.

Branding

Branding is reputation. What do people see when they see you or when they see our program?

When I think of MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), I think of philanthropy.

We want people to see winning, teamwork, and class. Guard that brand. Build it every day.

Competitive Character

When Brad Stevens recruits or signs players, he investigates their competitive character. What does that mean?

  • Work relentlessly without needing external motivation.

  • Stay poised under pressure; respond, don’t react.

  • Embrace coaching and pursue constant improvement.

  • Compete with integrity — hard, but never dirty.

  • Prioritize team success over personal stats.

That’s competitive character - effort, discipline, humility, and heart.

Experience

Make our program experience about teamwork, competition, and improvement. Players who give the team the best chance to succeed earn minutes. Experience means valuing each other and the game itself.

Habits

We become the product of our habits. Train for skill, quickness, strength, and conditioning - you become more skilled and more athletic.

Eat better and sleep more - you upgrade your hardware.

“We make our habits, and our habits make us.”

Impact

Impact means changing what happens - on the court, with teammates, and in the community. The best players, through their process, impact winning and make others better. They leave fingerprints everywhere they go.

Standards

Set high standards.

“How you do anything is how you do everything.”

Take care of business at home, in school, in practice, and in games.

A Gentleman's C is unacceptable. Clint Hurdle wrote, “Lower the standards and you lose the winners; raise the standards and you lose the losers.”

Raise the bar - for yourself and for your team.

Teamwork

Team sports demand that we put the team first. That’s harder in an era of NIL and pro-sports celebrity, where attention and money can eclipse shared purpose.

Teamwork requires sacrifice - often of the Big Three: minutes, role, and recognition. The best teams understand this truth: when everyone gives up a little, the team gains a lot.

Toughness

Brad Stevens says, “The game honors toughness.”

Toughness is physical and mental. It’s playing hard, finishing plays, and responding to adversity without flinching.

True toughness travels with you long after the last match - it’s the character that endures when no one is watching.

Urgency

Urgency means now. Be here now. Take a breath, then earn this point. Build momentum for MVB and halt it for opponents. Skill, strategy, and strength matter - but urgency turns potential into performance.

Value

Add value to your team and teammates, and you add value to yourself. Coach Saban asks, “How do you have to edit your behavior to accomplish the goals you have?”

That’s value — aligning your daily actions with your biggest ambitions.

Final Thought

Your code becomes your compass. Follow it when you’re playing, leading, or struggling. The blueprint isn’t perfect. The path has bumps. But when you live your code, you’ll have direction.

 

 Lagniappe. Never leave the basics. 

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