So...You've Become A Coach. What Do You Do Next?
In this article, you can find:
- The Best Piece of Coaching Advice I Ever Got
- What Coaching Is Not
- Your Real Duty As a Coach
- The Essence of Coaching Is In These Thoughts
- I Focused On These 3 Things. Should You?
You have just obtained one of your dreams...
...or you are involved because you want to be with your kids...
Either way...You have become a coach.
It doesn't matter what level you are coaching or the level you aspire to coach...
The issues, problems, and goals are the same:
- What do I do in practice?
- How do I decide who plays?
- What offense do I run?
- What defense should we play?
- What rules should I have?
- How do I discipline?
- What do I do first?
When I was named the Head Coach of a NCAA Division II school at 29 years of age, I was the third youngest coach in the country.
In hindsight: probably too young.
But I had spent a lot of time preparing for the moment.
I was a Division I assistant for 6 years. I had access to coaches who were coaching at the highest levels. I spent a lot of time talking to them about becoming a head coach, and they were very generous with their time and advice.
I thought I was very well prepared.
When I started my Head Coach tenure, I had contradictory problems...
I had all the answers and, at the same time, I really didn't know what the questions were.
I sat down to plan a practice and it turned out to be 22 hours long.
I wrote up a playbook that was just about as many pages as War and Peace.
But when we got on the court, I couldn't get my players to do what I wanted them to do...
I then did what you do...call everyone I know for advice (I didn't have the advantage of social media like Facebook and Twitter. I got all kinds of advice, much of it contradictory.
I was ill-equipped to sort it out. All I got was confused.
The Best Piece of Coaching Advice I Ever Got
However, to this day, the best piece of advice I ever got came from that experience. I just didn't understand it at the time.
I had glossed over it, not giving it much thought, until I was a head coach for 5 or 6 years. Once I figured out what it meant, things became clearer...and I started to improve as a coach.
That piece of advice was simple, and it came from a coach I truly admired. He said...
"Don't try to coach everything."
Simple, direct, and easy to overlook.
One of the keys to becoming a better coach is figuring out what's important and weed out what's not.
When I started coaching, I did just what I was warned NOT to do...I tried to coach every dribble, every play, and every possession.
Every time things didn't go right, I blamed my players...
Not concentrating!
Not paying attention!
Just won't do what I want them to do!
I never thought about what I was doing...
What was my message?
Was I doing what was right for them, or just what I wanted to do?
Once I figured out what coaching really was, my team started to get better.
How? you ask.
What Coaching Is Not
First, let me tell you why I think it's important to understand what coaching is NOT.
- Coaching isn't a forum for yelling and screaming.
- It is not calling players names (other than their own).
- It is not an opportunity to prove how smart you are or prove you are the smartest person in the room.
- It's not about how many offenses or defenses you know.
- It's not about your strategy.
The game is not about you, the coach.
Coaching is not an opportunity for you to express your anger or for you to take things personally or to believe anything is directed at you.
I recently saw a discussion where a coach was thinking of switching from a dry erase board to an iPad and Apple Pen for in-game illustrations on the bench.
The answer came as, "I wouldn't do it. iPads are too hard to break over my knee and Apple Pens are too expensive to throw."
I hope that was said in jest, but that is an example of what some people think coaching is all about.
Why is that?
I think one reason (certainly not the only reason) is that younger or new coaches really don't have great role models.
Often, the exposure that potential coaches have to coaching comes from two areas:
1) Being coached as a player. Coaching is very self-propagating; you coach as you were coached. And it is done without self-evaluation. There is very little thought as to what, as a player, the coach thought was effective and what wasn't.
2) Watching coaches from the stands or on TV. The only time you see the coach is when he is yelling and screaming because it is not productive to those broadcasting the game to show a coach calmly sitting on the bench. As a result, new coaches believe that being loud, yelling and sometimes being abusive is the natural order of coaching.
Next, this is what I believe coaching IS.
Your Real Duty As a Coach
Coaching is helping.
In any other arena, the definition of coaching includes the concept of "Help."
In business, coaching is meant to help your business grow.
In sales, coaching can help you become a better salesperson.
In basketball, coaching is helping your players become better players...
...helping your team become a better team.
It is not about winning and losing (unless, of course, you are coaching at a level where it provides your livelihood). Winning and losing is a function of talent. If you teach them well, if you allow them to grow as players and as a team, and you have the talent, you will win.
Instead, I have always felt that my job as a coach was to prepare them to play their best--
--and it was the players' job to win.
How do you measure the caliber of a coach? You can go to the old traditional standbys of...
Are the players prepared?...Do they play hard?...Are they getting better?
All of that is true.
But, I have learned some other things, which I think are more important.
I Think the Essence of Coaching Is In These Thoughts...
When your players walk out of the gym after practice on Monday, are they looking forward to coming to practice on Tuesday?
After all, how can you get better, how can your players improve, how can your team improve if they don't want to practice?
Coaching is when you are in the locker room after overachieving and losing by 20 points to a team that you know is 30 points better than your team.
You tell your team that if they practice a little bit harder, pay a little more attention to detail, try to get a little bit better...
...they will have a chance to win the next game (even though you know that's not true) but they still show up to practice and do just that.
Coaching is faith and trust. Every minute of your time with your team has to be spent cultivating the trust your team has in you.
They have to have the faith in you that whatever you tell them will be worth listening to and you won't be wasting their time.
They trust that you are dedicated to helping them get better.
I believe that's what coaching is. The question is, how do you get there?
Remember "Don't coach everything"?
Well, that's your job.
I think that the first task that needs to be done is to evaluate what things you can affect by coaching.
But understand you can't affect everything...
...understand what your own limitations are...
...and understand that what you can affect might be different with each player.
Then focus on 2 or 3 things that you can affect for most of your players and become really good at those things.
Everything else becomes support for those things, and you don't have to practice them as much.
You Can't Coach Everything. I Focused On These 3 Things. Should You?
After I figured out that I "couldn't coach everything," I focused on three things that I felt I could affect. I separated my practices into those three areas:
- Skills - This was the biggest section of my practices.
Shooting, ball handling, etc. High repetition, situational use, 2 on 2, 3 on 3, trying to relate as much of the work to the game itself.
I have also said, if I had it to do over again, I would play a lot more 1 on 1 in practice. - Defense - Teach not only the how, but the why, when we defended.
We really didn't do that much individual defense, but a lot of team defense.
Personally, I never felt at the levels I coached that any individual defender could stop any individual offensive player. That might be different for you.
We played a lot of "man down" defensive work, 4 on 3, 5, on 4 were common in our practices.
As a motion offense coach, it was pretty simple to get quality work in and understand that everything we did in defensive work would help our offense as well. - Scrimmage - I did not do enough of this early in my career.
The most important part of our scrimmage was to teach players how the game worked.
Not just running up and down, but how situations changed as the game went on...
how personnel affects the team,
learning the relationship between offense and defense and how they are dependent on one another.
We never just played--our scrimmages always created situations.
It was through our scrimmages that we could learn what we needed to teach, who needed help with what, etc.
It doesn't matter what offense you run, it doesn't matter what defense you play...
Teach your players to play.
Teach them to trust you and each other.
Teach them that everything and everyone has a purpose.
Then they will be able to play in any situation.
Letting the players learn some things on their own--through trial and error--is central to learning.
Let them make mistakes and correct themselves.
One thing I learned is that teams don't win because of the coach...
...they win in spite of the coach.
Mike Brey, Head Coach at Notre Dame, someone I have known since he was an assistant coach to the great Morgan Wooten at DeMatha HS, has a couple of phrases I have used to keep my coaching where it belongs.
The first is, "The longer I coach, the less I coach!"
The second is, "Coaching is like trying to grab a handful of sand on the beach. The tighter I squeeze, the more slips through my fingers!"
It's important to understand that this is borne of my experience and it is right for me.
You have to search for what is right for you.
But if you remember one thing, remember this:
"Don't coach everything."
Coaching Resources From Don Kelbick
If you'd like to learn more from Don Kelbick, here are some coaching resources:
The Attack & Counter Skill Development System
Transition Offense and the Four-Second Fast Break
Continuity Zone Offense & Concepts To Beat Any Zone Defense
What do you think? Let us know by leaving your comments, suggestions, and questions...
|
|||||
Facebook (76k Likes)
YouTube (85k Subscribers)
Twitter (26k Followers)
Q&A Forum
Podcasts