How important is it for, not only the athletes to be consistant but, the coaching staff to be consistant? Like continuing workouts that you start during the season, team punishments and maybe even post game conversations.

I think that kids thrive on consistency..... workouts meaning practice.... work on your skills and IF you can find a different drill that does the same thing.... that helps with boredom......
Not sure what you mean by punishments.... but IF you are refering to team rules... I would say, BE CONSISTENT...... make sure you know the entire story if there is a problem... sometimes there are extunating circumstances that might alter your decisons....
Post game conversations.... the one thing that I did late in the season was to let the kids talk after games.... let a few come up and give the team their opionons..... I told them you must be sick of me telling you things after games. I let them talk and either I or my assistant would finish up with something very short...

He and I would go out afte every game and while we were having a "pop" we would write down the areas we needed to work on, including any situations we didn't handle well. Any area we needed to improve upon went into the practice plans... ( handling multiple screens etc. )P any situation that we handled poorly we put into our "situations" part of practice. The kids knew why we worked on them... they learned how to handle them.. a great learning tool and the kids loved to compete. (that way I didn't have to be negative after practice complaining about how we handled X, Y or Z.) JMO

Thanks coach Sar, this is very helpful and I did mean team rules. Another thing is how do you feel about making your team run timed 17's for every point that they got beat by in a game, within the next practice?

That would be counter productive in my opinion.... and a huge waste of time. If you lost by 20 would you have them run 20 of them? And then expect them to practice? OR WANT to come back to practice the next day? ( just a couple of questions for you to think about )

When you end practice, always do it on a high note... meaning, do something the kids LOVE to do so they look forward to coming back ... and don't forget, they WILL talk about you at home... so that kills two birds with one stone... they talk nice about you and want to come back. For us, it was running "situations" -- mini games where you dictate the situation, time/score/who has the ball and where/fouls etc.

If you are looking to condition them, do it with a ball.... a well planned practice will get your kids in shape. It took me awhile to learn that there IS no room to be wasting practice time... example..... we never gave water breaks... Three 4-5 minute breaks... look at all that valuable time. We allowed them to get a drink just by raising their hand .... we would say go unless we were talking or they were involved in the drill etc.

Regarding the rules, be FIRM, FAIR and CONSISTENT and don't make too many or you will back yourself into a corner. FAIR being the KEY word here. I hope this helps. Let us know how things are going.