Just to follow up my last post, I wasn’t trying to bash officials. Blame for the sloppy/trashy endings to basketball games lies just as much with the coaches as with officials. I do think officials bear 100% of the responsibility for the ‘swallow the whistle’ mindset, but I think that coaches share in the responsibility for the sloppiness (and sometimes trashiness) at the end of games. I have seen teams continue to foul, the last few seconds of a double digit loss……that’s on us (coaches). I’ve seen teams simply push or hack, with no attempt at a legal play, then …
Category: Coaching Philosophy
My last post (What Coaches Want Parents To Know) was by far the most read post so far on this site, with over 8,000 views. With this post, I want to talk a little more about parents and playing time. I want it to be known, that as a whole, I had great parents. One of the benefits of this profession is all the people we get to meet, and I had lots of truly incredible people that had kids play for me. I really have had relatively few problems with parents. Off the top of my head, I remember …
I don’t know if I heard that phrase from someone else or not…..I actually think that it is one I came up with. Simply put, ‘false praise’ is when you tell a kid ‘good job’ when they didn’t do a good job. Usually, the intentions are good…..coaches and parents deal out false praise when they are trying to build a kid up. But, there are two problems with that in my opinion: I think it’s actually counter-productive to improvement. When you take away the sting or pain of failure, you take away some of the incentive to get better. It’s …
Whether you are dealing with players on your team, fellow teachers, fellow coaches, or employees of your business……excuse making and dependability rarely go hand-in-hand. I always have a hard time trusting or depending on someone when an excuse is the first thing they offer up to you.
Coaching is such a negative endeavor The nature of the profession demands that you are constantly looking for things that are wrong (negatives) so that you can fix them. In addition to that, a coach is constantly bombarded with outside criticism and second guessing. So much negativity…..it really is hard to remain positive in such a negative environment. I think that making a conscious effort to find positives on a daily basis is important to anyone’s mental health, especially a coach or educator. Whenever I am asked ‘How are you today?’, my reply is either ‘Better than I deserve’ or …
Video, or as we called it in the old days…..film. I have always been a big believer in watching film with my teams. Early on in my career, I met a guy that had gone to high school in Dimmitt and played for the great Kenneth Cleveland. I asked him how much film they watched……his reply was an emphatic ‘lots!’ I had never met Coach Cleveland, but knew of Dimmitt and their great teams of the 70’s and early 80’s. I wish that I’d had the opportunity to meet Coach Cleveland…..he was obviously a great coach, and by all accounts …