For my first year of blogs I intend to take an intensive look at coaching and what I have learned in over 25 years of coaching basketball.  What is essential for you to think about and decide upon if you want to coach?  I do not intend to provide a gospel that you can follow to the letter.  Since this will represent the majority of a lifetime of thought, the main point is to cause the reader to reflect, whether a coach or a player, I believe that by thinking about and coming to conclusions about what is written you will have a better understanding of the sport, your place in it and how to proceed.  The main point is to cause you to struggle with the same questions and considerations and see where that struggle leads you.  Much as Aristotle derided the "unconsidered life" a coaching life without examination is not really worthwhile.  Confucius tells us that to master something is to display it in every aspect of what we do.  Thus, to really understand coaching and to attempt to master it is to consider its biggest and smallest questions and attempt to understand them from our own point of view.  If we take the court or field with an understanding of why we are there and what our strong convictions are then we have a real chance to influence those around us and produce not only strong players but strong people.  I do not profess to have all the answers to these questions, just my carefully considered thoughts.  It is up to the reader to agree or disagree, but mostly to start their own journey of discovery.    

What you will encounter in these blogs is not a self-serving, isn't this great treatise on what it takes to "win".  Instead it will be a thoughtful consideration of all the questions that will confront someone who chooses to enter the world of coaching.  An attempt by the writer to boil these problems down to their most basic elements and make them understandable.  The conclusions drawn are those of the author and not some cosmic truth.  As a coach I adopted what we called a 50/50 principle from a good friend of mine, educator Augy Jones.  It was up to the coaching staff to supply 50 percent of the necessary work in the form of practice planning, game prep, video work, analytic analysis, player evaluation and training.  The players were responsible for the other 50 percent, physical training, being in the right mental state of mind, bringing intensity and work ethic, committing offensive patterns and game plans to memory and striving to be their best.   The closer each party came to bringing their required 50 percent the more likely the team was to be successful.  If either group failed to deliver on their 50 percent the other member was justified to hold them accountable.  That principle is very much in play in the reading of these blogs.  The writer will supply his 50 percent in the form of his thoughts and considerations on all the questions that follow.  The reader will need to bring their 50 percent to the pursuit, in terms of their willingness to consider all these questions, there implications and what the reader believes and does not believe.  From this effort each reader should be able to form for themselves their own answers to the questions that follow and thus create a path for themselves through coaching that will help guide them and allow them to be true to themselves and not flutter in the wind of indecision.

Every story has a start, it is the point from which everything that follows makes sense.  Without the start we cannot discern what comes next or understand the narrative that we are presented.  In order to understand these blogs the necessary starting point is that I consider myself a minimalist.  My whole life has been dedicated to taking things and attempting to boil them down to their most essential elements.  Even when I was young I often completed tests, exams or papers in the minimum amount of time or space, as I never felt the desire to waste words or time beyond what was needed.  It follows from this that when my life led me into coaching I would examine it from that point of view.  All of the issues and philosophies necessary to be good at what I did needed to be examined, thought about, and brought to their essence.  Once things had been boiled down to the barest minimum, then I could proceed to create a path through coaching that made sense to me and allowed me to pursue it to the best of my abilities.  These blogs will represent my considerations on the many questions that confronted me in coaching, everything from big questions like philosophy and the role of a coach, to what makes a good coach and all the way down to mundane considerations like substitutions and analytics.  My conclusions will be presented in their most basic form as befits someone who considers things from my point of view.

As a minimalist I also believe I am aware of the limitations of coaching.  The western media has created a "cult of the coach" that permeates much of what we absorb and watch in the sporting world.  Attention spans being what they are it was understood long ago that people will only absorb so much of a sporting event that they are watching and that in order to keep the viewing public engaged it was necessary to cut away from the action and then back to it.  The result was the need for images to fill the screen when you cut away from the action.  Crowd shots were a good way to fill space, look at all the fun everyone is having.  The other was to build narratives through the coaches, their looks, antics or contrasts in style, demeanour or beliefs.  Viewers became enamoured with coaches and saw them as the embodiment of their favourite teams.  People like Don Shula, Tom Landry or Red Auerbach became household names.  These coaches grew to take on an importance that likely far outreached their real impact on the proceedings.  How many times have I heard a parent say, "If we only had a good coach our team would be unbeatable."  As another friend of mine Bev Greenlaw is fond of saying, "Coaching is A factor, but it is not THE factor."  Once during an NBA broadcast Mark Jackson, a commentator and former player and coach, said, "The better the players the better the coach."  Well known NBA coach Jeff Van Gundy who was also working the broadcast followed up with, "Amen to that!"  While many young coaches believe they have control or can bring their teams to great performances the fact is that talent wins in almost every situation.  As Bill Russell, an 11 time NBA champion, famously said, "The best team always wins, we are just often mistaken about who that is."  With this in mind I have devoted a fair amount of my life and efforts to debunking the myth of coaching as a complicated venture.  I do not believe in elaborate meetings or lengthy preparations.  My teams often met out in public, in front of the fans who came to see us play.  The need to repeatedly retreat into a private space was often unnecessary.  The reality was, we either had the talent to execute what had to be done or we did not.  No amount of coaching was going to change that.

The first question then is what importance do you place on your role as coach? Do you expect all the recognition?   Can you live with all the blame?  Are you the unquestioned leader or do you merely supply the drum beat that gets everyone marching to the same tune?  How many times in my university career did the following scene play out, I would walk down the hall on a game week and a well meaning person would say, "Are you ready for the week-end?"  I would always reply the same way, "I am, but they do not let me play."  I do believe a coach plays a vital role in practice and in team preparation.  How do you organize your players?  Who plays what role?  What style best fits the talent we have on hand?  Once the game arrives the coach mostly tries to stay out of the way, you may be very vocal, or not vocal at all, you may diagram a lot of plays or not many, we will deal with this more in or discussion on philosophy, but the reality is your players will retreat to the level of their skill, ability and practice preparation almost regardless of what their coach does.  The simple fact is that no coach, anywhere, at any time, has ever won a game.  No coach has ever sprinted on to the floor, come off of a pin down screen and nailed the game winning shot.  Coaches can lose games, poor planning and poor substituting can often lead to a poor performance and a coach needs to own that, but there is little a coach can do once the ball is thrown up.  Parents in the modern era often give coaching too much credit and will shuffle their child around several clubs or teams looking for the magic coach that will unlock their vast potential.  There are some instances in which a player will succeed at a higher rate in one atmosphere and not another, but often the player is the player, as long as they get a chance to play they will pretty much look the same in most circumstances.  One interesting experience that I had was helping a coach as an advisor on their staff, the players complained that the coach was too negative.  I watched several practices, the coach rarely if ever raised their voice, did not use bad language and was generally upbeat about the changes that needed to be made.  On the other hand, the athletes themselves had a tendency to curse to themselves when they made mistakes and their self talk was very negative.  The brain does not have the ability to differentiate from what we tell ourselves and what others tell us.  These athletes were being very negative with themselves, and when they left practice they felt down.  They attached this feeling to practice and their brain could not differentiate from what they had told themselves and what the coach had said.  As a result they had attached the negativity as being the fault of the person who ran the sessions, the coach.  It was a powerful lesson about how we as people shape our experiences and assign blame.  When you start coaching I believe that you cannot let the fact that people will give you too much credit go to your head and neither can you let the fact that they will assign you too much blame cause you to lose confidence or waver in your beliefs.  My goal as a coach was simple, I tried to teach and coach in a manner that caused the players to see my presence as a net positive.  As a human I made mistakes and did not always do the right thing, but more often then not I believe that through talent identification, proper scheming and good adjustments the players felt like they had a better chance to be successful if I was present, even if in my mind I understood that the work was already done.  

Now that we have a start we are prepared to delve into all the issues that I have confronted in my journey through coaching.  I have always pursued coaching as something independent of my particular sport.  I engaged coaches from many different sports in conversations during my career and read continually about coaches and athletes in other sports and how they approached things.  These conversations and readings have combined to form my thoughts on coaching in a general sense, not in a sport specific model.  In this way what is said I believe to be a neutral philosophy and applicable over a wide range of sports and endeavours.  If you follow these questions and draw your own conclusions they will have value independent of its initial application and as a result your considerations are more likely to have a lasting impression on those you work with.  These questions and the answers that follow can be applied to any leadership endeavour, even if your answers might evolve to some degree when they are applied to different situations.  I hope that the considerations in these blogs help you discover your own path through coaching and help enrich both your and the athlete's journeys.