A Coach's Diary

Here are a couple of workouts that I've watched this morning.  Stanley Johnson of Arizona in a pre-draft workout: Jerian Grant out out of Notre Dame: What I've noticed about their workouts is the simplicity of it all and the number shots that they get up and make.  Two of the most important skills in basketball are (1) being able to get wherever you want tot get on the court and (2) being able to make shots when you get there.

Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors is the type of selfless, tough, warrior that every coach wants on their team.   This video, taken from ESPN's pregame telecast of their game 4 match-up against the Houston Rockets does a good job of telling what kind of player, and person, Green is.

I know I’m as excited as anybody to have Shaka Smart as a basketball coach in Texas.  The energy and enthusiasm that he will bring to the program is going to be great for the sport across the state.   He will do a great job of recruiting and he has shown the ability to get the most out of his players.   Plus, the style that they are going to play will be very exciting! The video below just gets me going.  He has a few teaching points that you can hear that are really good, a couple of statements that he makes about how they will play and the mentality that he is trying to build, and there are some good drills and ideas there as well.

Below are quotes are taking from the first chapter of Phil Jackson’s book, 11 Rings.  The first chapter is titled ‘Circle of Love’ and it talks a lot of the importance of getting your team to work together and form a real ‘brotherhood.’ He talks about the importance of ‘the ring’ in sports and how the ring symbolizes the quest of the self to find harmony, connection, and wholeness.  He also said that players understood intuitively the deeper meaning of the ring.  The Ring His 2001 - 2002 Championship Laker team took on the motto ‘The Ring.’  He said that it was not just a band of gold, but that it’s the circle that’s made a bond between all the players.  A great love for one another.  A Circle of Love. The Most Important Ingredient It takes a number of critical factors to win an NBA championship, including the right mix of talent, creativity, intelligence, toughness, and, of course, luck. But if a team doesn’t have the most essential ing...

Barkley talks about the importance of getting paint touches. The following post was borrowed from Bob Starkey at  HoopThoughts.Blogspot.com For the large majority of us, we are well into the beginning of the off-season.  A major part of the off-season for the best of coaches is a thorough review of their system of play.  As I view the NBA plays-offs, my question to us is this:  WHAT'S YOUR PAINT GAME? I'm a strong believer that championships are won in the paint.  This speaks to both offensive and defensive philosophies. In 2011, the Miami Heat lost in six games to the Dallas Mavericks.  The Mavs dominated the paint and the Heat settled for jump shots far too many times.  In that off-season,  LeBron James called up Hakeem Olajuwon  and asked him if he would work with him that summer on his paint game.  You have to give great credit to LJ for first recognizing what he need to work on to improve his game and then for not hes...

In an article posted at at Yahoo by  Adrian Wojnarowski , head coach Steve Kerr talks about Steph Curry's need to allow the game to come to him.  He said that Curry sometimes wants to win so bad that he tries to do too much. The desire to win sometimes conflicts with knowing how to win, especially for our best players.  They want to win so bad, that they think that they need to 'take over.'  It can be a challenge getting them to understand the need to and understand how to allow the game to come to them. Below are some quotes from the article: "I never worry about his confidence," Kerr told Yahoo Sports late Monday. "I don't worry about anything with him. I just feel like there are times that he wants so badly to win, he tries to do too much. "He's still learning. That sounds crazy, because he's the MVP of the league. But he's still learning how to develop that rhythm, how to be patient and just move the ball, makes the easy pa...

Below is an article from The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel on Bo Ryan and how he has built his program based on discipline and fundamentals. Indianapolis   — What's Bo Ryan's secret? Barry Alvarez, the University of Wisconsin athletic director, gets asked that a lot. People want to know how Ryan does it, how he wins and wins with players some big-time college basketball programs wouldn't touch, how his teams consistently display toughness and character. Since Wisconsin hired him in 2001, Ryan has won 357 games and has made 14 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances despite having successfully recruited exactly one McDonald's All-American. Over that span, Duke, the team Wisconsin faces in the national championship game Monday night, has put more than 30 high school All-Americans on the court. Going back further, Ryan has had one losing season as a college head coach — his first at UW-Platteville (1984-'85). His career winning percentage is .765....

Below is a post I borrowed from Gary Colson about getting guys to play with more aggression.  Coach Colson had a great career as the head coach of several division 1 basketball programs and even worked with the Memphis Grizzlies alongside Jerry West.  He has a great blog here  that I highly recommend to any coach.  It hasn't been updated in a while, but it still has great content. You can see read the post in full here . Situation: A tennis ball is being served at you at 150 MPH. What thoughts do you have in trying to return the ball? Read on and find out how you can return the serve. A few years ago I picked up the book “ The Inner Game of Tennis ” by Tim Gallwey. I loved the book so I wrote the author and told him his thoughts in the book were outstanding. In two weeks after reading my note Tim called me and said he lived in Malibu where I coached basketball at Pepperdine University. We had lunch that very day. I told him about a young man named...

After elimination, the Spurs played paintball together.  It’s important to be a team and to have camaraderie both on and off the court.

"I tell them that I don't inspire my teams to compete.  I inspire myself each and every day.  If I am motivated then my team feels my excitement and intensity and they mirror that in the way they play.  If you look at most successful programs at any level, they take on the characteristics of their coaches." Coach Angela Beck Cedar Ridge High School | Texas

Sports Illustrated ran an article last November about Jimmy Butler’s commitment to turning himself into an NBA superstar.  A big reason for his drastic improvement that led him to becoming the NBA’s 2014-2015 Most Improved Player was the decision to cut his cut his cable so he could focus strictly on the game of basketball.   Butler and his friends rented a house for the summer so that they could spend time together, but he says he purposefully chose not to furnish it or purchase cable: “I wanted to be so good at the game that we didn’t have cable, we didn’t have the Internet. Whenever we got bored, all we would do is go to the gym. We’d eat, sleep and go to the gym. We’d go three times a day because we didn’t have anything else to do. We were sitting on the couch, looking at each other, saying, ‘What the hell are we going to do all day?’” It was a well written article in which he talks about his life growing up, his college days, and goes more in-depth about some of th...

The video below is a great video about Steph Curry’s journey to greatness from the standpoint of trainer Alan Stein.  Stein stated that he first worked with Curry at the Kobe Bryant Nike Skills Academy.   The top high school and college shooting guards in the country were at the camp, and he knew immediately that Steph was the most impressive all because of his work habits. The Skills Academy had to workouts a day for 3 straight days and 30 minutes before each workout while most other players were still in their flip-flops, Curry had already started shooting and by the time the workout started, he had already made 100-150 shots and was in a full sweat. Throughout the workout, he made sure that he did everything perfect, and if it wasn’t, he would do it over. Steph also would never leave the gym after a workout without swishing 5 free-throws in a row.  That’s the level of excellence that he holds himself to. Success is not an accident.  Success is act...

This is a really neat article found on Grantland about a Division 2 basketball coach and program who has found success speeding up the game, not over-coaching, and letting their players 'play' and have some say in the decision making process. Jim Crutchfield took over the West Liberty University Men's Basketball program in 2004 following a 4-23 season, and they haven't looked back since.   The article is as much about the narrative of the decline in popularity of college basketball, in large part to the tempo of the game, as it is about Coach Crutchfield's basketball program.  They speak in-depth with several coaches, including former Sooner and TCU coach, Billy Tubbs about the slow down in pace of the game. The article is a very interesting read in general about college basketball, and it has several good 'nuggets' of information.  I have highlighted some notes from the article below.  You can read it in its entirety here . Being Able To...

The following article was written by Jim Trotter at The MMQB.  It was posted right after Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks beat the San Francisco 49ers enroute to their Super Bowl win over the Baltimore Ravens. The article talks a lot about Pete Carroll's philosophy and how he runs his program.  Here are some notes from the article.  You can read it in it's entirety   here . Doing Things The Best/Only Way You Know How:  “Pete told me once, ‘They already killed me once—they got me in New York and they got me in Boston—so I’m going to be me. They can’t hurt me now.’ For Pete that was a very humble way of saying, ‘I’ve been through a lot, and if I go to Seattle I’m going to do it the way that I’ve laid it out, exactly to my personality and to my philosophical approach.” Affirming His Coaching Tenets: For Carroll, Sunday wasn’t about proving anyone wrong. It was about proving himself right. It was about affirming that his coaching tenets—the r...