A Coach's Diary

Geno Auriemma is one of the best coaches ever. He has built UConn women's into one of the most successful basketball programs ever. He knows a little something about champions and developing championship players and teams. He has excelled at motivating his players to perform at the highest levels. He is always putting his players in the most difficult situations in practice. Doing so pushes them and forces them to perform closer and closer to perfect to find success. He likes to play 5 on 6, 5 on 7, and 5 on 8 in practice. He wants it to be really hard on his players. Whenever they get comfortable with doing something, he makes it harder on them. Some players complain and make excuses, but he said that those players and teams are never going to be any good. The great players and teams welcome the challenge. He is always moving the carrot. Some don't want any part of it. Some keep going. The ones who keep going are the ones who will be champions. PLAYERS: If you want to be great...

Geno Auriemma has a video where he says, 'Great players don't get tired.  When the good players get tired, the great players kick their a**.' Cole Anthony is one of the best players in college basketball.  When asked if he gets tired, he says, 'I do get tired, I just do a great job of faking it.' Everybody gets tired; the best just keep going. Bill Belichick once said, "The great equalizer is your mind.  It's not that you can't do it, it's will you do it." The best don't let being tired become an excuse.  They work hard to make sure that they are in the best shape possible and they keep pushing you. On Get Up on ESPN , analyst Louis Riddick said, "The difference between a back-up and a starter is not always that the starter is better, its that the starter can do it more consistently.   It's a mindset.   It's a mentality. Mental toughness. Resilience. Grit. It's whatever you want to call it...

Legendary coaches Geno Auriemma and Anson Dorrance talk about two of the most competitive and complete players that they have coached and some of the secret sauce that made them great.  Both athletes could be pushed as hard as they need to be pushed and they both wanted to be told 'there is another level.' Not everybody can be pushed as hard as Diana Taurasi and Michelle Akers; not everybody wants to be 'that' great.  But as coaches and as leaders, it is our job to find that line for each team and each individual and push our athletes past that line.  As Anson Dorrance said in closing, ' Usually if they don't achieve their potential, you were too soft on them.'    There's a big price to be paid if you want to play with the best Playing at Connecticut is nice, but there's a lot more that goes into it than just showing up in Storrs, putting your uniform on, and then running out of the tunnel in front of 16,000 people.  There is a big pric...

In season, we work on guarding the ball 1 on 1 everyday.  We do it from different spots, angles and positions.  We switch up between guarding the ball in full court, half-court and in the post.   We mix up between starting from a closeout position, from a girls coming downhill at us, and from a check-ball situation. Over time, our athletes get better both offensively and defensively in 1 on 1 situations this way.  Basketball is a team game with full of individual battles.  Players have to be able to win their 1 on 1 battles for the team to have success. The video above is how we teach 1 on 1.  Active hands and active feet, stay square to your defender to prevent blow-bus,  contest the shoot and rebound. UConn Defensive Keys - Arms length away to provide pressure and to keep the 5 second count going - Low stance and square to his body - force baseline, but don't open up and give free driving lanes to the baske...

The game is supposed to be played a certain way, and its impossible to play that way, at the highest level, every second of everyday of every practice and game.  But, the pursuit of finding out how long you can sustain playing at the highest level is the difference maker. Just when it starts to fall, I tell the girls that this is about the time that a normal team starts to fall, and we aren't a normal team ... so let's go. - Geno Auriemma When your team experiences playing at a higher level, you have raised the bar for your team and the challenge is to consistently sustain that level of play and to never drop below that new bar that you have set for yourself.  The challenge, the purpose, the pursuit of excellence is about identifying what excellence looks like, experiencing it by performing on a level of excellence, and challenging yourself to sustain it as often and for as long as you can. 

"Be so good that people will pay so much money to come watch you play.    And not just win, but play at such a way that everybody who was at the game goes back and says, “You’re not going to believe this.    You have to go watch these women play." Geno Auriemma talks about: - How he got into coaching - Lying in the interview process at UCONN - The lack of resources at UCONN when they got there - Selling the kids on trust and the fact that they will build something - Getting Rebecca Lobo - 6 high school Americans by the 3 rd year - The frenzy behind UCONN - The level of awareness it placed on women’s basketball and women’s sports - $1 million budget to over $23 million dollar budget - Be so good that people will pay so much money to come watch you play.  And not just win, but play at such a way that everybody who was at the game goes back and says, “You’re not going to believe this.  You have to go watch these women play.

'We trust you until you give us a reason not to trust you.' 'Just be great at what you're good at.  You know you're really good at something.  Identify it and then work your brains out to be great at it.'

... and not how to make mistakes and excuses. The importance of holding yourself accountable, now as an athlete, and in the future as an adult and a professional.  Right now, showing up late, or missing an assignment, or not blocking out does not mean the end of the world.  However, at some point, coming in late or turning in an assignment late at work could cost you your job.  When the stakes get higher, it is important to know that you have spent your career learning how to make mistakes and how to make excuses.

It’s not even about winning or losing.  It’s about getting the best out of every player.  Being a woman does not change their job description.  You never go after somebody’s heart or their core; you go after what they did.  You coach actions.

Two biggest issues that Geno sees right now is 1) teams are playing too fast and 2) bad shot selection. Shot selection might be the most important thing that you can teach your team.  Everybody thinks that they can make any shot. Shot selection is the biggest killer of offense because the wrong guy is taking the wrong shot, you can't rebound when you don't know when a shot is going up, and you are out of balance and can't get back on defense. Rule #1 When you are open, you have to shoot it if that's the shot you work on everyday.  Everybody knows and expects it and is prepared to rebound. Rule #2 If you shoot when you aren't open and somebody is, that's the last shot you get that game.  Thats where selfishness begins.

Recruiting enthusiastic kids is harder than it has ever been.   Finding kids that are upbeat, loving life, loving the game, and who have this tremendous appreciation for when teammates do something well is uncommon.   Be that person.   Every day.   Not just on the basketball court, but in the classroom, at home, and in the community as well.   Be that person that brings energy and enthusiasm to the room when you walk in. When I first started coaching college basketball, I was surprised when in recruiting, my head coach said that he does not have any idea of the stats of the players he recruits.   Talent and skill level definitely are visible at first, but the character of our recruits was equally important.   And as we went through the entire process and had to narrow down our efforts and decide which players to finally offer scholarships to, character won out over talent. We felt that high character kids had more of a chance to grow, develo...

“For some coaches, they love getting into the bunker of the season. They crave a darkness of everything and everyone. Yet, Kerr doesn’t see the profession as a way to grind everyone down. He coaches to elevate everyone, and maybe that’s made easy with Curry and Durant and Thompson. Still, Kerr has always been true to his disposition: fiercely competitive, relentlessly self-deprecating and smart with everything he’s done in the game. He’s truly a product of his coaching mentors: Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson and even Lute Olson. Mostly, Steve Kerr is the son of Malcolm Kerr, the American professor murdered in Beirut in a terrorist act in 1984. Kerr loves the game, but he’s always valued it within context of the people it allows him to reach, the voice it gives him for something bigger than the game.” These two paragraphs come from an article written about the struggles that Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr is going through this playoff run.  For years, ‘the grind’ w...

Geno Auriemma and the UConn women’s basketball team is the subject of a 6 episode, weekly HBO special following their 2016-2017 season.   I have just watched the first episode, and it gave good insight into the mindset of the most successful coach in women’s college basketball history and what it takes to be a part of the game’s greatest program.   It had interviews from girls who helped build the program and from girls currently in the program.  Every girl that spoke, from legend Rebecca Lobo to freshman Crystal Dangerfield, mentioned how mentally tough that you have to be to play for Coach Auriemma.  They mention that his number one goal seems to be to get them to reach their full potential in the 4 years that he is with them.   Below I have some of the more memorable quotes from that first episode. The coolest thing about this is how all of the players seem so happy to be a part of the whole ‘UConn’ thing.   They all seem genuinely ha...

The article below was borrowed from Bob Starkey at HoopThoughts.BlogSpot.com .  You read the original article here . It's been a while back, but I posted briefly about a concept that I hold dear to my coaching philosophy -- the ability to teach your players to figure things out on their own. There are three things that I think coaches should stress, teach and demand on a daily basis regardless of what their philosophy is in regard to X & Os, discipline and team building.  I believe you should be teaching players to Talk, to be Tough, and to Think.  Figuring things out is a major component to thinking. One of the most underrated things that the best coaches teach, in any sport on any level, is that of educating their players how to think on their own.  Few were better than Coach Newell. “I wanted players with initiative, guys who could control a difficult situation on their own.  People may not realize that years ago, you couldn’t bring a player...

Notes from a behind the scenes look at a UConn women's basketball practice. 1 - Culture 2 - Good players 3 - Holding them accountable every second of every practice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIIInfIPnQA 0:10 - What we are trying to do is put you guys in situations where you get to see for yourself without being told.  There will be times we won’t have the opportunity to just stop the game and go okay, timeout and let’s talk this over. There are going to be times where you guys are going to have to figure it out on your own.  Certain individuals are going to have to step up and make big time plays.  Not when we are up 25, not in the first 5 minutes; I’m talking about when you’re in deep shit and everybody is so tired that you can’t see straight.  That’s when somebody has to make big plays. 1:05 – Nothing in a game can match the challenges that the players face during a typical Huskies practice. - Sue Bird 1:43 – I think our goal e...

This is a great video on how you have to adapt as a leader in terms of how you drive performance.   As a coach, you want to drive your kids as hard as you can to get the most out of them everyday and to help them reach their full potential as athletes and people.   The trip is trying to get to know and understand your players as individuals, learning what they are capable of handling, and learning the best ways to affect their performance.   Every person is built different, every person has a different threshold, and every person can handle different levels and pressure.   You have to know how much a player can handle and what is the best way to get the most out of that player, which sometimes isn’t driving them as hard as you would like.   Sometimes that means meeting them halfway so that you can keep them motivated growing. He takes Brianna Stewart for example: if he meets her halfway, she might become half the player she is capable of.   Howev...