The Cross Over Movement Blog

I once wrote on this site that “I am not a drill guy.” I think coaches look to drills to solve problems. I watched Kicking and Screaming the other night and Will Farrell picks up a soccer book and reads from it while trying to organize the kids to practice. It doesn’t work.

Drills are a part of coaching and can be used effectively as a learning tool. However, drills alone do not make a good coach. When I first published Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development, coaches emailed and asked for more drills. One businessman contacted me and wanted me to make the book more specific to the point where it became a checklist to follow for good coaching.

I don’t think such things are possible. Coaching is a people business and the most important skills are not technical, but interpersonal. If a coach cannot communicate with his players or fails to understand their learning styles, how can he be a successful coach? Using Coach K’s drills or copying Jim Boeheim’s zone defense from a DVD does not make a great coach. Everyone now has access to the same information. You can watch thousands of basketball games a year on television and buy thousands of DVDs or books. Knowledge does not separate coaches. It’s how a coach uses the information, relates to his players, motivates, inspires, etc.

In How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in life), Don Seidman writes:

Specialized knowledge or expertise differentiates you for a moment in time, but it likely won’t carry us through an entire career. Changing jobs, companies and even industries now often involves adapting knowledge skills to a new set of conditions.

Yet, the drive for differentiation - personalm professional and organizational - lies at the heart of business endeavors…We all still want to stand out, to be bold, to be uniquely valuable, to distinguish ourselves from the competition, to do things others can’t copy and to be number one. We always will. But, in a commoditized world, we are running out of areas in which to do so.

There is one area where tremendous variation and variability exist, however. One place that we have not yet analyzed, quantified, systematized or commoditized, one which, in fact, cannot be commoditized or copied: the realm of human behavior - how we do what we do.