The Cross Over Movement Blog

I have been asked a couple times in the last two weeks about my rules and how I discipline players. I am not a big “rule guy.” I don’t have my 15 commandments that all players must follow and I am not a “my way or the highway” type guy. In all my years coaching, I cannot think of a real discipline problem. Sure, we have had bad practices and some players work harder than others, but I do not remember a time where I really had to discipline a player or team.

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

To be capable of making Waves, you need an organizing principle more inspirational and compelling than rules…Thinking and communicating in the language of should - values-based language - by its very nature inspires…The language of values inspires us because values are aspirational in nature. They propel us to higher ground…Values do double-duty; they inspire us to do more than while simultaneously preventing us from doing less than.

Rules generally create a confrontational relationship. When a coach creates a rule, he tells a player he cannot do something. Players - and people in general - do not like to be told what they can and cannot do without any part in the decision. So, players find ways around the rules. Soon, 15 rules becomes 20 as coaches make rules to eliminate ambiguities caused by other rules.

Rather than setting down rules, should language inspires and replaces the need for rules. I worked a camp once and told my team on the first day that they were going to act like champions in everything they did all week: our goal was to be first at everything. We jogged from station to station to be first; we sat in the front rows for speakers; everything we did was based around the idea that we want to be first at everything and have a championship mentality for the week.

While we jogged to stations or sat attentively and listened to speakers, other coaches dealt with behavioral problems. “No walking! No talking! No dribbling!” Rather than inspire, these rules and admonishments created an adversarial relationship between player and coach as the coach tried to retain his power and the player tried to subvert it.

In How, Seidman writes:

Though companies desperately want employees to keep their heads in the game, it turns out that generally they do a terrible job at creating conditions necessary for employees to do so. A three-year survey…conclused that, although the vast majority of employees are filled with enthusiasm when they begin a new job, in about 85% of companies morale declines dramatically after six months and continues to do so for years afterward.

Does the same happen with basketball teams? The recent firings of Scott Skiles, Avery Johnson and Mike D’Antoni (okay, he wasn’t fired), three good coaches, would suggest similar occurences in basketball. For some reason, after a period of time, the players did not respond to the coach in the same manner as at the beginning of their tenure.

According to the survey, people want three things:

1. Equity: to be respected and to be treated fairly
2. Achievement: to be pround of one’s job
3. Camraderie: to have good, productive relationships

Is basketball any different? Players want to feel like the coach cares about them and respects them; they want to feel like they are part of the team; and they want to feel like they are improving and play a role in the success of the team. If a coach makes sure a player feels all these things, playing time, shot attempts, wins and losses and other common excuses for players’ displeasure go away.

I coached a player once who hardly played. However, I gave her a role on the team and outlined the steps she needed to take to earn playing time. I offered to work with her individually outside our normal practices. I challenged her to get better to make the starters work harder to get them ready for competition. Suddenly, she went from a little used player on the end of the bench to a motivated player who felt respected, felt like she was an important member of the team and felt like she played a role in the team’s success. She earned some playing time, but never played a lot, but she said the season was her favorite season in her career, mainly because I ensured that she felt equity, achievement and camraderie regardless of playing time.

Most basketball discussions center on the what: plays, press breaks, drills. However, it is the how which separates coaches.

In an article on NBA coaches, David Dupree makes a point with which I agree:

Sure, you can run a Princeton offense or a triangle or another kind of motion offense as your basic set, but more times than not, every team resorts to some sort of pick-and-roll or just giving its superstar the ball and letting him create something. Coaches can play up-tempo, use a controlled offense or, as most prefer, a combination of the two. Defensively, coaches can insist that players go underneath screens, over the top or switch on them. They can play zones, double-team, overplay, trap, press or play everything straight. They make adjustments at halftimes, tweak things here and there and often rely on the common sense of their players. If the coach stresses defense as much as offense, he has more options to go to when things aren’t going well, so too much emphasis on one and too little on the other results in falling short of a championship.

I bolded the part about the pick-and-roll and star player because more and more, at every level, I realize that most offensive plays end with an individual play. Teams run sets to try and get a shot, but most of the time they do not work, so a player has to make an individual play. The genius, I suppose, behind the dribble-drive-motion and similar offenses is that it eliminates the plays and moves straight to the individual making plays. In Game 4 of the Cleveland-Boston Series, LeBron James shot a low percentage again because he had to take a bunch of bad shots against the shot clock. The Cavs need to learn from the DDM approach and get the ball into James’ hands earlier in the shot clock so he can create better shots for himself and his teammates.

The NY Times has an article about girls and ACL tears titled “The Uneven Playing Field,” while Vern Gambetta offers his thoughts in a post titled, “Perpetuating Myths.”Honestly, I did not read the entire original article, as it featured interviews with many of the same people and redundant stories.

Unfortunately, the repetitive stories fail to educate the masses. At the beginning, the warning signs are clear: too much competition, too soon:

She had competed in hundreds of games since joining her first team at 5. She played soccer year-round — often for two teams at a time when the seasons of her school and club teams overlapped…She had given up other sports long ago, quitting basketball and tennis by age 10.

Gambetta attacks the overcompetition in his post:

This whole article overlooks several key factors, not the least of which is the fact that in long term athlete development process the female athlete is victimized by a system that throws them into competition and skill development before they have the physical base of preparation. They over compete and under train and are coached by coaches that have no formal training as coaches and do not understand the needs of the female athlete. The system or lack thereof rewards the more aggressive girls who develop earlier and does not take into account the girl who not as aggressive. In addition there is an incessant search for athletic scholarships that causes the girls to over compete to showcase their talents.

His critique mirrors my thinking when I wrote Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development: no long term athlete development, compete too early and too often, no athletic base, coaches without training, and too much emphasis on showcasing abilities for scholarships without training to improve. This captures the essence of the book, as well as the purpose for the site.

Unfortunately, rather then being a warning sign to female athletes, athletes, parents and coaches now prepare for injury rather than training athletes to prevent injuries.

PARENTS OF TEENAGE GIRLS who play sports have grown accustomed to what seems like entire teams battling injuries — and seeing those who do make it onto the field wrapped in Ace bandages or wearing braces on various body parts.

I first investigated ACL injuries because I met four girls from a San Diego-area high school while coaching at a summer camp and all had injured their ACL within the year. I believed that if so many girls in individual programs were getting hurt, maybe something about the training or lack thereof contributed to the high injury rate and I wanted to make sure that I avoided the problem with the athletes I train or coach.

In the meat of the article, Sokolove tries to explain the difference between injuries in boys and girls by addressing hormonal and biomechanical issues:

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

However, his next comment contradicts his opening paragraph:

This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes.

As the opening paragraph illustrated, for many athletes, this occurs long before puberty, with many athletes specializing in one sport and competing year-round by 10-years-old.

Gambetta disagrees with the hormonal and biomechanical angle:

Sure there are physical differences, but the more we accentuate them the bigger they will be. Today the young female is severely short changed because of the constant stream of information like that presented in this article. Unfortunately this is what the parents, coaches and the girls themselves read and believe.

Why am I upset? Because once again we totally miss the point. Don’t set the bar lower because they are girls. Set the same expectation for training as the boys. Girls do respond to training.

During the NCAA Final Four, the ESPN analysts made a big deal out of stating that UConn’s Geno Auriemma no longer teaches the jump stop for fear of ACL injuries. Stanford’s Tara Vanderveer told me the same thing several years ago. Like Gambetta’s points, this approach misses the point completely. It’s not jump stops that cause ACL injuries. Stopping, in general, along with changes of direction are the sites where the injuries occur. However, it is the inability to decelerate properly and handle one’s body weight at game speeds which cause ACL injuries. Therefore, the cause is not the jump stop, but the inability to jump stop correctly. Gambetta argues that this is not a technical deficiency, but a strength deficiency:

All the BS about different landing and running mechanics is just that, pure bull shitake. Poor landing and running mechanics 99% of the time are due to lack of strength, the ability to handle their own bodyweight. You can blame lack of core strength, whatever that is, but it is really a lack of strength throughout the entire kinetic chain. There must be a daily investment in strength training as part of warm-up that includes exercises that are mindful and proprioceptively demanding.

I agree that strength is the underlying factor in many injuries. I am embarassed for high school girls when I ask them to do a push-up and they cannot. I find it even worse when their excuse is that they are a girl. That’s not a reason why you cannot do a push-up. Why do coaches allow athletes to get away with such behavior?

I see athletes - boys and girls - every day who simply cannot bend properly. Now, some of it is a strength issue and some is bad habit or poor teaching. For instance, coaches often ask players to sit into a low stance with a straight back, meaning a back which is perpindicular to the floor. This is nearly impossible. To train this position, coaches have players do wall sits. However, why do you need to use the wall to sit in that position? Because there is no way that one can stay balanced with a straight back and a low stance. The instruction creates poor movement. Rather than sitting into a proper squat, players bend forward with their knees to keep their back straight and their weight balanced. However, this position puts strain on the knees and it is impossible to move from this position. So, while strength is an issue, for many it is poor habits which contributes to the problems. Since players start so early, before they have a base of strength, they develop habits before they develop the athletic base. When they add the strength, they have to fix their habits.

Sokolove recounts an experience watching a game with a physical therapist who identifies players who are at-risk and those who move well.

She pointed out another girl with possibly even worse form. She was one of the better players on the field, but Silvers said her advanced skills masked serious physical flaws. I asked her if she could fix the girl, given the opportunity. “Yes, I could,” she said. “In four to six weeks I could improve her a lot. In three months, I could get the job done. I would educate the muscles, educate the nerves. She could build strength and change her patterns.”

I see players all the time who are labeled “athletic” because they look tall and fast running down the court, but they actually have terrible athletic skills when you really look close. They cannot stop, lack core strength, upper body strength and more. I coached an 11-year-old kid who parents called athletic who could not even hold hismelf in a push-up position, let alone do a push-up.

When I worked Cal’s Elite Basketball Camp several years ago, I sat with the athletic trainer as they played some dumb camp game called land-see-air. As the girls played, the trainer pointed to girls who were at-risk. I asked why she didn’t do anything. She said she asked the staff, but was told there was not enough time. So, the staff valued a game of land-see-air over a frank discussion or presentation on movement skills and injury prevention.

It is this attitude which hurts youth sports the most. As the article states:

Coaches rarely like to give up precious practice time for injury prevention, and often have to be pushed by parents.

Injury prevention is also performance enhancement. When a player can change directions quicker, and more safely, he or she is going to be better at skills that involve changing directions. Gambetta may not have finished the article, either, as Sandra Schultz from North Carolina Greensboro echoes his comments:

“Just because a kid is good at a sport does not mean she has the foundational strength or movement patterns to stand up to constant play,” she says. “What I’d like to be able to say is: ‘Before you engage in a sport, I am going to teach you how to move. And I am going to give you strength.’ ”

When I did a coaching clinic recently, I was asked what I would do with five and six-year-olds. I said that I’d tell them to do martial arts. I’m serious. And, this is one reason. By strating in martial arts or gymnastics, kids learn to move, learn body awareness and develop general strength before playing a team sport. These are all positives, especially since few youth coaches stop practice to train general skills. If players start basketball at five and only play basketball, they will have a very shallow foundation of athletic skills. Playing other sports and especially starting with some type of martial arts or gymnastics develops athletic skills which all sports incorporate and give players a head start toward performance and injury prevention.

We rank third graders. I don’t know who, because I don’t even look at player rankings anymore after I was involved with a service and saw the disastrous process that led to the rankings, but someone ranks 3rd grade basketball players.

I read some comments about women’s volleyball rankings yesterday. The comments said that women’s volleyball rankings are a far better predictor of college success because only one group ranks players and they do so after their senior year of high school. In basketball, who doesn’t rank players? It is the easiest way to sell subscriptions to a site: rank a bunch of kids and get their parents to buy a subscription to see if they are ranked. It gives people something to argue about on message boards, which keeps them coming back and posting more, which increases the hits and the advertising revenue. It’s all a big business.

The problem with ranking third graders or eight graders is that people want to be right. I trained a player a couple times when he was in eighth grade. He was ranked as one of the top 8th graders in the region and invited to the Area All-Star ShowCase Spectatcular. Good for him. Now, he stopped playing basketball in 10th grade to focus on football. He never played varsity basketball. However, he was invited to the same All-Star Spectacular in 12th Grade! The people never bothered to take his name off the list. He was still considered a top prospect and he did not even play the sport any longer and never really showed anything more than the size needed to excel.

When we rate players at a young age, two things happen: (1) We build high expectations for a kid which puts pressure on the player to perform constantly and justify his lofty ranking every time he steps on the court because the haters are waiting with their wireless internet cards to bash the player as soon as he has a bad game; and (2) We create a self-fulfilling prophesy where the rankers want to see the player do well to show that they are right, so they introduce the player to trainers and AAU teams and get the player free stuff, which creates the Entitlement Affliction: players and parents believe they have something special which means they deserve something in return.

The problem is that precocity is largely a myth. Just because someone excels at nine-years-old or fourteen-years-old does not guarantee success. In the volleyball argument, some suggested that basketball coaches do a much better job developing players than volleyball coaches, which explains why the rankings are more accurate predictors for volleyball. I disagree. Some of it has to do with sex (boys vs. girls) and different ages of maturation, but much of it has to do with inaccurate rankings because rankings do not measure the important things like work ethic, desire, competitiveness and the like because one cannot see those things in a brief glimpse of a player during a game.

Malcolm Gladwell writes:

We think of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement, and, according to Gladwell, that concept is much of the problem. “What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.”

To be a prodigy in music, for example, is to be a mimic, to reproduce what you hear from grown-up musicians. Yet only rarely, according to Gladwell, do child musical prodigies manage to make the necessary transition from mimicry to creating a style of their own. The “prodigy midlife crisis,” as it has been called, proves fatal to all but a handful would-be Mozarts. “Precociousness, in other words, is not necessarily or always a prelude to adult achievement. Sometimes it’s just its own little discrete state.”

A “precocious” third grader is oftentimes almost a year older than his peers and therefore is bigger, stronger and faster. However, over time, these size differences balance out. The future seven-footer is likely gangly and awkward as a nine-year-old or even a 13-year-old. What constitutes an exceptional skill level at nine or 13 differs at 18 or 19-years-old. We get excited when a kid can throw the ball in the basket from the three-point line at nine-years-old: however, does that skill translate when he is fully grown?

Early acquisition of skills — which is often what we mean by precocity — may thus be a misleading indicator of later success, said Gladwell. “Sometimes we call a child precocious because they acquire a certain skill quickly, but that skill turns out to be something where speed of acquisition is not at all important. … We don’t say that someone who learned to walk at four months is a better walker than the rest of us. It’s not really a meaningful category.”

Kids shoot differently at 13-years-old than they will at 18-years-old. They use more legs, they dip the ball to get strength, they shoot from a lower release point. When they shoot consistently at a young age, does that translate to better adult shooting? Or, does it lead to a sense of satisfaction and a desire not to change the shot and learn a higher release or quicker shot?

In music, people point to Mozart. However, “First of all, the music he composes at four isn’t any good,” Gladwell stated bluntly. In the same respect, we get excited about the “best” 4th grader, but does he really play good basketball? When he reaches to get steals because officials do not call fouls or dribbles coast to coast because he is faster, is that goo basketball, at an adult level?

Rather than physical gifts, are there better indicators of future success. In academia, Gladwell points to Einstein:

A better poster child for what precociousness really entails, Gladwell hinted, may thus be the famous intellectual late-bloomer, Einstein. Gladwell cited a biographer’s description of the future physicist, who displayed no remarkable native intelligence as a child but whose success seems to have derived from certain habits and personality traits — curiosity, doggedness, determinedness — that are the less glamorous but perhaps more essential components of genius.

If a 13-year-old is tall and fast, but lacks determination and a work ethic, will he be a top player when he is a senior in high school? Gladwell used his personal example of his running career:

“I was a running prodigy,” he said bluntly. But… being a prodigy didn’t forecast future success in running. After losing a major race at age 15, then enduring other setbacks and loss of interest, Gladwell said, he gave up running for a few years. Taking it up again in college — with the same dedication as before — he faced a disappointing truth: “I realized I wasn’t one of the best in the country … I was simply okay.”

Of the 15 nationally ranked runners in his age class at age 13 or 14, only one of that group had been a top runner in his running prime, at age 24. Indeed, the number-one miler at age 24 was someone Gladwell had known as one of the poorer runners when they were young — Doug Consiglio, a “gawky kid” of whom all the other kids asked “Why does he even bother?”

The early success often leads to a fixed mindset, where the child believes his talent is innate. As long as he is on top, that’s fine. However, when faced with a challenge, or setbacks, the answer is often to give up, as there is no sense in working hard if talent is innate and it has been proven that you are not the chosen one.

Labeling a child precocious creates more pressure to perform than good. I don’t understand the parents who seek opportunities for their child to be rated. People tell me all the time that if a kid is not rated they will not be recruited. I can list a dozen kids I have helped get to college programs who nobody had ever heard of and who had never been ranked. Colleges use rankings to get names. However, nobody gets scholarships based on their ranking. Coaches watch players and make their own decisions. I don’t know any college coaches who care who the top 5th graders are (except maybe Billie Gillespie!). Nobody wins awards for being the top 5th grader. Spending an entire childhood worried about player rankings and college scholarship ruins the childhood experience and confuses the destination with the journey.

To develop talent, it is far more important to impart and develop skills like industriousness, work ethic, desire and competitiveness than to concentrate on maintaining one’s player ranking.

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.

I saw The Visitor yesterday, which I thought was an excellent film. In the beginning, Walter, an older college professor, takes a piano lesson from a woman. The woman offers the same instruction she gives to little kids and ultimately Walter decides to find a new piano teacher. The woman says that it is very hard for a man of Walter’s age to learn a new instrument.

Later, he meets Tariq who teaches him to play the African drum. Tariq explains that playing the African drum is very different than the classical music to which Walter listens. Classical music is based on a four-count while the African drim is based on a three-count. Tariq challenges Walter to keep playing and eventually gets Walter to play with a drum circle in NYC.

While the move was not about learning musical instruments, the approach each takes was very telling. When the woman failed to get through to Walter, she blamed Walter. It was not her inability to instruct, but his age which she saw as the limiting factor. She had a belief that at his age, learning the piano was not something he could do.

Many coaches fall into this trap. When players make mistakes, they blame the players for not paying attention, or maybe suggest that the player lacks the ability to be good at the particular skill. Rarely does the coach address his own short comings in his technique.

The piano teacher tried to reach Walter, a college professor, with the same tools she used with little kids. If nothing else, this is insulting to the man and likely does not provide the same value in terms of the explanation as it does with a kid.

Coaches sometimes do the same thing, trying to use the same teaching style with all players. Teaching a nine-year-old and teaching a college players are different tasks requiring different skills, even though the game is the same. The instruction which makes sense to a nine-year-old does not always make sense to a 20-year-old, or vice versa.

Tariq had no preconceived notions and brought his enthusiasm for the drum to his teaching. The piano teacher showed no enthusiasm for the piano. Tariq’s enthusiasm was contagious and he wanted to share the drum with others. He used an important teaching technique, pointing out the difference between his previous experience with classical music and the drum. Then, he got Walter playing immediately. He did not dwell on details - like the rounded of his fingers when playing the piano - but focused Walter on the sound and the beat.

Tariq showed the goal and gave Walter the opportunity to reach it. He challenged Walter, but did not push him too fast. When they arrived at the drum circle, Walter was nervous. Tariq encouraged him. Walter declined. So, Tariq told him to feel the music and join when he was ready.

Many coaches and parents push their kids before the child is ready for that next step. Tariq provided the challenge, but allowed Walter to take the first step. He did not force the performance onto Walter before he was ready.

Tariq used many of the concepts from Cross Over and LTAD, using his enthusiasm as his greatest teaching tool to a beginner and progressing slowly when Walter was psychologically ready, while the piano teacher, with her formal teaching background, illustrated a cluelessness in terms of learning.

Surfing the Internet this morning to find the winner of the TUF7 from this week because I missed (the show is my one reality show guilty pleasure, though I miss it more than I actually see it), I found an interview with Forrest Griffin talking about training his guys:

It was hard to tailor the workouts to the guys. Matt Brown and Jesse Taylor could do whatever you threw at them and ask for more. Nick Klein would work himself into the ground doing what you asked but it would be overtraining for him and he got worse over the course of the show. He did whatever I asked and never complained but he over trained instead of backing off.

Training a team presents the same problems because each is at a different level and has a different capacity. Some finish practice and are ready for more. Some finish and are done. Coaches have difficulty meeting the individual needs of players while “being fair” to the team. It’s part of the art of coaching, balancing each player’s needs within a team environment. Each player has different physical needs and psychological needs. Some players really need to be pushed while others can push themselves.

Few coachesworry about overtraining, though many player suffer performance plateaus because they train too much or too hard, not because they fail to train. Rest and the taper before competition is as important as the training, as without the rest and taper, the athlete sabotages his training.

It worked out well for some guys and not so well for others. But eventually the guys decided what they were going to do. I gave them workout options and they decided whether or not they were going to do that or go on the treadmill or whatever else they needed.

With older, experienced and mature players, the players should have some control over their environment. This does not undermine the coach’s role, but it does empower the athlete and put the responsibility for improvement with the athlete, rather than the coach. The coach is the guide, not a dictator.

I read an interesting account of Avery Jonhson who was fired today by the Dallas Mavericks. The article mainly describes Johnson’s inability to communicate with his players and his lack of humility. Coching in the NBA is certainly different than coaching high school or college baketball, but it is an interesting example of communication failures.

I believe communication skills are the most important skill for a coach. Mike Fisher writes:

Please note that none of the aforementioned items even approach being about X’s-and-O’s, about benching Kidd in the final seconds of the loss at San Antonio, about Avery’s assemblage of thirty-something “pets’’ who on a whole made few contributions to one of the worst overall seasons experienced in the highly-successful Cuban Era. None of them are even about wins and losses, the recent 3-12 playoff record, for instance – even though Avery struggles in all these areas.

No, these complaints are about dealing with people, about motivation, about relationships, about communication.

The best coaches are not necessarily the best X’s and O’s guys. They are the ones who communicate with their players. ironically, NBA organizations generally hire former NBA players because they believe the former players can communicate with current players better than coaches without NBA playing experience. However, I would argue that the ability to communicate with people is a talent that is unaffected by one’s playing career.

Now, NBA players might respect a former player automatically, while someone who lacks the playing exprience might have to earn the respect, but the players will eventually respect the coach that makes the player and team better and in most cases, that’s the coach who communicates with his or her players.

I have written before that the best ball handling training is to dribble around a couple hyper-active kids who want to chase the ball and play. I also wrote that a dog works too. I saw this about soccer star Ronaldinho:

Ronaldinho has revealed that a dog helped him to learn to play football and to develop the silky skills and tricks that made him into one of the best players ever. The Brazilian explained that a pooch in his neighbourhood in Porto Alegre, Brazil would keep him company after the other boys in the area had gone home and would chase the ball around with him.

On the NorCalPreps message board, I read this comment by a user. This user has a very talented son, I don’t know his ranking, so take it with a grain of salt. However, I do not disagree with any of his comments:

I was in Denver this past weekend for a major AAU/Elite Club Tournament…I saw several top players play this weekend who are RANKED HIGHLY by these various SCOUTING SERVICES and I was alarmed by what I saw and what I read about the PLAYERS’ RANKING!!

I saw Player A, who is ranked, make bonehead decisions, played no defense, and played selfishly, but, Scout A covering the event,
wroted that Player A was “impressive.”

This is what I remembered Player A did that was consistent with what Scout A wrote: Player had one dunk and made a three point shot. So, I said to myself, “So, this what makes a HS BASKETBALL PLAYER, playing on the AAU/Elite Travel Team circuit great?” If you can DUNK, make a 3 POINT SHOT, and score the MOST POINTS, you WILL get RANKED HIGH!”

Not to be overly sensitive to my new found revelation, I continued to watch these HIGHLY RANKED PLAYERS over course of the weekend and true to form, SCOUT A and his buddies validated my aforestated analysis. If you can DUNK a basketball (it shows how athletic you are), make a 3-POINT SHOT (this shows that you are great shooter beyond the arc) and SCORE all the POINTS in the game, you willget RANKED, period!!

It makes no difference to Scout A and his buddies that you do not pass the ball to your teammates, rebound, defend and/or have a BRAIN!! All they (SCOUTS) care about or want to know is this: Can he DUNK? Can he MAKE the 3? Did he SCORE all the POINTS?

MEMO TO HS PLAYERS, COACHES and PARENTS: This is the NEW DEAL: If you want to be a RANKED PLAYER, HE must be able to do the following: DUNK the BALL; MAKE the 3, beyond NBA range (i.e. you do not have to be consistent and you take as many shots you want until you make one) and SCORE all the POINTS in the GAME!! Oh, by the way, SCOUTS do not care if your TEAM WINS of LOSES, just make sure you fulfill the three requirements listed above!!

I have argued with several of the top West Coast scouts from these Internet sites over the years, so I do not disagree that they often make mistakes and typically put too much emphasis on athleticism and scoring. Unfortunately, so do college coaches. I talked to Jim Clayton of Sports City U in Huntington, West Virginia and we talked about many of the same things. Many players peak at 12 or 13-years-old. People believe that they improve as they grow and get older, but for many, they just add size, not skill.

However, my favorite part of the thread is this comment:

I just do not think you can evaluate a kid fully on the AAU level.

Now I am confused. Everytime I question these tournaments and ranking services, I am told that they are important evaluation tools for colleges. The entire system is designed to make recruiting easier for college coaches, so they can go to one place and see many players. And, now people suggest this is not the best way to evaluate players? If we can agree that these games are not the best way for players to improve, and now we agree that they are not the best way to evaluate, why are so many people so sommitted to maintaining the status quo AAU/exposure environment?