Ask The Coach: Offseason Expectations

1). How much time do you realistically expect your players to spend in the offseason on their fundamentals, and with that in mind what kind of off-season program do you have set up for them?

2). How much time is spent in a normal practice prior to Xmas on shooting drills?

The next newsletter will spend some more time specifically offseason programs, so I’ll address offseason expectations, and time spent on shooting.

I try to make it clear to my teams that this is the standard that good players and teams set for themselves, and I try to schedule enough during the summer to allow a committed group of kids to experience a lot of growth. But I stop short of making them ‘expectations’. They are standards that we set for our program, but kids have other commitments in their lives. And they are often faced with choices – sometimes the best choice isn’t basketball. I know of a first year high school girl’s coach who kicked a senior off of the team for failing to participate in the team’s summer program – because she was in Germany with her family!

The coach placed himself in a position where he felt like he had no choice but to kick the girl off the team because he told his players that they were expected to play during the summer. He painted himself in a corner when there was no need to do so; the girl’s family commitments were supposed to secondary to basketball commitments – even in completely unreasonable circumstances.

Filed Under: Basketball Coaching Tips

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