Ask The Coach V

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.

1. I don’t necessarily frame our offseason work on terms of my ‘expectations” – or at lease my expectations are never lines drawn in the sand, so to speak. Perhaps this approach is very different from that of many other many coaches. My approach is more to set up a summer program that includes several team functions – usually two to four local summer leagues and a practice schedule that keeps us busy 5 days a week, on average. I usually give my players individual workouts by position – post or perimeter – that are tailored at least in some small way to the skills they need to improve on for the following year. I talk with them about spending time going through their workouts consistently throughout the summer. In my experience the better players – the ones who really are committed – will spend at least 45 minutes a day on individual skill work. The committed ones will also make sure that they actually do get up several hundred shots each day. I know that a lot of coaches say that players should shoot 500 shots a day every day and that sometimes the expectations seem ridiculously high. Still, when a players make a real commitment to improving himself and makes it as goal to play at the next level, whatever that level may be, they will usually meet or surpass the coaches expectations, no matter how over the top they may seem.

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.