Youth coaching

Again, Jordan wasn't a late bloomer in the basketball sense, though. Again, he scored 40 a game for the JV team. The varsity team had senior guards, and the coach was just doing what a lot of high school coaches do. If Jordan had been on varsity, he would been too good to not start and play the entire game. He was only a late bloomer in that he shot up six or seven inches from his sophomore year of high school to his freshman year of college.

But I'm just being nit-picky because I agree with your general points on player development. Jordan's just a horrible example that gets overused by people who don't know the actual story.

 

Keep them busy busy busy. They hate standing around and waiting in lines to do something. They love being engaged. When I helped coach girls softball at that age I would spend almost the entire practice going around and rolling grounders to girls as we waited between pitches during batting a/o fielding practice.

 

Bingo.

One rule I absolutely lived by was, nobody ever stands/sits around doing nothing.

When we had 12 kids show up for basketball practice (fairly rare), we split into separate 3-on-3 games on each end of the court.

 

I always like to put it out there to see who it annoys. Thanks for playing.

 

In the "what goes around comes around" department, I got an e-mail yesterday from my youngest sister, who now has daughters aged 10, 6, 6 and 2, and she said she is going to coach the oldest one's basketball team this winter.

Of course, in my fabled coaching career of a couple decades ago, she was usually on the teams I was coaching. She's 16 years younger than me, Dad was 48 when she was born and hadn't done much in basketball since the 1940s, Mom had played college hoops but back in the 6-player days, so when she got on a team with a real Vince Lombardi cement-head type coaching, Dad asked if I was interested in signing on as a co-coach and hopefully toning down Mr. Buzzcut's act.

So I did, and off we went. Over the next five years, I coached her for six basketball seasons (two with her school team and four in offseason club teams). The school was happy enough they hired me to coach four other teams as well. Amazingly enough we seemed to find it was indeed possible to coach in a positive way for everybody, make sure everybody got plenty of playing time, have fun, improve, and (gasp!!!) even win games.


In my own sports playing career and those of three other siblings, we had had a variety of coaches who mostly ranged from "fair/decent" to complete unmitigated tools. The bad ones mainly divided into two categories: utterly clueless people who signed up for utterly unfathomable reasons, and blood-and-guts leatherneck types, one who had the added attraction of being utterly obsessed with turning his ball-hog son into an NBA first-round pick at the age of 13 (he coached the whole team with that objective).

Everybody on that kid's team (including my brother) hated the kid's guts and the dad too. The dad shamelessly ran every play for Junior Jumpshot, instructed the starters their job was to get him the ball, and told all the marginal players they would play only if the game was out of hand and Junior needed a rest. In practice most of the "scrubs" rebounded while Junior shot 500 jumpers a day. Shockingly enough they had 14 kids on the team in 5th grade; by the time they got to 8th, only 8 were left.

So when I decided to take the plunge into coaching, I decided it wasn't going to be like that.

So i guess most of the next 2-3 months I'm going to be an "executive consultant" or "consigliere" for her coaching staff (I live a 2-hour drive/$50 tank of gas away from the old family home so that will probably be the extent of my involvement). It'll be fun to see how she does.

 

Back in the spring, I started a topic discussing a column by Eric Sondheimer, lead prep writer at the LA Times, on parents pushing their kids in sports. Don't want to dredge up the thread for fear of incurring Moddy's wrath, but here's a link to the column. It's one I'm sure we wish we'd all written when we get one of those calls: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/31/sports/la-sp-0401-sondheimer-20110401

 

Al Davis is watching.

Just win, baby.

 

One other thought. In youth sports I think its more about coaching to ALL the kids, not just the studs. Which many times leads to less than perfection.

I readily admit that while the teams I've been associated with have been competitive we have not yet won a championship, but I've never been focused on that and if I'm a poor coach I accept that.

I just believe that if you coach to the studs and championships, there is a great deal of collateral damage. To me the studs are going to be studs, don't screw them up. The less than studly are who really need the encouragement and the guidance. They will also be the more rewarding.

 

Here's a link to some fun drills I've found...I'm basically boiling it down to teaching the basics and playing some fun games. As long as the kids are smiling I feel I'm doing a good job. This is first-and second-graders...no scoreboard during games and such. Just learning the game.

http://www.degerstrom.com/basketball/drills/youth/

 

I am glad someone else brought up that point.

At every level at which you coach, you need to keep one thing in mind: the majority, probably the fairly large majority, of the kids you are coaching, will not go on to play at "the next level."

Of course that depends to a large extent on the size and makeup of your school system -- if you are coaching in a really small-town environment, the "shakeout" attrition factor isn't as pronounced -- but if you are in a reasonably-sized school district, the vast majority of the kids you coach in grade-school basketball will not eventually end up playing varsity in high school.

Far too often the whole function of kids sports is presumed/assumed/ preemptively declared to be as a farm system for the high school program -- at lots of places the high school coach runs the whole youth program, dictating offense and defense, etc etc all the way down to biddy basketball.

The problem with that is it leads to the star system all the way down the line. The handful of kids with HS star potential are singled out early and things are usually geared to developing THEM.

In the meantime, the majority of the kids who are not star prospects for HS are basically shunted to the side, used as roster filler for the superstars-in-development.

For those kids, being on a good grade-school or junior-high team may be the best sports experience of their lives, but instead they're turned into bit players as the superstars are prepped for the next level.

The age-old debate over zone defenses in youth basketball is a prime example. The player-development gurus usually go berserk over the mere suggestion that zone defenses should even be allowed. No no no no no no no no zone defenses ever, they all scream. They want their players to play nothing but man-to-man defense every second of every game because that will "prepare them for competition at the highest level."

Well yeah, but there are a couple problems with that:

1) When no-zone-defense rules are strictly enforced (no trapping/no doubleteaming), the game quickly turns into an orgy of isolation plays. Give the ball to your best player, clear out, and let them go one-and-one and score. Repeat ad nauseam.

2) SOMETIMES (note emphasis) zone defense is actually an effective way for less physically talented players to slow down superstar opponents.

 

I'm actually FOR some level of community cohesiveness in athletics. Having said that, a high school coach - who would really be at the end of the youth sport ladder - would have to have perspective on what's in his best interest. In other words, it's about retention in the program and numbers more than stars.

Where I've seen the best results from public schools is when they do the most to keep kids engaged longer. So in youth league, you emphasize things that will bring the rank-and-file back. You encourage participation at every step. And once in high school school, you try to promote sub-varsity programs that are rewarding to their participants. Usually, these teams are afterthoughts.

At one successful school in a one-time coverage area of mine, the head football coach was able to get an athletic PE period for his freshman team where the player was able to get individual attention during the period from the varsity coach at his position, something that they would not get if they only were exposed to practice after school (those coaches would be working with the varsity players).

The freshmen felt more engaged and more a part of the program and that kept a larger number out as sophomores where, similarly, the JV team was given a good amount of coaching. The 90-pound kid who might never have a growth spurt that wold allow him play varsity was getting instructions by the same coach who later in the day would work out the future SEC stud. That made the kids felt like they were valued because, in a way, they were.

So, in this program, late-bloomers were ready to play when they physically caught up. Kids that "saw the writing on the wall" and knew they weren't going to be varsity players and subsequently dropped out were more likely to walk away from the game feeling that they had a positive experience and were more likely to continue to support the program, etc., etc. "It wasn't for me, but I liked coach and I enjoyed it," that kind of thing.

 

Funding is a huge part of the decline in that kind of participation. Very few elementary and middle schools have enough money for an athletic program. And since the parents who have the means are already paying thousands of dollars a year for the club team and the private training, they aren't likely to chip in for a school program that's beneath their abilities anyway. So a kid by age 12 is either fully committed or is never going to learn.

The kicker is the rich parents like this because it serves to narrow the competition pool for varsity spots in high school, and for the theoretical college scholarships.