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Youth coaching

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by flexmaster33, Nov 23, 2011.

  1. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Indeed. That's especially true in regards to baseball, basketball and universally true in sports like tennis. There really isn't "select" or "AAU" football so things are geared toward a high school varsity, so it's more doable there.

    Sometimes you don't need extensive school system support to have a comprehensive youth system. In some rural schools I used to be around, there were strong "Biddy Ball" programs or a local version called "L'il Dribblers" where fundamentals were emphasized and they did a good job of getting kid to embrace learning fundamentals by turning drills into fun little games. You weren't just dribbling around chairs, you were doing it in a relay race, that kind of thing.

    In a couple of cases where there were powerhouse rural prep programs, when you'd look into what their secret was, it was a strong Biddy or Lil' Dribbler program where the high school coach was sort of a figurehead who would conduct league-wide practices that were more like day camps. But the kids loved them because the way they were organized into kid-friendly games. Eventually, they got to junior high and played for their first school board employee coach (Biddy was all volunteer, like Little League), then the high school coach would benefit from it by having a school full of kids with ball skills, shooting ability, etc.

    Johnny Dangerously knows the schools I'm talking about. Funny thing is, Lil' Dribblers seems to work much better with girls because, a coach explained to me, little boys feel funny dribbling around a chair or throwing perfect chest passes and bounce passes to each other. They feel "above" that. Little girls were just having fun. So you end up with girls teams that can break a press and get a layup every time and boys teams that would dribble into traps, throw it away, etc.
     
  2. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    My sister had her first practice Thursday.

    Aside from just shooting around in the driveway, she hadn't really played basketball in 15 years (law school, 5 kids and opening your own practice tends to get in the way).

    As the kids were being dropped off by the other parents and starting to warm up, one of the dads came up and said something like, "my daughter had some mother coaching her last year who didn't know a damn thing about basketball." Went on for like 5 minutes.

    :eek: ::) ::) :eek:
     
  3. Smash Williams

    Smash Williams Well-Known Member

    I agree with this to a point, but in girls basketball and girls sports in general, way too many of the elite players (and I'm talking mid-level DI college here) are too passive because they've been taught "don't be a ball hog" their whole lives, and in girls sports, that message is all that gets through. So many girls are already ostracized by teammates for being "too good" that they bring themselves back down to the pack in order not to stick out, and then they don't get any better and enjoy the sport less in many cases.

    Now with younger kids, this is obviously less of an issue than with middle school and high school (god, middle school girls are some of the most evil creatures on the planet). But if there is a kid who is obviously more talented and just enjoys the sport more, then do make sure she knows that being better than her friends is okay as long as she's not just doing it to show off. And make sure her teammates know it too, obviously in an age-appropriate way for your team.

    She almost certainly won't turn into a DI college player, but she will learn that it's okay to excel in something even if her friends don't. And that's a pretty big step for most girls, especially in sports.
     
  4. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Yeah girls and boys are completely different in that regards. Girls will do what's asked of them almost to a fault where, with little boys, you've got to keep them from going 12 different directions.
     
  5. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    One real problem is the schizophrenic attitudes being pushed on kids sports.

    On one hand you have the cutthroat blood-and-guts win-at-all-costs travel teams with the Vince Lombardi/Bobby Knight operating philosophy, then you go back to house/rec leagues where everything is total pattycake, kumbayah, even-keeping-score-is-wrong, and actually doing anything with the idea of winning games is a complete surrender to the blood-and-guts zealots.

    I mean, I remember when I was a kid in middle school. A couple seasons I was on teams that absolutely sucked. We lost every game and the coach never seemed to give a damn. He was nice enough, he didn't yell or scream, but practices just seemed like a total waste of time. He never seemed to have any ideas on how to get better. He would run scrimmages in practice, but hardly every say anything about what we were doing right or wrong. He'd just kind of absently wander around center court until it was time to go home.

    He didn't get down on us for losing -- in fact, he never said a word -- but hell, we could read the scoreboard. We'd run the same play in a row five times, throw it away five times at exactly the same place, and he never said anything about how to maybe do it better.

    Then in junior high we got some coaches who actually did know something of what they were doing. Suddenly practices started to make sense; they told us the drills we were running and why we were running them. Instead of just wandering around in practice screwing around, there seemed to be a point to the whole thing.

    They didn't yell and scream and smash clipboards during games either, but they did start to be a little insistent, "come on, we know how to do better than that," and guess what, we did, and we did. We didn't turn into some titanic championship team, but we started to win some games, we started to make the good teams sweat.

    A huge problem with kids sports is it seems it's hard to find the happy medium between Lombardi/Knight and the who-gives-a-hoot type.
     
  6. flexmaster33

    flexmaster33 Well-Known Member

    Yes, 2 weeks in I'm finding that I would much rather coach an all-girls team.
    These are first-and-second graders, so it's coed 6 girls and 3 boys in this case, but two of the boys are obnoxious and carry this "I already know it all" attitude around practice all day. The other boy can get a bit wild, but keeps it fun.

    Meanwhile, the girls do what is asked, listed to the coaching and have a smile on their face all practice long. At the end of the practice we come to the middle for a quick team cheer before dismissal. The girls flood to the center excited to be part of the team, while the two boys linger far outside the circle as if they're just going to walk off. (I ended up calling them into the group).

    Meanwhile, the parents sit in the bleachers indifferent.

    For those of us writers out there, let's be appreciative of the junk the coaches at the prep level must have to deal with.
     
  7. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    Just let my kid take all the shots and get your clumsy kid out of the way, and we're good, flexster.

    I've coaches youth basketball, soccer, baseball, and flag football.

    Flag football was the worst. You have all these rules for how long everyone must play, what positions they must play, etc.

    It's hard keeping up with it during a game and you grit you teeth when other teams seem to just give the ball to one kid the whole game.

    One dad brought his kid in the middle of the second quarter and complained that his kid didn't get to play as long as he should have.

    Yeah, pops, I had him slated to start and he wasn't there.
     
  8. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Update,


    Well, the next week, my sister said this guy volunteered to be a "co-coach" (in his words).

    She called the league office and said, "OK who is the head coach here," and they said, "You are, you volunteered first, first-come first-served. If he wants to volunteer as an assistant, he can be an assistant, if you want him, but he isn't the 'co-coach' unless you say he is."

    So the next day at practice, Sis shows up with her daughter 15 minutes early for a 7 p.m. practice, a couple other kids show up and start shooting around. She has the whole practice broken down in 3-minute segments on a typed schedule on a clipboard. At 6:52-6:55-6:58, more kids trickle in, almost everyone is there. Except Co-Coach and his daughter. At 7:00 Sis starts into full-court fastbreak drills.

    At 7:04 in walks Co-Coach and announces, "OK, here's what we're going to do in practice tonight." He hands my sister a hand-scrabbled schedule which says something like,

    700 SCRIMMAGE
    715 WATER BREAK
    720 OFFENSE
    730 DEFENSE
    740 WATER BREAK
    745 FREE THROWS

    Sis said she was one millimeter from replaying the "Your coaching days are over" scene from Hoosiers.

    She takes "George's" scrabbled schedule, crumples it up, and hits "a nice 15 foot jumper" (as she described it) into the trash can. "Practice has already started, George," she says, "We get this gym for one hour a week. Practice started at 7:00. It's now 7:07. At 7:09 we'll be moving into fast break continuation and transition to motion offense. Go round up the loose balls over there."

    Then she says "Girls, Mr. Dyckschlapp here is going to help out a bit during practices and games. I'm sure he'll figure out how we do things around here."


    So far they're 2-0. She has Mr. Dyckschlapp keeping the most detailed stat sheets you can ever imagine for 5th grade girls. Happily, another dad, who seems to be fairly cool, has also signed on as an assistant, so Mr. D can be edged farther and farther down the bench.
     
  9. flexmaster33

    flexmaster33 Well-Known Member

    A lot depends on the parents it seems...you get a good group and it goes smoothly, you get a bad group and it's a nightmare.

    This week, we had our second game and the Scoreboard was turned on...so as coaches we decided to keep time on the board and let the kids hear the horn and such. League rules state "no score shall be kept" for this level. So my wife reluctantly volunteers to run the scoreboard and doesn't get 2 minutes into it when the parents start harassing her to update the score and such. I guess it was a steady flow of complaints all game long, and my wife's last time volunteering for such duty.

    Explained the rule to the parents and the philosophy of simply teaching the kids the game at this mini-hoopers level. Doubt it made much impact. Some people just can't enjoy a game unless they have a winner and a loser.

    Also sent around a post-game snack list and had one parent out right tell me "No, she wouldn't be doing that." To make matters worse, my wife overhears her a few minutes later asking her son "Is that it? That's all they had for snack?"
    Yes, it was my week to bring snacks...crackers and juice boxes...pretty typical I thought, but not as gourmet as this deadbeat parent required I guess.

    Next season, we're going in with a batch of families that we want to be on the same team...this year was a blind draw going in.
     
  10. qtlaw

    qtlaw Well-Known Member

    On one hand I dearly miss coaching hoops, I'd been coaching the last 4 years but alas my 5th grader decided enough was enough and my 7th grader took a pass. On the other hand our weekends are much more manageable; instead of hoops took the boys to a science museum last weekend and it was great.

    Am looking forward to my oldest's last year of Little League.

    I've got to say that looking back, I dont' really recall any scores from the past seasons, but what I do recall fondly are the memories of my players.
     
  11. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Amen to that.

    Thinking back over the 10 basketball teams I coached, one was the dominant league champion; five were contenders, two were average-to-below and two were real bad. But the only real problem I had with parents was with one (probably the best) of the "contender" teams. There were two real primadonna players with primadonna parents to match, both of whom wanted the ball in their hands every time down court, who hated each other and everybody else on the team.

    One was a cigarette-smoking, fishnet-wearing 7th grader, a speed guard who regularly walked into games a quarter and a half late (league rules mandated everybody sit out a quarter anyway). The last practice before the last game, her mom pulled me aside (I thought this story might be taking a different turn entirely) and demanded Daughter Dearest play point guard the entire game Saturday. I said, "We'll see." (The handy response every youth league coach learns to use early and often.)

    In fact there was no chance in the goddamn world this was gonna happen, since my sister played point guard and was the only player on the team who could or would pass, so in effect her ultimatum amounted to, "my baby is gonna take the ball and shoot it on every play."

    (Which would send Primadonna No. 2 -- a big center -- and her parents into a funk of their own, since she continually pouted when she didn't get the ball.)

    In actual practice my sister and D.D. alternated at PG; my sister would pass her the ball with the full knowledge she was gonna go and shoot it. But I figured I'd let Mama have her little dream, anyway.

    Neither one ever showed on Saturday. Never saw either one again.
     
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