The Trip

By my count, it looks like I owe you all 3 more blog posts to catch up for the year.  Guess we need to get started.

Every year I go back to San Antonio to visit my family for the holidays.  It's the one time all four of us are in the same spot, so it's pretty much a staple even though it always seems to interfere with the Winter travel Holiday Slamfest Tournament in some way or another.  We'll figure out someway to get everything to work out, but in the mean time, we'll just have to deal since family is kind of important. 

This year, just as I was making my last rounds in my apartment to make sure I had everything packed and in the car (if my plane is delayed a little, I am set to go straight from Newark Airport to the gym) I got a phone call from the airlines.  "Due to delays, your new flight information is..."  Great.  Turns out I was going to have to either lose a whole day to travel or spend the night in Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.  I chose to spend the night in the airport just because I needed to get some errands run, and losing a whole day to travel was not what I wanted to do.  The first leg of the flight was fine, then came the 6 hours of sitting in the airport all by my self with nothing but my tablet, laptop, and the Internet.  It was time to be productive.

Over night I went back and looked at my team's stats.  We need to work on sharing the ball a lot more.  We do a great job of rebounding, but we need to make sure we get points off those rebounds and not air-balls and bricks.  I started putting together some practice plans to address those issues.  I also went through each player's stats.  I don't have stats for every game, but I have enough to get a read on how the stats would look for the ones that I'm missing.  I have guys who get minutes that have a lot of zeros on the stat sheet which means I need to work with them to get them to be productive with their time on the court.  They are hard workers, it's just that they are new to competitive basketball.  They need attention.  I have guys that are good players, but are inconsistent or try to do too much when the competition is stiff.  Need to get more consistent in that area and develop some trust in their teammates.  As the other players develop, both of those areas should improve.  Coaches that don't keep stats are really missing out on a great tool and source of information.  Yes, you can get a feel and see these things during games, but stats not only puts numbers to it, but it also lets you see just how bad it is.  Sometimes in games, you feel like you are doing better or worse than the numbers show.  You get that certainty that concrete numbers will show you versus the feeling of the game.  The game of basketball at every level is about putting in work outside of games and structured practice, so I sent each child and parent the stats and what I saw based on looking at them so that when we get together again we all have a sense of what we are going to work on together.  If you don't want to use stats for yourself as a coach, use it to motivate you team to keep working hard and improve.  Nothing says fix this than seeing that you average 8 turnovers a game, or .42 rebounds a game.  Even better is being a total 0-10 from 3-point range.  It should say, "Your range is not there yet, stop wasting possessions" so that you don't have to be the bad guy - Dad will for you.

I also took some time sitting in the airport to clean up some of the plays I had and draw out new ones.  They aren't entirely new, just that I'd never actually sat down and drawn them out.  Players seem to have either transitioned to being more visual learners or just gotten so focused on themselves that they only learn "their spots" so I've decided to fight that by drawing the plays out and sending .pdf files of them to the parents, as well as creating a "playbook" that comes with me to every game.  But it also helps me as a coach see where the flaws are, and has even shown me possible options I didn't see before now that it's on paper.  I love win-win situations! 

We have a while before we play again, but many of the parents have said they are working with their kids to help improve their abilities based on the stats they got, which I believe because they understand the challenges facing us as a new team this season.  I still have video to watch and put together a film session so they can see how they got some of those numbers on the stat sheet, but I'm kind of thankful for the layover.  Game me a chance to just work without distraction.  Well, almost. I did have to battle sleep a little, but that was it.