Everyone loves to say youth basketball isn't about winning - it's about having fun and learning. I'd like to see those people coach competitive basketball. Basketball where there are playoffs, championships, and the like. Yes you want to have fun and learn, but when the standings always show you in last place kids start to check out because it's not fun anymore and learning isn't being rewarded with anything. Then you as a coach start to doubt yourself and feel that pressure from parents and colleagues to get wins, which kills your fun. Sorry, but the game of basketball is about winning and that won't change no matter how the "pro-participation" party may try to spin it.
This last season though, I think I was able to figure something out. I sat the team down and we just talked about our reality and what winning meant to us. I didn't set the standard - they did. I just held them to it, and as I promised in my last post, tried to be as positive as I could all the while. Sure from a record standpoint we weren't very good, but we met our goals just about every game and that kept everyone involved.
Each game our goals were to give 100% effort, limit turnovers, and have fun. Lofty goals, right? When you think about setting good goals especially as a competitor it's really easy to make a bunch of goals that will set you up for failure because they are not entirely under your control. Goals like "win x games" are great if you can guarantee that you are not going to run into competition, but that also likely means you aren't being challenged to grow. But our goal of limiting turnovers was one where everyone had to work together to achieve and would put us in good position to win. By keeping the goals simple and focused on the team we were able to be competitive in a lot more games than most would have thought at the start of the season. By holding everyone to always giving their best effort, the feedback for everyone was based on what their best was and they understood that they were only getting measured against themselves. By doing that at practices as well as games they were able to see very quickly that if they gave that effort every time, not only would we look and play better, but it was a lot more fun regardless of the score.
And those goals stuck no matter what. Oh we are up by 10 - great. But we can't start to relax, you still have to give your best and not be sloppy with the ball. Down 20 - great. We aren't giving up because we said it would be 100% effort at all times and anything less would mean we failed ourselves. Whether I was talking to a parent or a player, that was the attitude. "Man, they were a tough team." "Yes, but no one in the gym can say we gave up or backed down. That is all that matters to us." After a while the parents would join in and it was just talk about how we played. Even when we lost by 20 to a team from DC parents were praising the boys for playing so hard. No one mentioned the score - just how we never quit and made them work for everything.
The winter season is about to start, so it will be another opportunity to strike that balance and get that total team buy in. Granted, the winter season is a different animal, but if I'm going to grow as a coach I need to pull it off. I feel like this will allow me to get to another level in terms of player respect and engagement, and those are "must-haves" for any decent coach. And I don't want to settle for being decent...
