This Week’s Question- What can a lower level coach do to make the program stronger? What are examples of both little and big things a lower level can do to help your program and help you as a head coach? What responsibilities did you give and expect from assistants and lower coaches? What did you have assistants do during games?
Diane Lichtenburg- Bettendorf
To help make your program stronger, lower level coaches need to be:
• Great role models
• Strong teachers of the fundamentals. Fundamentals include the skills of the game, practice expectations, importance of hard work and preparation, and the significance of being a team player.
• Organized- prepared for practice with detailed practice plans so they are making the most of their time.
• Good communicators with players, parents, and coaches.
Some things that lower level coaches can do to help your program include:
• Helping with camps and clinics. This is important so that they can see how the head coach wants the fundamental skills to be taught. They can assist with demonstrations, see how drills are run properly, and get to know the players at all levels.
• Coaching the younger players during club season. It’s very helpful to have a quality coach working with your future players.
• Show an interest in all levels. It’s great when they are visible at matches and tournaments. It means a lot to the players and other coaches.
• Assist with scouting, statistics, videotaping matches
Responsibilities given to assistants and lower coaches:
• Leading warm ups during practice
• Assistance in the weight room with strength training & conditioning both in season and out of season
• Planning drills and different parts of practice- Taking small groups and working on their strengths with that group.
• Break down game film
On game day assistant responsibilities include:
• Prepare video for the match
• Assist in pre game warm ups running various drills
• Help take stats, chart different skills and tendencies of both your team and the opponents
• Discuss line ups, strategies, and adjustments during times outs and between games
• Following the match, scores need to be called in to the news stations, media, girls union
Evan Massey- Galesburg
Enthusiasm & Loyalty
One of the best lower level coaches I had was Michelle Wynne. She coached 8th grade and then later 9th grade. She did a tremendous job of getting her players to be excited about basketball and also excited about playing for Galesburg HS. She promoted our program and got the players to believe they would have an excellent experience at the high school. As a result, more of her players kept playing in our program and her players came to GHS believing in the high school coaches.
Follow the Program
It is important to have coaches in the JH and the FS level who are on the same page in terms of drills and plays. By the time a player gets to the varsity, they should know the name and purpose of drills of the program, also your basic offense and defense.
It bothered me when I would go to a JH or lower level program when they would be calling out the name of some play that I had never heard of and was not part of playbook. All I could think was that they were investing time in this play vs time in our program.
Development over Winning
While I wanted players to learn to be competitive, become confident, and think of themselves as winners- winning was a secondary goal. The priority of lower level coaches always should be skill development of lower level players, and also belief in our approach.
An important part of our program was centered around playing man to man defense. We wanted our lower level coaches to not only teach the skills of man to man defense but to develop a belief in man to man defense. One year our JH was playing a “big game”- realize they were not in a conference and it was not part of a tourney. To try to win the game, the coach put in a triangle and two defense for their JH team. The team won with the triangle and two, but at a cost. Those kids and those parents not felt, “MM is a good defense but for “big games” a triangle and two is what worked.” By focusing on winning that one game, the lower level coach impacted the belief in our program.
Thom Sigel- Rock Island
While the youth and junior high situations at Rock Falls and Rock Island were different, I believe we tried to stress many of the same aspects. Rock Falls had four different school systems that fed into the high school. It took a couple of years to gain more influence with the programs at the lower levels, but then we had tremendous cooperation. In Rock Island we had two junior highs in our district, and I was able to help hire our coaches. The grade school program was our Future Rocks (formerly RIMBA) program.
The first thing we wanted to accomplish was to try to have the coaches understand how important they were to our program and to get them to buy in to what we believed was important. The coaches would get some type of gear or shirt. In our coaches meetings, we would include them and give them handouts and DVD's we recorded for them. They were also encouraged to attend our practices if available. At Rock Falls we were able to have our own game programs, so we would put photos of the junior high teams and coaches in the program.
In our youth program, and maybe more at our grade school levels, we hoped coaches didn't stress winning over teaching and improvement. We told them to coach kids in competing and playing to win because that is essential, but not to sacrifice teaching good basketball to stack up some wins that ultimately don't have a huge impact on our program. A couple of negative examples would be not running offense and just using high ball screens for your best player or avoiding teaching man to man defense to sit in a bad zone when young players on the opposing team can't consistently hit 3's. Another important factor I believed in as our Future Rocks teams were formed was to split our regular season and travel teams evenly. I don't think loading up one team and having "A" and "B" teams helps develop depth at younger ages. It made more sense to me to develop two players at each position by starting your 10 best players to develop depth rather than put them all on one team to try to win tournaments.
I will dip into last week's topic just a bit in talking about our system. Generally, I would categorize our system as Open Post (Positionless) offense and man to man defense. We would adjust our offense depending on our personnel, and I usually liked to have something 5 out and 4 around 1 to have options to use as a change-up. And while we did mix in some zone, we were a man to man program. So we expected that from our youth coaches. Using Open Post Offense at the lower levels allow players to use different skills as they develop. We know not all kids grow at the same rate, so this helps them be more versatile. In addition, it allows players to learn how to pass, cut, screen, read screens, and move without the ball. That allows them to become better all-around players than running a pattern offense or just learning set plays.
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