I love to listen to podcasts on my walks. Some are current events, some are interviews with famous people, and many are sports news and analysis. One of my favorite is After the Time Out with Jon Palicki and Todd Zasadil. Jon and Todd are coaches interviewing coaches.
This past week, I listened to their interview with the new men’s basketball coach at Northern Illinois University. I was very impressed with Coach Matt Majkrzak. I want to share some of his coaching nuggets.
Approach to Players
“I probably started out I'm going to be super tough and macho and when I'm a coach, I'm going to be the man. And I think I probably relaxed over the years. I don't know if yelling and screaming and stomping every day is the right strategy anymore.”
Core Values
But I think the core stuff, honestly hasn't changed a ton. You surround yourself with good people and people you want to be around. I'm like, I'm just going to recruit kids that want to be around.”
Locker Room Motivation
Everyone has those signs in the locker room. Ours are be a good person, go to class, pass the ball.
Those are the only three we have. Because everything else is kind of made up.”
Recruiting
Red flags are, if they complain about all the coaches they've had. I'm good if they're like,”I had this one coach that I didn't like.”
But if they're like, “I didn't like my high school coach, I didn't like my AAU coach, I didn't like my first college coach,” that's a red flag.
Coaching Grit
I've found is the guys (Coaches) that are at places and complaining about what they don't have, they usually go to another place and find out what they don't have. And the people that are, “There's some challenges here, but we're going to work around those challenges and make it work.” They go to the next place and there's challenges and they make it work.
I wanted another place that people call bad jobs and can't win, that I thought you can win at and were sneaky good jobs. I probably got the Northern Illinois job based on turning around programs.
Building Program When Take Over
It starts staff and players.
We have a bunch of locker room things we want to do, office things we want to do. I'm a big list guy. So I have three columns of short term, medium term, long term jobs to do. Long term still is 90 days. Long term's like, we got to redo the signage in the locker room.”
The main thing now is our roster for next year. As much as long term, we're going to be based in high school recruiting, and we need to develop those relationships. It's not something that's the most pressing thing because we have to fill a roster.
You put these things in these buckets. So once we're going to reach out to high school guys and form those relationships, I'm going to be all in on that. But right now, we're all in on our roster for next year because that's the most important thing. Because if we win two games next year, it won't matter how many cool phone calls I made. If we win 20 games, it'll be pretty easy to build those relationships”
Basketball Strategy
I can guarantee we will not turn the ball over a lot. We are going to try like heck to rebound.
The rebounding is a little harder because at some point you need to have physical prowess to grab rebounds, but we're going to fight on the glass in particular.
So when we're recruiting, everything comes down to let's make sure we don't turn it over, let's make sure we rebound, and we know that is the baseline. Then let's recruit offensive guys that are talented enough to put the ball in the hoop in some way, shape, or form.
If they can shoot, bonus points. If they can't shoot, but they can score, we'll find a way to make it work”
Turnovers
We don't put the high risk turnover guys in positions to make turnovers. We try to keep the ball in the hands of the guys that are going to be relatively safe.
I think sometimes when I watch film on other teams, they're putting guys that just aren't great decision makers in these decision making areas. That's where turnovers are going to happen.
We try to minimize that as much as we can through how we structure our offense.
Obviously, recruiting point guard play is important and recruiting point guards that value the ball.
If a guy comes down and whiffs on a screen, I'm probably going to let it go. If a guy miscuts, probably going to let it go. If you have a careless travel in the paint because your footwork's bad, you're going to get talked to about it. And if you make a lazy pass or a lazy catch, we'll stop practice. There aren't a lot of things that it's just no, but turnovers are one of the things.
Accountable
All the old school stuff, we save that for turnovers and rebounding. If a guy's not making a rebounding effort every single time, eventually, they won't play and we'll run. And those are the only two things, unfortunately, run and bench.
We'll show a ton of film, we'll chart a lot, we'll get there in the new school approach. But at some point, if the new school approach stops working, we'll go back to the old school- you will not play, I will bench you, and we're going to run when you do it.
I think there's a reason that, when things have worked for hundreds of years, sometimes you don't need to reinvent the wheel.”
Basketball Skill Training
You're going to work on wing catches where guys like stampeding it and then spinning backwards. How many players on your team are you going to want to do that in a five on five game? One? Two?
It's insane. We just don't do that and we're not going to do that. We put them in real situations.”
What are we doing? And that's why we don't turn it over, is because we just work on the real situations you're in over and over and over again in a five on five setting.
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