First, If you haven’t listened to the “Flying Coach” podcast with Steve Kerr & Pete Carroll you are missing out. It is great insight from two of the best coaches out there. This particular podcast included Dave Roberts (manager of the Dodgers) on it as well and the three talked about coaching at a very high level. It’s on my short list for podcasts to go back and listen to again.
In this podcast, Pete Carroll made a comment about “The Players Mind” and it has honestly made me think a lot. It was not a new concept at all, but was just perfectly phrased. Do you ever have that moment when someone says what you think in a way that is so much better than anything you could have said? That was how I felt about this. Here is how he explained what it means:
“In all of our teaching and all of our coaching we are just trying to get the guy into the frame of mind that they are just playing the game.”
He wants his players to be reactive, responsive, and natural. He does not want them to be in the outside stuff like stats, score, standings. He doesnt want them to be overcoached. They need to be in the flow and be able to freely play. The word that stands out to me is “natural” because it is not a word you hear often when talking about how players should play.
Kerr continued on the topic and he brought up the importance of the mind-body connection. He wants his players to be able to compete without thinking. It is a 1 play/1 possession thing. Players can’t worry about the next possession or the last one. Roberts mention that he wants his players to play pitch to pitch and “dominate that moment.”
My biggest takeaway to this is that it’s easy for us as coaches to dump information on our guys that takes them out of this frame of mind. Basketball is a sport that can be very over coached and I have been guilty of it many times. Information is good but too much information is not good. The art of coaching is that once it gets past that appropriate level of information, that is when performance declines. Instead of being reactive and responsive they are in their own head trying to remember what they should be doing or worrying about things that they don’t need to worry about.
I think our biggest role as coaches is to be able to filter information for our players. We take in information from all over and have to filter it down to the absolute most important things. The art of it is balancing how much information the player needs. It is a fine line. We constantly have to figure out what the “minimum effective dose” is for giving our players what they need to know. What makes it even tougher is that every player is different.
So how do we get players into that mindset that they need to be?
Their are many things we can do to help our players get into the “players mind”. Here are a few situations that we can make the biggest impact on our players.
- Technique
- Decision Making/Games approach
- Scouting Reports
Technique
I think that we can put to much emphasis on perfect technique. Every player is different and some are unorthodox in how they play the game. So do we need cookie cutter technique for every part of the game? Some guys are able to slide defensively and some need to turn and mini-sprint to stay in front. So if a guy is sprinting or sliding all that matters is that they keep the ball in front of them. I think it is important to teach players what you are trying to do and then let them figure out how to make it work. The words you use and the emphasis you place on things is so much more important than worrying about those extra things that can bog down a player.
An example of this is guarding the ball handler in the pick & roll. We teach our guys that we want them to go over more screens than under. We also want them to body up on the bottom hip as soon as they hear/feel the Ballscreen. Our teaching points are “take a hostage” and “no rejects”. We are not worried about being at a certain angle or a certain distance. We do not talk about how they absolutely have to do something. We give them our general goal and what we want to see and then let them figure It out. They have to be able to play naturally because that split second they have to think about something is the second that gets them rejected or too far off the ball.
A similar example would be chasing a shooter off a pin down. We want to chase more than shortcut (gap) the screen. However, sometimes the player reads that they can shortcut it and make a play. Why would we want to take that away? The player knows that they are free to make any decision that they want, we will hold them more accountable on the shortcut because it usually ends in an open 3. It is more important that the job gets done than how it gets done.
Decision Making and the Games Approach
The way you practice is so important. I love the thought of basketball decision training and using small sided games to improve players. Not only is it more enjoyable for the players, but it is proven to help them with in-game retention. It puts players into that playing mind in practice which can only help them in games. We can shape situations and scenarios that players will see in games and build up those reads to help them make the decisions they need to make in a real game.
Going back to the previous point, this allows coaches to not have to coach every little part of something. We cannot cover every possible thing that happens on a court. Sometimes players just need to make plays. Cody Toppert uses the phrase “Don’t play the play, make a play.” This fits in the idea of a “Players Mind” so well because we are freeing the player to make the play he sees in front of him. Clearing him of the mental space that overreaching can take up. We let instincts take over for the players and help them through use of feedback.
Allowing players to play to their instincts isn’t easy. We do not want to take away something that makes them a better player. If a player continually makes poor decisions in this type of scenario we will give the feedback of showing film or working on it in a breakdown drill (SSG). However, them being reactive and responsive is more important to the success of our team than just telling them what to do. It also builds a level of trust from the players because they know that you are giving them some freedom and decision making power.
Scouting Reports
One of the biggest areas I think this comes into play is scouting reports and game prep. In past seasons I was a big scouting report guy. I would have every action written down and scouts would be 12-15 pages. However, I have made a big change because I wanted the players to really focus more on our system and the most important parts of the other team. We name our closeouts and that is a huge part of the scout (Korver, Curry, Kyrie, Rondo). We want them to know who they are closing out to and what hand they drive to. Some guys have a tendency that we need to cover but we figure between our habits/system, knowing the closeout, and knowing the strong hand that is 95%+ of what we need to be successful.
Instead of spending time working on a specific set, we our principles to get us through most of what the other team is trying to do. An example of this is defending Screen the screener action that can come in a million different ways. Instead of going through a specific set play we will break down our general rules early in practice and come back to it. We will name it so that instead of saying they run “45 black” we will say they run “blast” which is our term for it. It is “blast” for every team that runs that and our guys are now aware of what to expect and what they need to do. It is a simple way to help them without overloading them.
Overall, I think that the more our players can get in this frame of mind the more success we will have as a team. A coach has a huge impact on how our guys go out for the game mentally. So with that responsibility it is important that we are always working with them to get into the proper mental place.