A wise, successful coach once explained to me that one of the greatest challenges coaches face is that players’ think they are twice as good as they really are, and worse, parents think their kids are 5 times as good as reality.
One primary source of the problem is that until recently there has been no good way to objectively show players and parents what you know as a coach – mainly that most player’s skills are deficient, they aren’t practicing enough, and other kids have moved passed them for a limited number of roster spots and minutes. Compounding the problem is that choosing who plays and who doesn’t becomes a personal assessment of a parent’s child and affects the collective family dreams that they have shared for years. Worse, if it’s perceived that this is your opinion that prevents that family dream from becoming reality, you get caught in an unwinnable battle – one based on opinion rather than fact. The risks are significant because you know that if the parent is not on your side, the player will hear negative comments every night at the dinner table and bring the family’s frustration back to your team, your locker room, and your practices. The frustration that builds from the perception of biased opinion increases the risk that there will be a cancerous undercurrent of dissatisfaction from the players who aren’t playing as much as they believe they should be. This can lead to unnecessary losses, miserable seasons, and in the worst cases, early coaching exits from potentially great programs simply because coaches are not supported by the parents in the program.
We have seen many of our 94Fifty customers effectively manage these relationships with a four step process that transforms opinion to fact, turns subjective assessment to objective diagnostic, and evolves the coaches role into that of the expert at all times with any player/parent rather than just the expert when a player gets all the playing time during a 19-1 season. As a coach, you know that some years you won’t win every game, and that is when the critics (parents) start to snipe. Here are some ideas you can implement to eliminate the sniping forever while building those long-lasting parent/player relationships that makes coaching so rewarding.
1) Create Evaluation criteria for earning the chance, not the guarantee, for playing time: Creating a combination of objective and subjective criteria that creates a series of gradually increasing gates that each player should pass through is important. These criteria should include a combination of Height, Ball-handling and Shooting Skill, Athleticism, On-court IQ, Heart, Competitive Desire, Game Performance, and Leadership.
This list gives the coach a series of objective and subjective criteria that all players and parents can see. You should consider making all of the criteria visible, but you should strongly consider making skill and height the first criteria that any player must pass to move on to further evaluation. Skill alone should not equal playing time, but it should be the first factor that every parent and player understands as your baseline. If a player is not working on skill, then he/she is hurting or eliminating the opportunity to get minutes. Let your parents know that you will be screening players by skill as the first screen for making the team and for making playing decisions. Our products are designed to help make this process exceptionally objective, so those interested should simply visit our website at www.94Fifty.com/features. But for those programs that don’t have 94Fifty, consider developing a series of skill evaluations that lead to objective criteria.
Don’t forget or ignore that height is an important criteria in your screening process – our statistics show that the combination of height and ball-handling skill can accurately predict a player’s ability to play at higher levels over 90% of the time. When you add shooting skill the predictive level increases to over 95%. Whether parents like to hear it or not, height is a factor. Players that are tall and skilled are extremely valuable. Players that are shorter have to possess a higher level of skill (particularly ball-handling) to be on the court. Players and parents need to recognize that if a player lacks height, then practice needs to be increased on skill work, and if a player does possess some height, that height is not sufficient on its own to guarantee playing time.
2) Set Up and a Mandatory Pre-Season First Screen (if rules allow it) – It’s important to measure early for skill and to do it objectively. At 94Fifty, we believe measurement brings accountability, and accountability drives rapid improvement. Our most successful customers use 94Fifty products as a way to quantify skill in a standard way that cannot be questioned. It’s designed to be completely objective. Parents can’t argue that their 6’-2” tweener should be a point guard when his/her 94Fifty ball-handling score puts them as the 8th best ball-handler on the team, or that their under-sized center should be chucking more threes when he/she can’t shoot accurately or quickly enough. We help you measure every aspect of these skills so that your players see their weaknesses, and more importantly, so their parents can see it and understand that decisions are not just based on your opinion. Nothing is more sobering than seeing objective data, and the first 94Fifty skill testing session sets a level playing field for player – coach – parent. Measure everyone in your program for ball-handling and your varsity players for shooting and ball-handling. We recommend doing this in September or October or at least a month before practice/tryouts begin.
3) Establish Ongoing Objective Evaluations – Our most successful programs instill a culture of constant measurement and improvement and use objective testing to see who has the desire to work hard. During pre-season or tryouts, it’s important to make these results visible to your players. Don’t just use the testing as a way to screen for which players make the cut – use it as a way to explain and help guide for future success. If you have to make a tough cut, or send someone back to JV, or defer a promotion of a sophomore to varsity despite lofty expectations, use the data to help explain what steps need to be taken to earn the right to play more at higher levels. If the skills are great, but the player’s height is not, explain the issue in that way. If the skills and height are correct, but the desire is missing (which you will see with 94Fifty historical tracking if they aren’t practicing), then explain that concern to the parent in an objective way. If a player is making the cut but still competing for playing time, then explain to the parents/player that the player will still have to show the other subjective skills to earn the right to play. Always reinforce that the skill development is an important first step. The key here is that when you start with objective data, and follow up with another set or ongoing sets of objective data, you have now established yourself as a coach that uses unbiased criteria to make decisions, even if some of those decisions are more subjective. You have built credibility and trust for the parent and player – which leads to the final step.
4) Never Relinquish Your Coaches Intuition, Just Make the Decision Process Visible. Once skills have been established and used as the initial screen and established as objective criteria, you obviously have a number of other factors that are more subjective in nature. When you can, we recommend that you measure and record whenever possible. Try to track, or have your managers track things in practice (hustle plays, + – stats in scrimmages, athleticism factors, etc). This all helps to set the stage for a productive discussion with a player when they approach you to ask what can be done to get more playing time; likewise, it is equally helpful to avoid emotional outbursts when a parent calls you to demand playing time. Whether you set rules with parents early in the season outlining who is allowed to ask about playing time (or not), by using objective evidence to support your more subjective decisions, you will help to set the tone that you have thought through your player decisions and that those decisions are well-reasoned. But at the end of the day it is your choice as the coach to make the decision.
At 94Fifty, we have a number of high school and college coaches who are employees and advisers that share their collective experience with us, and we have coaches all over the world contributing their experiences to help us see successful communication strategies. In the end, we have seen a common theme that by using measurable skill criteria as an initial and ongoing screen, coaches can set the right tone for the rest of the decisions that follow, whether they are subjective in nature or not.
Turkish Basketball – Early Surprise of the 2012 Olympics
May 8th, 2012One of 94Fifty’s best customers and distributors is the Guler family in Turkey. Sinan Guler, who plays on Anadolu Efes, one of the top Turkish professional teams, was kind enough to provide some detail behind the surprising absence of the Turkish team from the 2012 Olympics.
I have to first say how genuinely confused and shocked I was to learn that Turkey had not made the Olympics this year. With all of the travel and heads-down work that comes with running a global company, it is sometimes difficult (and at times embarrassing) to keep up to speed with all aspects of the global basketball world. I can empathize with how disappointed basketball fans in Turkey must be that the team did not meet the lofty expectations that were no doubt created after their impressive finish in the 2010 World Championships. After hearing a first-hand account from Sinan, it is clear that the disappointment still lingers.
What follows are some thoughts from a completely independent basketball observer (although obviously skewed towards events in U.S. basketball), who appreciates great basketball and great skill wherever I see it regardless of where that talent comes from across the globe.
First, my expectations for Turkey in the 2012 Olympics were very high. They earned that expectation not only from their fans but also from fans across the globe. I fully expected them to compete this year for a place on the medal podium, with a very real chance to take the Gold medal along with Argentina, the U.S., France, Spain, Lithuania, Slovenia, Serbia and a handful of other countries that have a legitimate shot in any given year to compete for a medal. But the very fact that Turkey has earned that expectation speaks volumes for what is happening with Turkish basketball. These same expectations were not a reality just 10 or 15 years ago.
This leads to my second observation that has stuck with me since the 2010 Worlds. I was impressed with what appears to be a very cohesive basketball structure within the Turkish basketball federation. You could see the output of that structure with the performance of their national team. Their team had depth at all positions. They were long, athletic and all very skilled. Their Bigs could face the basketball or play the traditional post with equal confidence. Their guards could shoot and had command of the floor and were not bothered by pressure, particularly confident against the American defenders, which is not an easy task. The entire team could pass and rebound well. All of these traits from any basketball observer would be obvious signs of a strong feeder system and national structure that understands how to develop the skill necessary in its players to compete on a global stage.
But there was one more subtle but very important observation that might only be obvious to those that have spent time developing talent: I could see that the players, coaches, and fans had a Passion for the game. Coming from a state like Indiana – where passion for basketball exceeds logical bounds – it was obvious to me that Turkey, as a country, has a passion for basketball that will drive its success. You can see this similar passion in countries like Lithuania and Slovenia. But Turkey, as a country, has it – and that passion, combined with their basketball organization structure, are the elements that build international powers in any sport.
These observations made it all the more surprising to me not to see Turkey in the Olympics this year. As I mentioned, my expectations after the World Championships were to see them compete at every major international tournament. But as a former player who understands the perils of the game following the big game, there is probably a very simple and common explanation: a giant, inevitable, country-wide letdown from hosting the Worlds and coming so close to winning it.
Think about it.
You just host the World Championships, knock off nearly all of the top teams in the world in front of your own passionate, screaming fans for more than 3 weeks, and finish just short of taking home the Gold. Everyone is euphoric, and you relax, just a bit, to enjoy it. The entire Turkish Basketball structure lowers the intensity level to savor the moment. And that is precisely when teams get bit – because now you are a marked team. Others have now set you squarely in their sites to take you down, and now within 12 months you have to get every player, coach, and team member mentally ready to defend those expectations against the very teams who have just raised their intensity against you. I can tell you from personal experience that it is an extremely difficult task. It is the same reason why it can be so hard to win an NBA title, or any title, two years in a row, because it only takes a slight decrease in the mental focus and intensity to make the difference at a championship level. Everyone wants to claim that they beat you, and while your own game comes down just a bit, their game has gone up.
I am almost certain that is what has happened here – because there is just too much exceptional basketball structure in place to explain it any other way. This I know – while the people of Turkey must be disappointed in their 2012 absence – they have set a more permanent expectation in my mind – they can rest assured that the World has taken notice and that the international conclusion is that this was an anomaly, and our expectations are that in the years to come, Turkey will be a common contender for a seat at the podium.
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