- Giving it to the best player doesn't make the team better
- Positive reinforcement
- You can't play for them
- You're going to be ignored / Shared understanding takes forever
- The game is not the most important thing
I coached a rec team that had a huge range of talent. One young man was very talented and could have gone on to play junior college basketball. I had a couple that were a level below him and then varying levels all the way down to the kid who was surprised when the basketball was in his hands. I did focus on leveling up everyone in practice, but our in-game style quickly devolved to give it to the best kid and move around him. This was moderately successful, everyone got to contribute, and the games were competitive. Then that kid got sick. Then baseball season started and he wanted to focus on that. All of a sudden my team had no identity and no idea how to win. We couldn't just lean on the next best player, the talent gap was too wide. Before the team could really adapt and come together the season ended. Our team felt like a failure and we felt like we couldn't really play without our one all-star. As the coach, it was my responsibility to make sure the team was greater than its parts and I failed. Giving the ball to the best player doesn't make the team better, and it's a losing strategy in the long term.
On one of the "teenager" teams I coached, I had a real hard time connecting with my players. I would coach them to do one thing, they'd master that and so I would move on to a new thing. In the process, they would completely abandon the first principle. I kept veering between yelling about thing 1 and thing 2 and we really didn't get anywhere. It took me too long to stumble onto the secret. I wasn't giving them any positive reinforcement when they continued to do the first thing well. When I was growing up, if the coach wasn't yelling, you were doing fine. With these kids, I needed to continue to stress what they were doing well, even if they were doing something else incorrectly. Honestly, this often felt condescending to me "Great job finding your man on the switch!", but the team started to soar. Without positive feedback a player is not sure what needs correcting. A mixture of positive and negative feedback helps a player learn nuance and handle more complicated situations.
One of the hardest moments I had as a coach was when I was coaching a team of 18 year olds. I was 23 at the time and probably at my "peak" playing ability. It was fun team to practice with because I could play a little bit with them and not have to "dumb" things down. About mid-season we were playing a really talented AAU team. My team was completely outclassed and the game was "over" 5 minutes in. That hurts, but it's going to happen. So at this point my team is playing for pride, there's not much else left. Unfortunately in the second half the other team decided to run up the score, they wanted to get to 100 points. To sit on the bench and watch it happen was excruciating. I desperately wanted to check in and start blocking shots into the bleachers. Unfortunately, I can't be the hero and play the game for them.
I have often felt that my players take too many 3s. Three pointers are fun, but are easy to defend, particularly when a kid isn't strong enough to shoot them consistently with good form. Almost every season I have one or two kids that only want to shoot turnaround fadeaway 3s and I spend a lot of effort trying to talk them out of it. The simple answer is to bench the kid, but that doesn't really solve anything long term. On top of that, generally out of the 20 times they attempt such a shot, they'll make one and then you're forever wrong. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to teach and work together to come up with alternative strategies that help everyone. I'm only occasionally successful despite my best efforts. My good suggestions are going to be continually ignored when I can't reach a shared understanding with the team.
My favorite team that I ever coached was a team of sixth grade girls. That team learned so fast and were full of infectious energy. We had so much fun. Before a game, my team was warming up and I was talking to a friend. Suddenly I looked up and my team was gone. They had gone back to the locker room en masse. To set the scene, the game is about to tip, and I'm a 17 year old boy with a team in the girls locker room. My co-coach, a 17 year old girl, was at home sick. There's no way I'm going to enter that locker room to find out what's going on. So I'm just kinda pacing and hyperventilating and the other team's coach comes over to ask what's going on. She goes to the locker room and leads my team out. It turns out that one of the girls had just come from her grandma's funeral and started sobbing. The whole team banded around her and took her away. The thing we were brought together to do could wait while one of us was hurting. The game isn't the most important thing.