Blog Posting #39, March 10, 2009

Teach Like This Is Your Last Season; Learn Like You’ll Coach Forever

The basketball season is over. So now whatchagonnado? If you’re like most of us, you’ll reflect on the season, target the reasons you lost games you shouldn’t have, and pledge to fix those areas before next year.

Was it zone offense? Was it your players didn’t have enough patience against a zone to allow the play to get high-percentage shots? Was it they were too quick to launch some “perimeter prayers” and it drove you nuts? Was it offense against pressure? Did your players lack the poise necessary to work the ball through the defense with passing. Was it rebounding? Did your players fail to block out or perhaps were they not aggressive enough? Was it shooting? Did you get zoned because your players couldn’t make shots from the outside? Was it out-of-bounds plays? Was it man-to-man offense? Was it your man-to-man defense that allowed too much penetration?

There are so many facets to basketball, aren’t there? And, if you’re like most coaches in America, when you take inventory after the season, the task of improving seems daunting because there are so many things to work on—so many things to improve on before next year. Where do you start?

You have two choices for your off-season research and development plan: Work on several things, or work on one thing. The first will certainly improve your team for next year. In fact, it probably will improve it more than the second. However, I’m going to try to convince you to adopt the second—work on one subject for an entire off season.

In 1948, when John Wooden became head coach at UCLA, he began his off-season research and development study. Each spring, for the next 28 years, he chose one component of the game and, by the end of the summer, he had mastered it. It wasn’t easy. In April, he sent questionnaires to six coaches he felt had deep knowledge of the subject. Then, he followed up by calling them, explaining the questionnaire and requesting they return it by a certain date. While waiting, he read every book and periodical on the subject, taking copious notes. By the middle of the summer, he had collected all that was written on the subject and the information contained in the questionnaires, and he began analyzing the data. In a few weeks, he wrote down his conclusions, selecting only the threads that ran through most of the data he had collected. In other words, if many of the successful coaches believed something, he wrote it down.

For example, it may shock you that, in the area of rebounding, after months of study, he only arrived at three concluding principles: Assume every shot is missed, Get your hands up, And go get the ball. “What about blocking out?” you might ask. That’s important, but not as important as those three. There are many great rebounding teams that don’t practice hard block-outs as much as assuming every shot is missed and crashing the glass with hands above the shoulders. In other words, according to the successful rebounding coaches, aggressively blocking out was important but overrated. The next season, Coach Wooden incorporated what he had concluded into practice plans. As a result, UCLA teams were famous for controlling the boards at both ends of the floor.

When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor) signed with UCLA, Coach Wooden spent the off-season studying the tall center. As a guard, he knew little about how to work with such a force. He studied the tall player like he studied the other parts of the game. He even interviewed Wilt Chamberlain, then with the Lakers, and learned much.

Because his studies were exhaustive, he never had to visit that subject again. In other words, he didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Suppose, while studying rebounding, he also included press break and zone offense. Would he ever have gotten to the depths of rebounding to pull out those three principles? No. It would have taken him years.

Coach Wooden believed, you teach like this is your last season but you learn as if you are going to coach forever—one subject at a time. This philosophy is contrary to the disposition of most coaches because, by nature, we are impatient. There is pressure on us to make maximum improvement in our teams by next season. But, think about it. Learning a little about many things may improve your teams in the immediate future. But what about ten years from now when the fates finally bring you that dream team? Do you want to have good general knowledge about many things, or deep knowledge and solid conviction about those same subjects?

In his last twelve years at UCLA, Coach Wooden won ten national championships. Some believe it was because of superior talent. Perhaps to a degree. But what about that first championship team, the one that had no home gym and was the smallest team ever to win the crown, even to this day? Could it be that 14 years and the mastery of 14 basketball subjects made the difference?

So, whatchagonnado?