Why Stop Developing?

Being apart of a Division I college basketball program (Mercer, Belmont, Butler) since 2006 as well as being a National Skill Development Coach for Pure Sweat Basketball (www.puresweatbasketball.com) I feel like I have a unique perspective on player development.  For years I have heard coaches and players talk about how the off-season is a time to get your skills improved while the in-season work is focused on preparing for another team.  The notion that the summer is where you outwork your competition is true, but it also comes with a fallacy.  What if coaches and players alike concentrated on an on-going process rather than segmenting the year up by the “in-season” and the “off-season.”  The quote “One day the winter will ask what you did all summer” is one of my favorite but it should continue on and say one day the summer will ask what you did all winter.

Continuously building on concepts is huge with me.  It’s kind of like the people who make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight.  They gorge themselves away from discipline until January 1 hits and then they just expect to have a dramatic change in direction and behavior.  Player development isn’t a sometimes thing, IT’S AN ALL THE TIME THING!

Understandably during the in-season portion you can’t work as long or as strenuous as you can outside of the season because there are games to be played and the recovering time for players needs to be adequate.

The most important attribute of skill development is, does your teaching transition into the games?  I have been able to watch practices, clinics, and been a player on teams where what we spend time on in practice never transitions to the game.  This is the coach’s responsibility singularly.  Emphasizing what you teach is the way to make that transition to games a beneficial one.  I heard a quote once and I can’t remember who said it but it went something like this, “Take all your knowledge of the game of basketball, all the clinic notes, philosophies, and authentic material you want to do and throw half of it away.”  When I meet older coaches and ask them what advice they have for a young coach that they wished they would have known back in the day. Their response is 99% the unanimous, simplify your teaching.  And that’s a lesson we can all learn from including how you differentiate in-season versus off-season work…and the answer is…you don’t.

Assist,

T.J. Saint