More Lessons & Wisdom

Recently I came across an article from a blog written by an Assistant Basketball Coach. It offered 37 tips for assistant coaches, and many of them were really valuable. The entire article is here (it also includes a link to the blog itself), and I copied the most relevant tips to our semi-pro level below, then added my comments in italics.

1. Ultimately, your job is to make your head coach look good. Being a head coach is much more about being a CEO than an Xs and Os strategist. Yes, the head coach will get most of the credit, but they will also get all of the blame. Their job is to win, have a detailed vision and to be the leader. Your job is to help them execute their vision. It’s not your show, it’s the head coach’s show.

As an assistant myself, sometimes this is hard to remember. This equally applies if it is a coordinator-to-head coach relationship, or an assistant-to-coordinator relationship.

2. Understand and teach the game inside and out. Know how to attack opponent weaknesses, win with the players you’ve got, teach fundamentals and research and teach the best drills to prepare your position group.

A lot of assistants are pretty good at all but the last one on this list…..at our level, you have to have drills that keep your players engaged. If you do all the same things all the time, they get stale. Now, there are a set of “everyday” drills that I’ve done for years, but they only take up 5-6 minutes of our Indy time – the rest is spent doing other things.

3. Traits head coaches are looking for in assistant coaches: loyal, hard-working, reliable and trust-worthy. 

I touched on this in my blog here, at least the loyalty part. Reliability will get you a long ways at our level. I can’t tell you how many coaches I’ve worked with that just wouldn’t show sometimes, or show up late. Meanwhile, the practice plans you worked on are now out the door and you have to adjust on the fly. Efficiency in practice then suffers, not to mention that the players now think punctuality isn’t something that is important.

4. Not everyone on the staff will get along—there will always be jealousy, personal differences, age differences but in order to win you must be able to put that aside to work with each other!

5. Coaching is a family—build your network. Outside of your head-to-head competitions, consider other coaches as your co-workers, not enemies. Build a strong network. You will rely on them heavily throughout career.

Both of these sort of go together and should be obvious, but they’re not always.

6. Best way to move up from where you are today into a new position? Be the best at your current position! Treat your role and current school as your dream job, and work like it’s where you’ve always dreamed to be.

I talked about this in my blog here. It was one of my best-reviewed posts.

7. Assistant coaches on your staff (or your opponents) can be in the position to hire you one day—you are building a track record with not just your head coach, but assistant coaches and opponents. Keep it professional and courteous.

Great advice. As longtime NFL assistant coach Bill Muir says, “You write your resume every day when you come to work.”

9. Your players will mirror you. You want them to do it right and pay attention to detail—you must take the lead and see that you take the little details serious, too. Do what you say you will do. Follow through!

So true. Comes back to #3 – reliability also.

10. It’s never “I," “me" or “mine," instead use “we," “us," and “our."

I told the offense this year, “If something goes wrong, it’s on me. If something goes right, it’s on you.”

16. Think ahead, anticipate what’s next. What will your head coach need today/this week?

Don’t be one of “those guys” who has to be told to do everything. Take some initiative!

18. When evaluating players it’s critical you rule out players who will be a waste of time in terms of leading you on a wild goose hunt. ……. If you know problems will arise down the road, it’s best to find other players who have less off-field issues. The risk isn’t often worth the reward.

Boy does this ever ring true at the semi-pro level as well! Coach Christensen, when I saw him a few weeks ago, said, “Don’t become a whore to talent.” It is so easy to do, too….someone is a lot better than the person you have in a particular spot, and you want him to play for you. So you let your team standards start to slip in order to keep Mr. All-Star around. In the long run, it won’t be worth it. Coach Mike Sherman said it even more succinctly back in 1996 when he told me, “Don’t recruit a**h***s.”

21. How can you separate yourself—what value can you add to a staff? What can you become indispensable at? Scouting, recruiting, relationships with prep coaches, developing players, leadership?

This is a great self-evaluation question every coach should ask themselves.

24. Be organized—organization brings direction to chaos! A prepared player never flinches, nor do prepared coaches!

This is huge. Have a plan.

27. If you lack experience or talent, you can overcome your weaknesses by being hardest worker who brings relentless energy—in the same way that you teach your players that “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard."

Pretty self-explanatory! When I started out, I quickly realized how much I didn’t know, so threw myself into getting better. Now, I’m accused of being a “grinder”, but really being organized and working hard is just the way I was taught.

35. What would a scouting report on your own team/unit look like? Be brutally honest with yourself on which weaknesses your players need to improve on. Build on what they are really good at, show them how to get better!

That’s what the title of this blog site is all about – “You’re either coaching it, or allowing it to happen.” If your guys are doing something on film incorrectly, then you either taught them to do that, or you’re allowing them to continue doing it.

I hope at least a few of these pointers are helpful. I know that sometimes you may think, “Man – that’s a lot of work for a volunteer job”, but we’re definitely not in it for the money, so you can only be in it because you love coaching. No other reason. So just remember where the Big Time is……