Are you able to organize your Practice?

Posted by Eitel in For Coaches, For Parents, For Players | 0 comments

If you want to master the many basketball skills, you have to practice to get used to them. Practice becomes the center of focus in learning new skills, but you have to remember, it does not always make you perfect. It can either make or break you. There are well conducted practices while there are also practices that are not as good. How can this be?

Have you ever been in a dance group wherein you have to prepare for a certain dance competition? Or, have you ever been a member of a cheerleading group that you have to arrange, plan, and practice movements of a certain cheer dance program. What have you noticed? The group spends so much time in organizing everything, starting from the group members up to the completion of the entire dance program. Practice is more about organizing your team, your plans, your drills, and the synchronization of movements among the players. This is the same, and should be applied, in the sport of Basketball.

Essential Items in your Sports Bag

Posted by Eitel in For Players | 0 comments

Your equipment bag is one of your most important tools for on and off the court. It contains any essentials that you need for your practice, along with anything you may need for situations that may arise throughout the practice.

Ensuring that your equipment bag is fully stocked is one thing that some players overlook and underestimate the importance of. While ensuring that your equipment bag has the essentials, you also have to ensure that is all it contains, and that valuables and other items are left behind if they aren’t necessary.

While most teams provide their team with water or refreshment of some sort, it is always in a player’s best interest to ensure that they have a bottle of water or Gatorade with them in the practice bag, on a just in case basis. This ensures that the player has their own source of refreshment and that is essential to the practice.

Another highly important item is the equipment itself. You should have your basketball sneakers in the bag, along with a practice jersey, pair of shorts, and any protective equipment that you may require. This could be eye, knee pads, elbow pads, etc.

You may also want to carry some base items like Tylenol. Some players get headaches or minor pains, and while some condemn the carrying of Tylenol, it seems a bit silly to let a headache or minor pain derail your practice or downgrade it’s quality. Being prepared in all aspects includes thinking of the things that you will rarely use, but are prepared for just in case. Just ensure that you adhere to the guidelines on any medications that you will potentially consume, and ensure that if it is prescription based or you have any prescriptions, that you review the use of Tylenol or other medicines with your family doctor before you take them.

Fresh change of clothes will also be a welcome addition to your equipment bag. No one wants to go home after practice, smelling like practice. It doesn’t have to be your Sunday finest, just a t-shirt, pair of jogging pants, socks, and shoes would suffice.

Some minor toiletries are also a good idea. Shampoo, deodorant, and a little body spray, are the minimums that you will need. While they seem like unimportant things that don’t really matter, in the end they will go a long way.

While some of these things may seem trivial and unnecessary, they go a long ways in ensuring that you have the most productive and pleasurable experience. These items are the bare essentials and while there are many other items that could be included, they would do nothing but clutter up your bag unnecessarily. In the end just ensuring that you have the above items will send a message to coach and team that you are ready, willing, and able to do your part in the practice. That will go far in showing the type of person, and player that you are!

[info_box]Picture credit: Mat Honan • Creative Commons Attribution[/info_box]

Coach’s Equipment and Tools

Posted by Eitel in For Coaches | 0 comments

While a coach’s role has changed over the years, so has the tools and ways his job is done. A coach used to have a ball, a chalk board, chalk, and some film. That was it. Now these days you have all of that, the internet, a considerably larger sized fan base, as well as the popular professional aspect. Coaches have to not only deal with their team, but they now have to deal with the public relations aspect far more often than they used to. There have been new methods and tools developed over the years to help coaches and teams deal with these newer changes and tasks that face them.

The internet and its many uses have made their way to the spotlight. While a lot of junk is available on the internet, and a lot of crap is spewed by those that pretend they know everything from the safety of being behind their monitor, there is a lot of positive material online. In the right spots, coaches will be able to network with other coaches and gain valuable advice and tips. Coaches may also to just bang heads together with other coaches and solve problems that would otherwise escape them and cause unnecessary frustrations. As mentioned above you must exercise extreme caution when going online to find any materials.

Another internet usage for coaches is the ability to keep in touch with their team, and provide them with potential new work out ideas or other activities that they could do around the house to not only stay in shape, but to improve their game. Often the value of the internet is horribly warped and misrepresented when in today’s age; it has become a unique and hard to beat tool in the everyday coaching life.

Aside from the informational uses that the internet provides coaches, it also allows them an avenue in which they can shop around to obtain gear for their team. This allows a coach to shop literally worldwide in a matter of seconds, getting the best prices that are possible for what the team needs. Before the internet days, coaches were restricted to wholesalers and local vendors. While some people would say it is destroying local business, it is just going to force them to become more competitive.

Coaches also have the choice of practicing outside at a great many locations now with the boom in popularity of basketball. Parks, Schools, and various other locations are installing full basketball courts, and they are constantly in use. This also can be used as a recruitment tool by coaches as they can have their team out on display and show people that may think of playing at some point what kind of things a basketball team does. The level of personal interaction that it provides was often not accessible before because basketball wasn’t as popular, and people would just walk on past. Now when folks are playing basketball outdoors, people stop and look, and even stay for a time and watch!

Coaches have a full complement of tools available to them now, it is up to them to find which ones best fit their team and the needs of it, and get the ball rolling!

Photo credit: SD Dirk

Goals to Set and Achieve as a Coach

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There are many types of goals that you can set as the coach of a basketball team. Firstly you will have to observe the type of league you are playing in. If it is competitive your goals will differ from a league that is purely recreational. Competitive leagues will focus more on the winning and statistical aspect, while recreational teams focus on the fun and team togetherness aspects.

If you are in a competitive league, you also have to keep in mind the past history of your team. If your team is new, then you can disregard this. If you are taking over an already existing team, you will find that one of your goals may simply be to improve your win/loss record. While this is a simple goal, it requires many smaller goals to achieve it. Just saying you want to win more does absolutely nothing. To achieve this goal, a coach will have to study many hours of film, and be involved in every aspect of practice. In doing this a coach will be able to identify any potential problems, and will be able to suggest and implement some measures that will go towards improving the team overall. These changes could be simple as additional drills, or just shifting around the players into positions that they may perform better in.

In recreational leagues, the goal is to improve the skills needed to play the game, but without the sole focus on winning. The focus is on actual enjoyment of the game by all involved, and sportsmanship. This isn’t to say that competitive leagues do not have courteous and sporting players, it is just not as primary of a focus as it is in a recreational league. Some professional leagues like the NBA have strict guidelines to govern how the players act and ensure that they are professional on and off the court.

Focusing on the team is also another way to resolve many problems. Basketball is a team sport and if any aspect of your team is failing to function at the quality and level that you require, then you will have to make changes. Whether the changes made are to a single member of the team or to the overall team as a whole. Sometimes just some small team building or fun exercises will put your team in the proper mindset and remove any negative effects or doubts that previous losses or events have caused. Some people will need one on one time with their coach, and that is up to the coach in some causes to identify. Not every player is able to come up and ask for help as occasionally the mentality is that indicates weakness, and people do not like to admit fault. All a coach can do is offer an open door and any help possible.

While there are many large goals, and small goals that help towards them, these are simply a small sampling of the problems and remedies a coach encounters in their everyday responsibilities. You don’t just have a game to win; you have a team to look after, on and off the court.

Photo credit: Zach Klein