I’m planning to write about some of my coaching tools for the next couple of blog posts. I’m sure that every good coach has some handy helpers, which aid him in being organized, prepared and professional. Today I’d like to share with you one of my most important assets: My Coaching Clipboard.

Now, there are a lot of good coaching clipboards available, and I’ve had a lot of them, but for the last 5 years I have sticked to one particular clipboard, the KBA Playmaker SPM-16.

Today I want to tell you about a website, BallSide.com, I’ve discovered some time ago. BallSide.com was developed at the German Sports University in Cologne and has been online since early 2010.

Disclosure: I’ve been provided with a scout account to have a close up look at their offered service! Nonetheless this will not affect my opinions I will be sharing with you in the following articles.

In short, coaches can use this free Basketball Coaching Software to easily organize their teams, analyze detailed player and team statistics, and save a lot of time by doing this. For example, it is no longer necessary to create elaborate mailing lists, only to find out that the e-mail address of a player is wrong and you are not able to get important information out to the right place.

Today I’ll be having a look at the Basketball Trivia iPhone app developed by the guys from Appiction. With this iPhone app you have close to 1,500 Basketball facts from College Basketball (NCAA), Professional Basketball (NBA) and Miscellaneous categories at hand to boast with. Now, let’s have a closer look at this app:

Basketball Trivia has a simple and sleek design. The color of the menu is brownish/dark red. The main background looks like an actual maple colored gym floor, which I (being a total basketball nut) really liked a lot.

Once you start the app, there are different things you can do. A random fact is shown in the middle of the iPhone’s screen. In the upper left corner there is a search field where you can enter keywords for specific facts. If you enter the desired keywords the search function returns the total number of results, eg. the keyword ‘gym’ returned two results, and a corresponding list with matching facts. When you tap on the listed item, the fact item is displayed.

Not without a reason this basketball has been chosen as the official game ball by many (mostly European) organizations. As of season 2010/2011 in Germany it is the official 1st Division Beko Basketball Bundesliga game ball. The Spalding TF-1000 ZK Pro is a high quality product which has been available throughout the global market for quite some time now and has found a lot of supporters, from recreational players, semi-pro to pros. Some players of mine have been using this ball for years and they still enjoy playing with it and won’t trade it for any other basketball. When doing scrimmages, this is the only ball they’ll accept for playing.