1) Australian Pro Coach, Liam Flynn, on the “tax” teams pay for defending “High in the Gaps”: Sometimes we gave up one, maybe two backdoor cuts per game, and we were like, ‘that’s the tax you have to pay for being a great defensive team’, because the other forty possessions of defense we were able to impact the offense by being higher (in the gaps)…that’s how I’ll be coaching defense for the foreseeable future.”
2) Johns Hopkins Head Coach, Josh Loeffler, on handling difficult situations in real-time: “What your team is looking for in those (tough moments), is the path forward… a lot of it is the way we frame things… Players look to coaches for guidance and assistance to help them figure out how to succeed. As a coach you want to just be yourself in that moment…you need to try and take emotion out of it and figure out the best chance to succeed moving forward… and how do I convey that to the team in the most practical and helpful manner.”
3) Former NBA and Current International Pro, Sam Dekker, on understanding and developing a player’s role: “What are the skills that you need? What does every team need? What is your role? And once you figure that out, you’re not going to waste time with certain things in the gym in the summer. Work on what is going to make you successful in the game.”
4) International Pro Coach, Will Voigt, on winning and connecting with people:“Your ability to connect with people is going to be more important than than your ability to come up with “peel switching” or whatever it might be. At the end of the day, if you take a group of guys and get them to play as a team, with maximum effort, and play unselfishly, you’ll win.”
5) Brown University Head Coach, Mike Martin, on learning from other disciplines:“I think whether it’s a CEO of a company, or coaches of other sports, I think you can take so many things from people who are not basketball coaches…If want to learn and grow and try and be the best you can be, seek anyone and anything out that you think can come back to fitting into how you do things with your program.”
6) Former NBA Head Coach and current ESPN Analyst, Jeff Van Gundy, on balancing simplicity and complexity:“You gotta be as simple as you can without being too simple. And that’s hard too, to find the right balance between simplicity and ‘hard to play against’. But usually you’re hard to play against because your players are good and your players are relentless, not because you try and out-trick the other team.”
7) Euroleague Shooting Guard, Mike Roll, on player conversations in the locker room after tough losses:“…a quick talk about it after the game right after the coaches leave the locker room… and then you move on, the season is so long, there are so many games. You can’t dwell on the losses. You have to be prepared for the next game (and) keep your mind fresh.”
8) Assistant/Player Development Coach for the Memphis Grizzlies, Joe Boylan, on helping players with anger/emotional on-court issues:“I know that the best advice means very little. It has to be practiced. So I try and bring awareness to it, I try and show them on film what they look like, I say ‘How does this benefit you? How does this benefit the team? Look at your reaction, and then look at the chain reaction that comes. Now look at your four teammates, look what they do…How is our group right now? What’s our focus level? Where is our attention at? And it’s a result of what you did. You’re leading by example whether you want to or not.'”
9) Ireland’s U18 National Team Head Coach, Paul Kelleher, on keeping composure and focus as a coach:“A phrase that I have on my board all the time now is ‘What do they need now?’, and it’s really help me bring my attention (back). So I will always have my board to see that phrase because there will be times when I won’t be focused enough to ask myself at that particular time. But it’s ‘What do they need now?’ Do they need a hand around the shoulder? Do they need a specific detail? Do they need to be told ‘keep doing what we’re doing, it’s going to drop’, do they need to be chewed out at that particular time? And hopefully as we go along, the last one becomes less and less, where we can trust them and they can trust me that when we’re talking, we’re talking as a trusting unit.”
10) UPenn Head Coach, Steve Donahue, on the balancing analytics when it comes to decision-making:“It’s not a science, it’s an art.”
11) Indiana Pacer Assistant, Jenny Boucek, on analytics and the human element: “The tricky part about analytics now, and I’m open minded about it, but I’m witnessing as well, is that things that are so very black and white numerically can take a toll on the soul or player of a team. And so you have to find some element of humanness to all of this, because what might be clearly right in the numbers can mess with the psyche of a player or a team.”
12) East LA Community College Head Coach, featured on the most recent ‘Last Chance U’, John Mosley, on developing a bond with your leaders: “You have to spend time with your leaders…you have to respect them, you have to spend time with them, and you have to let the leaders know… ‘Hey, you have to let me coach you, and you have to let me discipline you. So, when (your teammates) see that, they’ll absolutely follow you. And then they’ll follow me, and that’ll help us all as a group.”
13) ESPN Analyst, Jay Bilas, on the importance of sideline temperament: “You see a lot of crazy coaches, and I think you can be crazy when your players are too calm, but when they’re crazy, you can’t be crazy too. I think that’s a must, your demeanor and how you handle yourself and what you’re going to instill into your players. Are you going to instill a calmness and a belief in them? Or are they going to be frenzied because you are?”
14) Euroleague guard, Frantz Massenat, on knowing your value and maturing as a player:“I just started becoming a mature basketball player. What I’m good at is what I’m good at, and what I’m not…I’m not…So now, when I train, I train for what I’m going to do in a game. What works for you is what you need to work on. Of course you can expand your game in different ways, but what you can do in a game is what you really work on.”
15) Legendary High School and Team USA Basketball Coach, Don Showalter, on true greatness: “The word ‘great’ to me is way overused. ‘Great’ is a different level. Great people think different, their approach is different. They’re always trying to get better. They all have that little extra something that no one else has.”
16) UCONN WBB Hall of Fame Head Coach, Geno Auriemma, on the truth about coaching your best players:“The real truth is, is that (your best players) want to be coached so hard, so bad. They want to be pushed beyond their capabilities every minute of every day. They want to be told everyday what they have to do to get better. The fastest way to lose your best player is to not coach them. The fastest way to have them lose respect for you is to let them get away with crap that they know they’re not supposed to be doing.”
17) UNC Charlotte Assistant Coach, Aaron Fearne, on the time it takes to establish a powerful culture:“Does it take a lot of time for you to establish your offensive and defensive system? It sure does. Well the ‘culture thing’ is the same thing. (Coaches ask) ‘Well when do you discuss these things? Every few weeks?’ (I say) Well, no, we talk about it every game. And it takes time.”
18) Croatian Professional Coach, Ivan Rudez, on the “Jungle Rules” when it comes to team chemistry:“We as coaches sometimes think that we are the ones who are going to create the team chemistry, because we give the rules of how we’re going to drive on the bus? Are there going to be phones allowed or not? (We think) this is team chemistry. No, team chemistry is really created in the locker room. I call it the “Jungle Law”. Pretty soon they’re going to realize themselves who is the Lion and who is where in the food chain…”
19) Hartford Head Coach, John Gallagher, on “Carefrontations”: “I think you have to start with the word “carefrontation”, like we have a thing where, ‘I care about you but we’re going to have a confrontation.’ If I’m not having carefrontations daily, then what am I doing? This isn’t all cupcakes and roses, this is about winning. And if it’s about winning you’ve got to be growing, and if it’s about growing you’ve got to be honest. If it’s about being honest you have to go at guys, and at them in a way that they know you care.”
20) Former NFL Coach and Executive, Mike Lombardi, on what is earned by living your passions: “The three of us, we can’t go online and steal Emerald’s recipes and then go open a restaurant in New Orleans and think we’re going to make any money. We’d be broke in three years. You’ve gotta live it. You’ve gotta live through it, and you’ve gotta make errors that you can learn from…”
21) St. Thomas Aquinas Head Coach, Tobin Anderson, on finding success in a difficult situation:“Sometimes the Coach of the Year in the conference is the coach who goes .500 in an absolutely impossible job.”
22) European Pro, Mike Carlson, on players raising their overall basketball IQ:“You need to raise your mental capacity to be able to recognize situations, recognize patterns, and react accordingly. And that ability, that process, that mental processing comes with ‘you’ve got to think through it and know what you’re doing, and then you’ve got to get reps and reps through that.”
23) Arkansas Razorback Head Coach, Eric Musselman, on responding to adversity:“You can’t cry over spilt milk, you’ve got to just pick it up and keep moving. And I really think it allows you to focus on each day. Not look three days down the road, just do what you can do on this day with whatever team you have and whatever staff you have.”
24) The WNBA’s All-Time Assist Leader, Sue Bird, on the art of passing:“Through the years I started to realize there are ways to get the ball somewhere crisply, but also with a little bit of finesse and float to it. It’s the kind of pass where, it’s going to get there, but they also have this split second to get their feet set and then the ball just kind lands there.
25) Swarthmore Head Coach, Landry Kosmalski, on playing with pace against tough competition:“I remember when I was at Davidson as an assistant, people would always question saying ‘Why are you running against Duke’?…And I would say, ‘We can’t not run against Duke. If our point guards walk it up, they’ve got some ballhawks at half court slappin’ the floor in their jock right away…. we’re not running offense. Our only chance was to go north and south and get them on their heels.”
26) Polish Pro Head Coach, Igor Milicic, on evaluating players beyond the stats:“For me, the team winning is everything. So I’m trying to have them know that it’s not pure stats, that the coaches are watching how you run in transition, how you run back, how you scramble, how you have active hands on and off the ball, or how you’re boxing out. It’s not just points, rebounds, and assists.”
27) NY Knick Head Coach, Tom Thibodeau, on challenging your team mentally:“Challenging your team not only physically, but mentally everyday (is key). There’s a lot of decisions that are made in the course of a game and no one is going to be perfect, mistakes are going to happen. You want to minimize those and often those can be the difference between moving on and going home. You want to work on that every day… you want to prepare for everything.”
28) Merrimack Head Coach, Joe Gallo, on the value of watching other teams practice:“I think one of the best things you can do is to go watch people live. (With Villanova) I’ve watched watched them live and you leave there blown away. I couldn’t even tell you a single drill we stole from those workouts, it’s just the way they do everything is unbelievable.”
29) Former D1 Head Coach and Current NBA Scout, Bobby Gonzalez, on mastering the simple things…“I think the biggest thing as a young coach, you know you think you’ve got all the answers. There’s a great line that says…’The rookie sees the answers, the veteran sees the complexities, but the master sees the simplicity.'”
30) 5-Time Euroleague Champion, Kyle Hines, on the role of the leader:“In the last dance when the Chicago Bulls were going through their issues Phil Jackson drew a circle and he asked everybody to place a dot where they felt they were at that moment with the team, and Scottie Pippen placed his dot so far outside the circle because he said he felt isolated. So, that is the job of the leader, to make sure everybody is still in that circle and still together, that we we can build and try and go through those problems collectively.”
31) SE Melbourne Head Coach, Simon Mitchell, on culture:Culture in a nutshell is behaving, walking the walk and talking the talk. If you’re gonna hold anyone in your organization accountable that one, you go about it respectfully, and two, that the other person understands where you’re coming from. that you’re coming from a place of ‘I want this to be better, and I want to win’, and it’s a place of trust and a place of respect.
32) Charlotte Hornets Player Development Coach, Nick Friedman, on decision-making…“Because the game is that fast, your ability to make decisions on the fly has to be excellent. Your mind has to fight through the fatigue. You know, can we have a conversation while you’re tired? I was talking to one of our guys the other day (saying), ‘while you’re having a sip of water lets’ talk so that you can get in the habit of , if I’m on the defensive end and I’m exhausted, I’ve still gotta talk through our PNR coverages. I can’t get quiet. Small things like that just to trigger their brains in different ways.”
33) USC WBB Head Coach, Lindsay Gottlieb, on elite communication from LeBron:“LeBron, maybe the most physically gifted human we’ve seen on the basketball court, but this guy is calling out coverages like he’s watched more film then you and I have in our lifetime…and this is what I’ll teach our players is that ‘talent gets you some places, and understanding the game gets you some places, but when you put that together, that’s when you get elite.'”
34) BC Andorra Head Coach, Ibon Navarro, on giving values to good habits:Unselfishness is not just giving an assist. Unselfishness is when you sacrifice yourself, and we give values to things that are good habits. And if one of them is unselfishness, or commitment, or team spirit, that means that the players must know which actions belong to that value.
35) Long Island Nets Assistant Coach, Jimmie Oakman, on being “all-in”:Just try and be curious, at all costs. Taking things on a wim like going out to random events, just being at a clinic and being around people, and surrounding yourself with the people in those environments. I was in a situation not too long ago where I was the only coach at a clinic that didn’t have a name on my polo, and I couldn’t get a call back for a D3 GA spot. Situations like that, where, over time if you keep sticking to this thing, it’s great. You’ve gotta be willing to dive in somewhere, you know, sink or swim, whatever level you want to be at you’ve got to be all-in.”
36) Regis University Head Coach, Brady Bergeson, on leadership under pressure:“I think it’s important for coaches to be aware that your leader is whoever the eyeballs look at under pressure. You ask the team who the leaders are they’re going to know. I can put a ‘C’ on a guy’s chest, but ultimately it’s going to be the guy who everyone looks to under pressure. Figuring out who that is, is an important start point as you’re building your team”.
37) Former NBA Head Coach, Stan Van Gundy, on honest conversations about playing time: All of us at every level get this question from multiple guys every year…’What do I have to do to play more’? And I think you have to be really careful with that one, because I think with all good intentions, what we do is give guys the areas that they need to improve. ‘Well your defense has got to be better, you’ve got to shoot the ball better.’ Ok, now the guy starts doing that. Is he going to play more? Well, maybe not, because the true answer is, ‘you’ve got to be better than that guy who’s playing ahead of you.'”
38) UC San Diego Head Coach, Eric Olen, on team decision making:When you get multiple guys on the floor who are playing with anticipation and know what all ten guys are going to do in different situations, I think that’s where as a coach you can kind of step back, don’t over coach them, and let them play. You’re trying to get guys to that point where you trust that they’re going to make decisions and that they have the understanding of what they’re going to do. Now, do they get all the decisions right, no, but they’re not limited by their understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish.
39) Boston Celtics President of Basketball Operations, Brad Stevens, on mental health:The reality is, you’re still going to have the ups and downs…whether you’re a coach or a nineteen year old player, and you have to be able to navigate those. And it’s not easy. Everybody has their own experiences and is their own person, and we want to very much normalize the idea that working on yourself, working on your own mental state and mindset, is just as important as getting in the weightroom and working on your strength.
40) Florida State WBB Head Coach, Sue Semrau, on working with her Assistant Coach, Brooke Wyckoff, and staff communication during pressure situations:“Communication isn’t telling. Communication is teaching and getting someone to listen, so it’s important that you know your audience and it’s important that the person who is complimenting (assisting) you knows you and your audience. It really take a lot of work and it really takes a lot of coming together to know one another… when you think about a staff, if a staff understands their role, if a staff understands what your vision is, what’s coming next, then it’s much easier to communicate in a moment of pressure.”
41) Bayern Munich Head Coach, Andrea Trinchieri, on a winning mentality:“Of course you want to have a winning mentally, of course you want to have good habits, the culture, of course, but how to get to this point? I don’t like general stuff… ‘Ah we have to have a winning mentality.’ What is a winning mentality? For you a winning mentality is ‘I hate to lose’, and for you a winning mentality may be ‘I want to win’, it’s totally different….you have to right these motivations, and from there we can build something.”
42) Telekom Bonn Head Coach, Tuomas Iisalo, on transition offense and gaining advantages: Most of it is dictated by understanding what type of advantage we’re dealing with. This is something that came from soccer and positional play, where you can have a numerical advantage, you can have a qualitative advantage, or you can have a positional advantage. And we’ve kind of translated them into you can (1) have numbers…(2) do you have a matchup that works for you?, and then the last one is the action.”
43) NFL Hall of Fame Head Coach, Bill Parcells, on the most valuable lesson he learned from his High School basketball coach, Mickey Corcoran: “The most valuable thing he taught me is… if you’ve been critical or hard on a player, you do damage control before that player goes home for the night, and you talk through the situation and why you behaved the way you did or why you were trying to explain this technique to him, so that he has peace of mind in knowing that he had done something that we needed to alter, but that you weren’t mad at him for it. We used to call it ‘damage control’. Go to the player and say ‘Do you understand why I’m on your case about this? Do you get this? Let’s go through it so we’ve got it together. That’s what I’m here for, that’s what my job is.'”
44) New Zealand Pro Coach, Zico Coronel, on conversations with players who are not upholding team standards:“I think you come back to ‘if you don’t give the requisite effort, there’s no place for you here.’ I think it’s a dangerous thought to think that you need the talent. You need the behavior, and the principles, and the culture, and the ethos much more than you need any individual talent. (Letting the player know) ‘Collectively we’ll get this done without you, but if you erode my ability to coach this team and have the standards we need, we will not get it done.'”
45) Southern Utah MBB Head Coach, Todd Simon, on teaching players to communicate:“Really it’s just about the gaps, like teaching guys to communicate. Teaching guys how to share about themselves. It’s amazing when people can talk to one another and you understand the shared experience that this whole thing is. And what ends up happening is guys find a lot of commonality amongst themselves, which ultimately helps you win and builds trust.”
46) Oral Roberts Head Coach, Paul Mills, on maintaining staff “togetherness”:“I can remember walking out of meetings just so mad, like, ‘if we guard middle thirds that way I am telling you, we’re gonna lose’! Coach (Scott Drew) would always caution us about the ‘meeting after the meeting’. You don’t run back to your office and then have another meeting after this meeting. Have the courage to say whatever it is you need to say now, because when we leave here we’re all on the same page.”
47) NBA Assistant and Pro Scout with the Boston Celtics, Brandon Bailey, on defensive systems and effort:There isn’t any real secret to what you’re doing defensively whether it’s man-to-man or zone. It’s really #1 who’s doing it? And #2, how well are you doing it and are you doing it together?…One thing (Brad Stevens) used to say all the time, which I think is really smart is ‘a system with no effort is a bad defense, players that play with effort with no system is an average defense, and then when you can combine both together that’s when you have a championship level, Top 5 defense.”
48) Euroleague Forward, Alec Peters, on elite defensive teams and rotations:The first rotation is always great, everybody always knows the first rotation. But it’s after that, that I think you see a lot of mid -evel maybe not as great defensive teams that are now lost on that second and third pass rotation. If you’re able to rotate great as a team, I think that’s special. If you see a defensive team rotate and everybody knows where to be, knows which pass to take, knows which passing lane is coming next, knows who to collapse down on, those are special teams. Those are teams that win championships.
49) Austrian National Team Assistant Coach, Stefan Grassegger, on the difference between mental health and mental toughness:“I think it’s important, and this can be achieved by a coach to create mental health literacy within a club, because, especially in the sports, world mental health is a lot of times perceived as mental toughness, which it is not. That has to be a very very clear statement, mental health is not equal to mental toughness.”
50) Washington Mystics Head Coach, Mike Thibault, on perfecting your craft:“What I’ve tried to pass along to everyone that I’ve been around is that you have an opportunity everyday to learn from somebody to soak up something. And, I look at some young coaches now and they want everything to come quickly. ‘I want to move up, I want to do this’, they’re always looking for the next job. And I think we forget sometimes, just like going to school for anything else to me a musician or to be an artist, there’s a lot of hours that go into perfecting your craft. Whether it’s watching film or getting on the court or going to clinics. I did that when I was young and it gave me context and contacts. And so I learned from a bunch of different people, and I learned that you can’t be somebody else, you’ve got to be yourself.”