Basketball Coach Unplugged (A Basketball Coaching Podcast)

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Show Notes

Fall basketball season is kicking off, tryouts are here, and Coach Bill wants to talk about the person nobody writes a rubric for: the parent. Two sides to it. What coaches should be teaching parents to expect, and how parents can actually support their kid through a stressful week.

Coach Collins goes first, and his list is unglamorous on purpose. We are dealing with kids, not young adults who can drive themselves. So the number one parent responsibility is logistics: shoes that fit, a ball in the bag, properly hydrated, everything they need, and there on time. That is most of the job.

Tryouts can be genuinely stressful for a family, especially when nobody knows whether the kid makes a team at all, or which team. Coach Collins' advice is to drop both the coach hat and the parent evaluator hat and just be the supportive person in the front seat. When they get in the car, ask how it went. Ask what was fun today. Not "how'd you do" and not "were any of the other kids good." That one shift is what makes a kid want to come back next year.

Coach Bill's biggest coaching side point: share your tryout rubric with parents before tryouts. How are teams being picked? If there is an A and a B team, what actually separates them? If there are cuts, why would a kid get cut? Say it plainly and say it early, and you avoid most of the fallout after the list goes up.

He also names the thing everyone has seen: the leagues where the three dad coaches end up with the top three kids, automatically, because of how the structure works.

Coach Collins frames it as a triangle. Parent to kid, parent to coach, coach to kid. When one leg of that breaks down, what the kid heard and what the parent tells the kid stop matching what the coach actually said, and that is where the problems come from. Ten spots, here is what we are looking for, here is what competitive means. Say it out loud to all three points of the triangle.

Coach Bill lays out two scenarios worth walking through with your kid ahead of time.

Your kid makes it and their best friend does not. One kid is thrilled, the other is crushed. Teach yours how to handle that, because the bragging happens more often than you would think.

Your kid does not make the team you both expected. Talk through what it actually means, which is not much. A career is not over in fifth grade because someone did not make the A team.

Coach Collins agrees and adds the frame: life is about disappointment, and you learn more from failure than success. But he pushes it one step further.

His favorite parenting lesson from this episode. Before tryouts, have your athlete go ask the coach what they are looking for. After tryouts, have them ask what to work on for next year.

The story behind it: his son Drew, in fourth or fifth grade, got in the car furious about a book report. Coach Collins pulled over about three hundred yards from the school and told him to go back in and talk to his teacher, who was still there. The teacher had a great conversation with him. Coach Collins believes that single moment taught Drew more than the rest of that school year, and that it made him an advocate for himself through his entire education.

Coach Bill's addition is that this is really about teaching a kid how to speak respectfully to an adult in authority, which outlasts basketball by decades. And it is the kid who should do the asking, not the parent. Both agree a fourth grader is old enough. Coach Bill says he would love it if one of his fourth grade girls walked up and asked him to explain.

As Coach Collins puts it, your job is to get them ready to leave the nest, not to stay in it. Nobody wants their thirty five year old kid still hanging around the house.

Coaches: publish the rubric before tryouts, not after. Parents: handle the logistics, ask what was fun instead of how they did, and send your kid to talk to the coach themselves.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

Start with the boring stuffThen take off the coach hatThe communication triangleRehearse the hard conversations before they happenTeach the kid to advocate for themselvesCoach's takeaway
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If the play breaks down and five heads turn to the bench, that is not a basketball problem. That is a coaching habit. This episode is about moving from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side, and building players who can think when the gym gets loud.

What we cover:

Handing players real decisions, and why ownership is a muscle that has to be loaded

Trading instructions for questions, because a rented answer disappears under pressure

Killing excuses by killing your own first, starting with the refs and the schedule

Levels, standards, and borrowing what video games understand about motivation

Why autonomy without warmth reads as checking out, and why they take hard from someone who cares

This week's challenge: at one practice, tally every instruction you give against every question you ask. Then move ten of them over.

Resources: Practice plans, drills, courses, on court clinics, and the coaching community at https://teachhoops.com/

Recorded at the Fifth Quarter Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Summer is over, the banners are hung, and this episode asks an uncomfortable question: did you win because you taught something, or because you found something? One of those lasts. One of those disappears the moment everybody else grows.

What we cover:

The bamboo mindset and why root systems never show up on a December scoreboard

Choosing success metrics before the season, and why whatever you measure is what your players chase

Why development over winning is a rotation decision and a practice plan decision, not a slogan

Giving shooting real time instead of the last eight minutes of practice

Teaching your parents, because the car ride home carries more weight than the huddle

Why assigning positions to twelve year olds builds players who run out of runway

This week's challenge: write down three ways you will measure this season that have nothing to do with the final score, then show them to your players and your parents.

Resources: Season plans, practice plans, drills, courses, and on court clinics at https://teachhoops.com/

Recorded at the Fifth Quarter Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.
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What happens to your team when the head coach has a bad day?

In this episode, Coach Collins takes a deep dive into one of the most important responsibilities of leadership: managing the emotional temperature of your program. Coaches often spend enormous amounts of time thinking about strategy, practice planning, player development, and culture. But players and assistant coaches are also constantly reading something else—the emotional state of the person leading them.

Coach Collins uses the idea of the thermostat versus the thermometer to explain the difference. A thermometer simply reflects the temperature around it. A thermostat helps set it. Athletes naturally react to what is happening around them. Coaches have a greater responsibility. Their frustration, confidence, fear, patience, body language, and emotional consistency can quickly spread throughout a team.

This becomes especially important when circumstances change quickly. Winning streaks, great practices, injuries, difficult losses, parent problems, player issues, staff disagreements, and unexpected setbacks can all happen within days of each other. If a coach’s emotional state rises and falls with every event, players begin experiencing leadership whiplash.

The episode explores the idea that every coach has a leadership range. At the top end, coaches are clear, proactive, relational, confident, and able to see the big picture. At their baseline, they are steady and dependable. At the low end, fatigue and frustration can lead to emotional reactions, micromanaging, distance, impatience, or poor communication.

The goal is not to pretend that great leaders never reach their low end. They do. The goal is to raise the floor.

How do you behave when things go badly? Can you lose and still communicate clearly? Can you receive difficult news without bringing panic into the gym? Can you correct a player without turning your frustration into that athlete’s shame? Can your assistant coaches concentrate on coaching instead of trying to figure out what mood you are in?

Those questions reveal a great deal about leadership.

Coach Collins also challenges coaches to separate their identity from the scoreboard. Winning matters. Competition matters. Championships matter. But when a coach needs winning to validate who they are, the entire culture begins riding the emotional roller coaster with them. A great night means everything is wonderful. One loss suddenly makes everything feel broken.

That is not stability.

Great programs need leaders who can compete intensely while remaining grounded through both success and adversity.

The episode gives coaches three practical questions for evaluating themselves: Did I act as the thermostat or the thermometer this week? What did my low end cost the people around me? And what boundary can I create to protect my emotional baseline next week?

Sometimes that boundary is waiting before speaking after a difficult loss. Sometimes it is refusing to send the emotional text. Sometimes it is sleep, time away, perspective, or simply recognizing that an important decision should not be made while angry.

For coaches trying to build sustainable culture, this episode is a reminder that your emotional regulation is not just personal. It becomes organizational.

Players feel it.

Assistant coaches feel it.

Your program eventually reflects it.

The scoreboard can change your circumstances. It does not have to change your leadership.

basketball leadership, coaching leadership, basketball coaching, team culture, emotional leadership, thermostat vs thermometer, coach emotional control, leadership under pressure, coaching adversity, basketball culture, mental toughness for coaches, emotional regulation, head coach leadership, coaching staff, player development, program culture, leadership consistency, handling losses, coaching confidence, basketball program, high school basketball coach, coaching mindset, team leadership, sustainable culture, basketball podcast, TeachHoops

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Title: What Happens When You Stop Coaching Alone For Thirty Minutes?

Subtitle: Inside the TeachHoops one on one call, and why the coaches who ask for help are the ones who get better fastest

Show Notes

Most coaches don't need more information. They're drowning in it. What they need is somebody to help them sort through it.

That's the whole idea behind the TeachHoops one on one call. You get Coach Collins on the other end of the line, and you bring whatever the actual problem is. Not a general question. The real one. The rotation you can't figure out. The senior who's checked out. The parent email you've read four times and still haven't answered. The practice plan that looks fine on paper and falls apart at 4:15.

What a call usually sounds like:

You talk, he listens. Where the program is, what's working, what's keeping you up.

The real problem gets named. Usually it isn't the one you called about. Turnovers aren't a press break problem. They're a spacing, catching, or preparation problem.

You leave with something you can run Monday. Not a philosophy. A drill, a schedule change, a conversation to have, a plan.

You get a second set of eyes that has no stake in it. No admin, no parents, no politics. Just a coach who's been there.

Who it's for: the first year coach with nobody to ask, the veteran who's been running the same thing for eleven years and knows it, the coach who just took over a program that needs rebuilt, and the coach who's honestly just tired.

Coach also gets into why so many coaches won't ask for help, what it costs them, and the difference between collecting drills and building a system.

Coming to you from the Fifth Quarter Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.

Book a call, or start with the fourteen day free trial: https://teachhoops.com/

Win the Week, Coach.
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