Basketball Coach Unplugged (A Basketball Coaching Podcast)

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Title: What Are The Three PRs Every Coach Has To Get Right?

Subtitle: Player relations, parent relations, public relations, and why losing your job usually comes down to one of them

Show Notes

Coach Collins sits down with a guest whose background is communications, not coaching, and it shows in the best way. She built a framework around three words that all end in the same two letters, and once you hear it you can't unhear it. Player relations. Parent relations. Public relations. Get those three right and most of the noise in your program goes away.

PR number one: player relations

This is the one she calls the most important relationship you'll ever have. And the honest part of the conversation is that it has changed. Coach Collins says it plainly. The Bobby Knight world is over. Adjust or become a dinosaur. You can even see it in Geno.

But here's the piece that matters, and both of them land on it. Adjusting is not the same as lowering expectations. Core values are still core values. Fundamentals are still fundamentals. You just can't teach them with a hammer anymore and expect the kid to give you their best.

The example she uses is the wraparound layup in the championship game. Player brings it down on the break, wraps the ball around her waist, puts up the layup, misses it. The old school reaction is "it don't take all that, just make the shot." But that move is who that player is. She makes it ten times a week in practice. Take it away and you take away the thing that makes her good.

PR number two: parent relations

Here the adjustment flips. With players, you adjust. With parents, they adjust to you. But that only works if you've set the stage early.

The whole thing comes down to one word, and Coach Collins says it three times because he means it. Overcommunicate. There is no such thing as too much.

What that actually looks like:

A full practice schedule handed out from November through March. Every day. What time practice is, when the bus leaves, all of it.

A month on a page calendar printed and in their hands.

A weekly email every Sunday night. Here's the week. Weights got moved because of construction. Pasta dinner is at so and so's house. Parents know it's coming and they know everything is in it.

Clear expectations stated out loud. What you expect from their kid. What you expect from them in the stands. What you expect from them after a game.

She points out where most coaches get burned. Christmas break, going day to day, telling everybody at the end of Monday's practice what time they're going Tuesday. Then a family has a trip to grandma's and the kid misses two days and now everybody's upset. Plan, plan, plan.

Then the part every high school coach should sit with. Coach Collins lists the three ways you actually lose a coaching job. You're inappropriate. You mishandle money. Or the parents come after you. And parents usually come after you because they don't know what's going on. If everything's running smooth, your admin leaves you alone.

PR number three: public relations

This is the one coaches skip, and she makes the case for why it pays you back. Get your town, your city, your community behind you and it doesn't just help your athletes, it helps your program. When you need funding you're not begging, you're asking people who already feel like they're part of it.

Her line, borrowed from Dawn Staley, is that they're not fans, they're fam.

The warning is against the photo op. Teams show up at the 3K walk, take the picture, post it, and never come back. That's not community work, that's marketing. Pick one cause and be consistent with it. Boys and Girls Club is her example. Go sit down in the chairs and talk to the kids. Not a clinic, not a demo. Just be there. Your players are closer to those kids' ages than any adult in the building.

And she'll trade gym time for it. Make one practice a shootaround, take that hour, go be present.

Coach Collins adds the part that ties it together. You're modeling. Same as parenting. If you come home and get smashed every night, you're modeling that. If you want your players to believe in giving back, they have to watch you do it. He tells his students the meaning of life is leaving the place a little better than you found it. She has a shorter version. Pay your rent for where you are.

The quick summary

Players: core values are core values, but be willing to adjust.

Parents: set boundaries, communicate, and plan, plan, plan.

Public: support the community and the community will support you.

Also in this one: why the head assistant might have the best seat in the building, the twelve inches Coach Collins misses, and a math major explaining why he took the teaching job anyway.

Mentioned in the episode: High School Hoops, and $450 off.

Practice plans, drills, courses, mentorship, and the coaching community. Fourteen day free trial: https://teachhoops.com/

Win the Week, Coach.

One heads up: the transcript has the guest labeled as Dawn Staley, but she's clearly talking about Dawn Staley as her favorite coach, so that's a bad speaker tag from the transcription. I kept her anonymous in the notes. Tell me her name and I'll drop it in.
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Today's episode is sponsored by TeachHoops.com, where veteran coaches mentor you through the
exact challenges you're facing — because sometimes you need an answer tonight, not at the next clinic.
In this episode, we challenge a habit almost every coach has: teaching with NBA clips. When a sixteenyear-old watches a professional make a play, he files it under entertainment, not instruction. The gap
between him and that player is too wide to feel real.
Enter the believable model: clips of players who look like your players — same age, same level,
sometimes the same jersey — executing the concept correctly. We cover how to build a believablemodel clip library from your own game film, how one clip of your backup point guard making the right
read outteaches an hour of professional highlights, and how peer modeling changes what players
believe is possible for themselves. Belief, it turns out, is the real curriculum.
Start clipping your own players doing it right this week, and watch how fast concepts start sticking. For
clip organization tools and film-teaching courses built by coaches who use them, visit
https://teachhoops.com/

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Title: How Do You Actually Get Your Best Players Shots?

Subtitle: Why good shooters go quiet, and the built-in ways to make sure the ball finds them

Show Notes

Every coach has had this conversation. Your best scorer takes four shots. You look at the book after the game and you can't figure out how it happened. Nobody did anything wrong. The ball just never found her.

Coach Collins gets into the real answer, which is that getting shots is not a talent thing or a hustle thing. It's a design thing. If your best shooter has to create everything on her own, she's going to have quiet nights, and the ones she does get will be the hard ones.

What we cover:

Know who your shots belong to. Write it down. If your staff can't name your top three options in order, your players definitely can't.

Screen for your scorers, don't just screen with them. The quickest fix in the book. Most teams have their best shooter setting screens instead of coming off them.

Build two or three actions you can call by name. Not a whole offense. Two or three things that get a specific kid a specific shot when you need one.

Get the ball moving side to side. Second and third side shots are open shots. One side offense is guarded offense.

Teach the pass before the shot. The shot is the last thing that happens. The pass that creates it is the thing nobody practices.

Transition is free offense. Sprint lanes, early looks, before the defense gets matched up. Easiest shots your scorers will get all night.

Tell your players out loud who's getting the ball. Roles get quiet when nobody says them. Say them.

Coach also talks about the shooter who disappears in the second half, how to handle the kid who wants the shots but hasn't earned them yet, and the difference between a shot that's open and a shot that's good.

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

Actions, drills, practice plans, and the coaching community: https://teachhoops.com/

Win the Week, Coach.

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Title: What Should You Do Every Single Day At Practice, No Matter What?

Subtitle: The daily non-negotiables that build habits while everybody else is chasing new drills

Show Notes

Every coach has a list of things they mean to get to. Then the season starts, the schedule tightens, and suddenly it's January and you realize your team has not been drilled on the same thing twice.

In this one, Coach Collins walks through the handful of things that should show up in your practice plan every day, from the first day of tryouts to the last game you play. Not because they're flashy. Because they're the stuff that decides games in March.

What we get into:

Start with a purpose your players can repeat. If they can't tell you what today's practice was about on the way to the locker room, it wasn't about anything.

Touch the ball early. Some form of skill work, every day, before the legs and the attention are gone.

Compete at something. Score it, keep track, let there be a winner. Habits built in comfortable air don't hold up under pressure.

Teach one detail, not ten. One correction taught well beats a full clipboard of things you mentioned once.

End on a standard, not a whistle. Free throws, a closeout, a defensive rep, something that says here's who we are.

Say one player's name for the right reason. Costs you nothing. Changes how a kid walks into the gym tomorrow.

Coach also talks about the trap of the "perfect" practice plan, why your daily list should fit on an index card, and what to cut when the gym time gets shortened and you've only got forty minutes.

Recorded at the Fifth Quarter Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.

Practice plans, drills, courses, and coaching community: https://teachhoops.com/

Win the Week, Coach.

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Performance equals potential minus interference. That one equation, borrowed from Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis, is the spine of this episode, and it flips the way most coaches think about player development. Nearly all of our energy goes into the first half of that equation. Better drills, better lifts, better skill work, better film. But Coach Collins argues that some of the biggest breakthroughs in a season do not come from adding anything at all. They come from removing what is standing in front of a kid.

The episode opens with a player every coach knows. Terrific on Tuesday, unrecognizable on Friday. His ability did not vanish between those two days. Something got in front of it. Coach Collins walks through why the interference we go looking for is usually external, the crowd, the refs, the matchup, when the loudest interference is almost always internal. Fear of failing. Fear of looking foolish in front of friends. Overthinking. Trying to prove something to someone in the stands. Playing to protect a stat line instead of playing to compete. That is not a skill problem, and it does not respond to skill answers.

Then comes the uncomfortable part of the conversation. Sometimes the coach is the interference. A player struggles, so he gets a cue, then another cue, then a correction and one more reminder on his way out of the huddle. Now he is standing at the free throw line running six voices at once, and none of them are his own. Coach Collins makes the case that our job is not to fill a player's head. It is to free it.

From there the episode turns to a simple change in the question we ask. Instead of what does he need to learn, try what is getting in the way of what he already knows. One question assumes the player is missing something. The other assumes he has more inside him than he can currently reach, and those two questions build two completely different practices.

Coach Collins also connects the idea to culture, because programs manufacture their own interference. Unclear roles create it. A coach who runs hot and cold creates it. Mistakes punished in public create it. When a player is calculating what failure will cost him, he is protecting rather than competing, and gyms where kids play free are never an accident.

The episode closes with a challenge coaches can run this week. Pick one player, write down one thing you are going to take away rather than add, then audit your own practice for the fog you may be putting in front of your team. This is an episode for coaches who have been trying to add their way to better and are ready to try subtracting instead.
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