Becoming a basketballcoach Chapter 2 "Doing wrong, when doing right"

Maybe sounds strange to you, but there are many ways of doing wrong, when doing right. As a new coach you always have the greatest intentions with your practises and your game tactics. Most of the times you practise the things you need to win the games coming up or after a game where you hade many bad passes, next practise a lot of passing drills, or bad shooting at a game, then next practise many shooting drills.

So whats wrong with this?
Well, yes you are doing the right things but with youth teams you still are doing it wrong as I see it. I think every new coach needs help with their yearly plan and what to be taught and HOW?!

If not, the season will be a long road of quick fixes and when you are on fix number 12 its time to fix the first problem again. Most of time some very important foundamentals will never be practised, cause its lacking is not shown in the games at the moment. They will first be shown as weaknesses in 2,3,4,5 years, if not taught now.
This is of course very hard for a new coach to understand and even harder to find out if nobody tells the new coach about it. Every club, should have somebody that is incharge of basketball quality and this person cant be afraid of speaking the truth to the coaches. If you as a coach are doing most things wrong and maybe also you are winning a lot of games and nobdy tells you. Well, then of course you as a new coach think you are doing everything like you should.

An example from when I started was that I wanted structure in offense, nothing wrong with that, but I wanted easy scores of course. I put in a stationary highpost and made the guards make two cuts after eachother in grade six thats a score on the second cut 7/10 times. As I see it I was doing right, but I did it at the wrong time, the players needed other stuff at that time than easy score from higpost scrubcuts.

I taught my team a 1-2-1-1 zonpress and I thought I was briljant, because it worked so great in games. We won our game in the south of Sweden with an average of 43,3 points/game and moste games was over in 4-5 minutes then we where in the lead with +25p and had to play defense from halfcourt.

In these ages all kinds of zonpresses are deadly weapons since most kids hasn`t developed court vision yet and can only focus in "one" direction. As everybody knows zonpresses when adults on the higher levels very rarely get you anything else then seconds of the shootclock, still so many youth coaches put in so many hours to work on their different zonpresses to take advantage of not yet developed kids.

I was undeafeted for 3½ years in the south of Sweden with my first headcoach experience and I did so many wrongs that on another level would be many right things instead. If you are new ask, watch and find out what to teach, dont do same wrongs as I did, when I thought I was doing right.

Look for chapter 3  
"Will to win is to loud - The kids cant hear you"

/Coachholmgran