Discovery is Superior to being Told

Motivation gets us started but discipline is what keeps us going. We have started to run our individual skill development sessions as more "player lead", our players will come in and it is a great chance for me to connect with each guy individually about school, life, and of course basketball. 

This has been how we have tried to create our environment, coach lead, player driven. We give them teams at the beginning of the week and they are preparing all week to play against the other practice team. Some natural things will start to come out of that. Group chats will form, relationships will develop, some will change for that week. Best friends and roommates will talk to each other a little less or more, depending on who is on which team. 

There is no point in talking about one thing, when everyone is thinking about something else. Address the elephant in the room and you will be further ahead as a group. So give your players a lot of opportunity to bring things up to you. So that when something is on their mind, they can ask it and feel like it is just another conversation. 

It can be easy for the coach to come in and tell players what to do and run all the structured drills but players know more what they need to work on. They know if they weren't comfortable going left and they can do it without pressure in this environment. 

If you want players to be ok making mistakes, you have to let them make mistakes without you watching them every two seconds. They know the pressure is going to be on, but you have to let them write unedited and without judgement. 

We know that the first stuff that we write is always going to be bad, some of it will be good, but a lot of it will be bad. But the key is that you push through the mistakes, just keep writing, without judgement, without worry, unedited. There will be time for that later. 

Give them things to work on, things that are specific to their position, things that are going to happen to them a lot in the game. 

Things take time. It doesn't happen in a week, month or even sometimes a year. 

But your players have to care about their performance, care about their confidence and they have to own both of those things. If they care about it, they will think about it more and try harder at it. 

Culture is not about what you have done historically (that is tradition), it is what the current group of people working together are doing together.