Ø      Basketball Notes 15

You Don’t Have The perfect Coach?

            What a surprise.  No one does.

            It doesn’t matter where you go.  Even D-1 stars like Mike Chapell (Michigan State) and Chris Burgess (Utah) didn’t, when they were both playing at Duke, under Coach Mike Krzyzewski.  Both transferred.  They didn’t think Coach K (3 national championships) was the best coach in the world.  Not every player at Tennessee thinks Pat Summitt knows everything or works perfectly with her personnel (despite the fact that Coach Summitt has more victories than ANY coach in history, and has 7 national championships).  Same with Geno Auriemma at UConn (who has 5 national championships).  Behind the scenes, even at the best programs in the country, there are disagreements.

            If you are an intelligent player, of course you are going to disagree with your coach from time to time.  That’s a given.  All athletes have some things about their coaches they would like to change.  The better the coach, the more likely he or she is to have strange idiosyncrasies and “special” ways (or irritating ways) of doing things.

            Just be smart enough not to waste your time complaining or even thinking about these kids of things, the same things every player has to deal with.  So your coach doesn’t do things exactly the way you think he should?  Big deal!  So what?  That’s part of the game.  Everyone deals with that.

The important thing is not to spend time thinking about how your coach could be different; instead, spend you time thinking about how YOU could be better.

Its odd how many athletes will say “If only my coach would do such-n-such.”  The problem with thinking things like that is that athletes get distracted and fail to take time to think about what they need to do themselves.  For every 60 seconds you spend thinking about your coach’s problems, that’s a minute lost when you could spend that time thinking about your own solutions.  There are many things you can do to make yourself better as a player, regardless of your coach.  So, do yourself a favor…spend time thinking about how YOU can be better and stop thinking about how your coach can improve.