A Pen And A Napkin

Every coach, every off-season, looks at their schedule and their team, and it's human nature to try to anticipate what your record is going to be the next season. However, we often look at things from the perspective of "everything's going to go right" perspective instead of a realistic, analytical perspective. Here's a formula that I've used that gives you a pretty accurate predictor of where your team could/should end up this winter.

Here's our first week of APAAN "University"; let's get the party started!! As a bonus to everyone who has followed "A Pen And A Napkin", we're going to open up our first week, "Communication with Your Players", to ANYONE who wants to jump on for free! Here's a quick preview of the week!

We're excited to have on our first international coach, Brent Tipton, the U17 Men's BBall Coach from Guam! In this episode, Coach tells us about his journey, international coaches we should be studying, fundamental skill development, attacking pick and roll concepts and the two sided fast break. Alot of good information; enjoy!!

We're not coaching an Xbox game, we're coaching human beings, and sometimes the hardest part of coaching is the personalities that you have on your team. You're going to have players that are not content with their role, so how do you identify these players early, what are the warning signs and how do you handle those situations as quickly as possible? Here's some things to look for and some strategies to use to combat them!

A quick three minute pod on updates for this week, plus discussing updates to our "A Pen And A Napkin" University program!

We, as coaches, want to run great practices and workouts at all times. However, it is inevitable that we're going to have a bad practice at multiple points throughout our season. The key to this inevitability is bouncing back as quickly as possible and not allowing one bad practice to become two or three bad practices. In this week's "Foundation Friday", we take a look at strategies to minimize our bad practices.

In our last pod on Don Yaeger's "Great Teams", we take a look at the last pillar of what makes a "Great Team"; Mutual Direction. Getting your teams to move in the same direction is the greatest achievement of any coach or organization, and Yaeger gives us a lot to think about when it comes to what it takes and what we can do to get our team unified and moving together as one!

This week's pod is a "Quick Hitter" with three terrific guests! Chris Fore, the President of the California Coaches Association, comes on the pod to discuss the rights of coaches and what coaches should look for in their jobs. Jeff Morris, a retired girls hoops coach from Nebraska, chats about his career, while Casey Hall jumps on to discuss his active 2-3 zone and how to create chaos while protecting the basket. Great information that needs to be shared!!

Cracking zone defenses can sometimes be easier said than done. In this week's "Foundation Friday", we talk about attacking zone defenses, concepts and ideas for getting open shots, fundamentals vs. a zone, and one of our favorite breakdown drills for attacking a zone.

In our third part of our four part series on Don Yaeger's "Great Teams", we dive into "Activating Efficiency". In this pillar, Yaeger addresses conflict resolution and how to work through friction, mentoring, leadership transitions and how to run an effective meeting. As this book moves along, there's more and more information that apply to coaching your teams on a daily basis; take this information and run with it!