Coaching Youth Hoops (Youth Basketball Coach)

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

Coach Bill welcomes Nate Dalena, CEO of Rugby NorCal and an eleven year youth coach, for a conversation that shows how much basketball and rugby share. James Naismith actually drew on rugby when he invented basketball, and Nate argues that both games are really about evasion: moving defenders where you want them and attacking the space you create. His ball carriers are taught to attack the “branches,” a defender’s arms and shoulders, not the center of the body, which is exactly what a good driver does on the court.

Nate also explains how rugby keeps kids safe through technique instead of padding, starting with how to hit the ground. His cue is “butt, back, ball”: land on your side, then your back, and keep your head up. Coach Bill connects it to taking a charge, which is disappearing in youth basketball because kids are afraid of the contact. Teach them to fall with bent knees, a tight body, and their side hitting first, and the charge gets a lot less scary. Nate adds a baseball style slide for winning loose balls, and a reminder for parents worried about a “soft kid”: confidence in contact is a teachable skill that comes with reps.

On growing a sport almost nobody knows, Nate walks through Rugby NorCal’s pathways, from non contact flag rugby for four year olds to Summer Sevens and high school leagues, plus partnerships with parks departments and youth organizations that fit into their calendars instead of competing with them. His biggest lesson is that parents of young kids are not choosing a sport. They are choosing an experience and a coach they trust. Show up early, shake every hand, start on time, end on time, and aim for what he calls a positive rugby day, which almost never has anything to do with the scoreboard.

When Coach Bill hands him an hour with a group of sixth graders, Nate starts with a fun game like ultimate basketball, moves to a drill on the day’s skill, then goes back to the game to apply it. In the rapid fire round, he would bring back rec basketball with teams picked on the spot, and he wants every coach to steal rugby’s tradition of each captain naming a player of the match from the opposing team. His closing message: let kids play multiple sports, build trust and fun early, and you will have players who love the game when it really starts to matter.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

Coach Bill welcomes Nate Dalena, CEO of Rugby NorCal and an eleven year youth coach, for a conversation that shows how much basketball and rugby share. James Naismith actually drew on rugby when he invented basketball, and Nate argues that both games are really about evasion: moving defenders where you want them and attacking the space you create. His ball carriers are taught to attack the “branches,” a defender’s arms and shoulders, not the center of the body, which is exactly what a good driver does on the court.

Nate also explains how rugby keeps kids safe through technique instead of padding, starting with how to hit the ground. His cue is “butt, back, ball”: land on your side, then your back, and keep your head up. Coach Bill connects it to taking a charge, which is disappearing in youth basketball because kids are afraid of the contact. Teach them to fall with bent knees, a tight body, and their side hitting first, and the charge gets a lot less scary. Nate adds a baseball style slide for winning loose balls, and a reminder for parents worried about a “soft kid”: confidence in contact is a teachable skill that comes with reps.

On growing a sport almost nobody knows, Nate walks through Rugby NorCal’s pathways, from non contact flag rugby for four year olds to Summer Sevens and high school leagues, plus partnerships with parks departments and youth organizations that fit into their calendars instead of competing with them. His biggest lesson is that parents of young kids are not choosing a sport. They are choosing an experience and a coach they trust. Show up early, shake every hand, start on time, end on time, and aim for what he calls a positive rugby day, which almost never has anything to do with the scoreboard.

When Coach Bill hands him an hour with a group of sixth graders, Nate starts with a fun game like ultimate basketball, moves to a drill on the day’s skill, then goes back to the game to apply it. In the rapid fire round, he would bring back rec basketball with teams picked on the spot, and he wants every coach to steal rugby’s tradition of each captain naming a player of the match from the opposing team. His closing message: let kids play multiple sports, build trust and fun early, and you will have players who love the game when it really starts to matter.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How Do You Cut a Kid Without Killing Their Love for the Game?

The right room, the right words, and the right heat.

After a quick check on the weather (California gets a little bit of fall, and its winter is mostly rain), Coach Bill and Coach Collins get into the follow up to tryouts: the conversations nobody wants to have. Cutting a kid, or moving a player down from the top team to a lower level. The goal is not just delivering the news. It is delivering it without killing the kid’s enthusiasm for the sport.

Coach Bill always has these conversations in person, and his rule of thumb depends on the age of the player:

But he always makes the same offer. “I’m happy to sit with both of you, and I’m happy to talk to them specifically about the things they need to work on.” He encourages families to take him up on it.

His reasoning is the heart of the episode. You can say the exact same words to two different kids. One hears a challenge: this wasn’t my year, but next year look out. The other hears that the coach doesn’t like them, they’re horrible, and they’re quitting. Same conversation, same words, completely different landing. You have to know the kid, and you have to know the parent.

Coach Collins tells a story that proves the point. After his son Drew’s sophomore year, he sat down with him for a long and fairly blunt conversation about what his role would look like as a junior. Several assistant coaches were in the room, including Coach Kevin Klagos.

By the time Coach Collins got home, Drew’s mother was waiting at the door ready to give him an earful about why he told Drew he would never play for him.

That was not remotely what was said. He had to call time out, walk her back through the actual conversation, and offer to get Coach Klagos on the phone because he heard every word. What Coach Collins said was: here is where you fit and here is what you need to work on. What Drew heard, and what Drew carried home, was: I’m no good and I won’t play next year.

His message to every coach listening: what you say to a kid is not what reaches the parent. Ever. It is a game of telephone. That is exactly why, at the grade school level, you need to be talking directly to the parents.

And one more rule from Coach Collins: do not post it, do not put it online. Talk to people.

Coach Bill pushes for the actual language. What do you say to a sixth grader, or their parent, when what you really mean is “not good enough”?

Coach Collins admits that in a roundabout way, that is what you are saying. But here is how he structures it:

Always bring it back to a positive at the end.

Coach Collins’ best analogy comes straight out of Madison, Wisconsin, which runs the biggest outdoor swim meet in the country every summer, with roughly twenty public pools feeding into an event called All City.

When the seven year olds swim the 25 freestyle, there are something like thirty five heats of it. The beauty of the meet is that every kid is placed in the heat that matches their time. Eight swimmers per heat, and if you win yours you get a ribbon. The top eight kids in the city are in the top heat. Everybody else is racing kids they can actually race.

Those kids leave the pool smiling. They competed. Nobody got lapped.

Basketball cannot sort kids that cleanly, and both coaches acknowledge it. But that is what most coaches are trying to do, especially in programs with multiple teams. Not rank kids. Put them in the right heat.

“Who else got cut?” Or “How many?” Or “Who did you keep?”

Coach Bill admits this is the one he struggles with. Nobody wants to be the only one, because that is embarrassing. And when a kid truly is the only cut, the natural follow up is: why cut just one kid?

Coach Collins’ half joking answer: I can only keep ten. Well, keep eleven. I only have ten jerseys.

The real answer, as Coach Bill puts it, is that the gap between number ten and number eleven is usually huge. It is about level, not the number.

He also raises a safety question that does not get talked about enough. Is it actually safe for this kid to be on this court the way they are right now? Coach Collins adds the other half: and would they even be happy there?

Coach Collins’ youth program has had sixteen kids show up for fifth grade. You cannot carry sixteen on a team, so either you are cutting four to six kids, or you are telling families to go find four more players and another coach. Nobody wants to do either. (Coach Bill’s response: “You’re destroying the dreams of fifth graders? Way to go, Coach.”)

Sometimes twenty kids show up and only one parent volunteers to coach. Then somebody has to step up, or the program has one team whether it wants to or not.

And for the parent who says they have never coached before? Coach Bill’s answer: don’t worry about it. Go to coachingyouthhoops.com, download the plans, and follow the instructions step by step.

On the club side, Coach Bill tries to make sure a cut is never a dead end. Didn’t make the first team? Come to our camps and pick up skills there. Play in our three on three. Keep developing. And plenty of city and church leagues run equal playing time, where every kid plays, which is its own valid path.

Pick the room based on the kid’s age. Start positive, be specific about the gaps, give them a 364 day plan, and end on why this level is a better fit. Assume the message will get scrambled on the way home, so get the parent in the conversation. Never post it online. And keep a door open somewhere so the cut is never the end of the sport.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesWho is in the roomThe Drew storyThe script for delivering a cutPut them in the right heatThe question every cut kid asksWhen cutting is a math problemFind a pathway for everybodyCoach’s takeaway

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Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show

Links mentioned in this episode

What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club?

Gym time, good coaches, and the myth of arriving.

Coach Bill sits down with Joey Fuca, who runs Lake Show in the Bay Area and is also, as Coach Bill puts it, his boss. Two years in the making. Joey has coached everywhere from his third grade son's team to the college and pro level, and Lake Show now runs about twenty six teams and roughly two hundred forty boys.

Strip away the uniforms, the tournaments, and the Instagram posts, and Joey's answer is simple: helping kids. Ages seven and eight through the teens, and then staying connected to those families for decades. Over the last four or five years he has hired coaches who played in the program. He has coached multiple sets of brothers. He had Lake Show guys in his wedding party as groomsmen. He calls it a lineage of players.

The club started in 2005 as a family project. His dad, Joe Fuca, a tech CEO who worked at DocuSign through its IPO and now coaches at a small school in Dublin, put it together for Joey and his buddies. Nothing more ambitious than that.

Joey's advice to players is the same thing he did himself: take one or two good things from every coach you have.

John Raynor, his high school coach at San Ramon Valley for over thirty years, taught him toughness, grit, and how to grow up as a young man and be a leader in the community. He and Mark Madsen, now the head coach at Cal, recently went up to visit him.

Chuck Martin, his college coach at The Master's College and a former Liberty coach, was a great leader of men and modeled spiritual values off the court.

Eric Musselman, whose kids came up through Lake Show, brought Joey on as a grad assistant at Nevada after Joey finished playing professionally in Germany. That opened up the business side, right at the front edge of the transfer portal era, which Musselman helped spearhead.

What carries over to youth coaching is smaller and more ordinary than you would expect: getting to practice fifteen minutes early, how you communicate during practice, how you actually run a team.

Coach Bill asks what that coach is thinking about wrong. Joey's answer is that the premise itself is off. People want the end state, the twenty or thirty or fifty teams, without the part that gets you there.

Build a product you can be proud of. If that is two teams, it is two teams. Growth follows quality.

The non negotiables:

Coach Bill adds the part that catches most coaches off guard: at twenty five teams you are running a business. Books, payments, scheduling, conflicts. "I'm a coach, therefore I can coach a team" turns into "I have to learn how to run a business."

Hiring gets more delicate. Lake Show keeps it close to home, drawing from former players in the program or warm referrals from coaches Joey trusts.

Gym time becomes a hard ceiling. If you are in a district with a fixed allotment, that allotment is your program size. Basketball is an indoor sport and the season is fall and winter, so there is no workaround. Joey's advice to a new director: treat gym time as your business. Go to every district, every church, every space that might give you a relationship.

And you need help. Lake Show's director of operations, Jeff Maw, wears every hat: coaching, registrations, promotion. Coach Bill's version of the same point is to hire people smarter than you with strengths you do not have, which is hard for coaches who are used to believing they know everything.

For most of its life, it did not. The program was high school only, one or two teams, built around the goal of getting kids into college, D1, D2, or junior college. Joey's mom used to give them a hard time because they never ran it like a business. They poured their own time, money, and resources into it.

Joey started looking at it as a business about ten years ago. The youth program is only eight or nine years old. They added middle school because families had been asking for years, all those high school players had younger siblings, and the Fuca family wanted a way to keep the thing in the family while still serving the area. It started as one sixth, seventh, and eighth grade team. Once you have one team, you start creating more.

They set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017.

Coach Bill raises the outside perception: an Adidas 3SSB team looks like a club that made it.

Joey corrects the framing immediately. Nobody has made it. Lake Show spent ten to fifteen years earning their spot and is grateful for it, but the competition at the elite level is a dogfight every single year. You cannot be a flash in the pan with one blue chip kid and coast. He recently got an email from Adidas asking for the program's ten year history of players who went on to college, with NBA players highlighted. Who is in your program is a very real thing.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at ⁠TeachHoops.com⁠

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https://teachhoops.com/

The debate over ankle braces is one of the most persistent topics in basketball, with coaches, trainers, and parents often split on the best approach. In this episode, we dive into the pros and cons of prophylactic ankle bracing versus traditional taping. We break down the cost-benefit analysis, looking not just at the price of tape versus a one-time brace purchase, but also at the effectiveness of each method after 15 minutes of sweating and intense gameplay.

We also tackle the biggest myth surrounding this topic: the idea that wearing braces will weaken a player's ankles over time. We look at what the actual research says about "dependency" and whether external support leads to muscle atrophy, or if that is just old-school coaching folklore. We discuss the importance of distinguishing between reliance on a brace and using it as a necessary insurance policy, especially for players with a history of recurrent sprains.

Finally, we explore the balance between protection and performance. Does locking down an ankle limit a player’s vertical jump or agility? We discuss the concept of the "kinetic chain"—the fear that bracing the ankle might transfer force to the knee—and how to mitigate that risk through proper strength and mobility training. Whether you are considering a team-wide mandate or just advising a player coming off an injury, this episode gives you the facts to make an informed decision.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show

Links mentioned in this episode

What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club?

Gym time, good coaches, and the myth of arriving.

Coach Bill sits down with Joey Fuca, who runs Lake Show in the Bay Area and is also, as Coach Bill puts it, his boss. Two years in the making. Joey has coached everywhere from his third grade son's team to the college and pro level, and Lake Show now runs about twenty six teams and roughly two hundred forty boys.

Strip away the uniforms, the tournaments, and the Instagram posts, and Joey's answer is simple: helping kids. Ages seven and eight through the teens, and then staying connected to those families for decades. Over the last four or five years he has hired coaches who played in the program. He has coached multiple sets of brothers. He had Lake Show guys in his wedding party as groomsmen. He calls it a lineage of players.

The club started in 2005 as a family project. His dad, Joe Fuca, a tech CEO who worked at DocuSign through its IPO and now coaches at a small school in Dublin, put it together for Joey and his buddies. Nothing more ambitious than that.

Joey's advice to players is the same thing he did himself: take one or two good things from every coach you have.

John Raynor, his high school coach at San Ramon Valley for over thirty years, taught him toughness, grit, and how to grow up as a young man and be a leader in the community. He and Mark Madsen, now the head coach at Cal, recently went up to visit him.

Chuck Martin, his college coach at The Master's College and a former Liberty coach, was a great leader of men and modeled spiritual values off the court.

Eric Musselman, whose kids came up through Lake Show, brought Joey on as a grad assistant at Nevada after Joey finished playing professionally in Germany. That opened up the business side, right at the front edge of the transfer portal era, which Musselman helped spearhead.

What carries over to youth coaching is smaller and more ordinary than you would expect: getting to practice fifteen minutes early, how you communicate during practice, how you actually run a team.

Coach Bill asks what that coach is thinking about wrong. Joey's answer is that the premise itself is off. People want the end state, the twenty or thirty or fifty teams, without the part that gets you there.

Build a product you can be proud of. If that is two teams, it is two teams. Growth follows quality.

The non negotiables:

Coach Bill adds the part that catches most coaches off guard: at twenty five teams you are running a business. Books, payments, scheduling, conflicts. "I'm a coach, therefore I can coach a team" turns into "I have to learn how to run a business."

Hiring gets more delicate. Lake Show keeps it close to home, drawing from former players in the program or warm referrals from coaches Joey trusts.

Gym time becomes a hard ceiling. If you are in a district with a fixed allotment, that allotment is your program size. Basketball is an indoor sport and the season is fall and winter, so there is no workaround. Joey's advice to a new director: treat gym time as your business. Go to every district, every church, every space that might give you a relationship.

And you need help. Lake Show's director of operations, Jeff Maw, wears every hat: coaching, registrations, promotion. Coach Bill's version of the same point is to hire people smarter than you with strengths you do not have, which is hard for coaches who are used to believing they know everything.

For most of its life, it did not. The program was high school only, one or two teams, built around the goal of getting kids into college, D1, D2, or junior college. Joey's mom used to give them a hard time because they never ran it like a business. They poured their own time, money, and resources into it.

Joey started looking at it as a business about ten years ago. The youth program is only eight or nine years old. They added middle school because families had been asking for years, all those high school players had younger siblings, and the Fuca family wanted a way to keep the thing in the family while still serving the area. It started as one sixth, seventh, and eighth grade team. Once you have one team, you start creating more.

They set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017.

Coach Bill raises the outside perception: an Adidas 3SSB team looks like a club that made it.

Joey corrects the framing immediately. Nobody has made it. Lake Show spent ten to fifteen years earning their spot and is grateful for it, but the competition at the elite level is a dogfight every single year. You cannot be a flash in the pan with one blue chip kid and coast. He recently got an email from Adidas asking for the program's ten year history of players who went on to college, with NBA players highlighted. Who is in your program is a very real thing.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cuts During Tryouts

Links mentioned in this episode

Are You Sure the Kid Heard What You Actually Said?

Cut conversations, and the telephone game that follows.

The follow up to tryouts: the conversations nobody wants to have. Cutting a kid, or moving a player down from the top team. The goal is not just delivering the news. It is delivering it without killing the kid's enthusiasm for the sport.

Coach Bill's rule of thumb by age:

But he always offers the same thing. "I'm happy to sit with both of you, and I'm happy to talk to them specifically about what they need to work on." He encourages families to take him up on it.

His reasoning is the heart of the episode. You can say the exact same words to two different kids. One hears a challenge: wasn't my year, next year look out. The other hears you do not like me, I'm horrible, I'm quitting. Same words, same delivery, completely different landing. You have to know the kid, and the parent.

Coach Collins had a long, blunt conversation with his son Drew after his sophomore year about what his role would look like as a junior. Coach Kevin Klagos and other assistants were in the room.

By the time Coach Collins got home, Drew's mother was waiting at the door, ready to let him have it for telling Drew he would never play for him.

That is not remotely what was said. He had to call time out, walk back through the actual conversation, and offer to get Klagos on the phone because Klagos heard the whole thing. What was actually said was here is where you fit and here is what you need to work on. What Drew heard, and what Drew relayed, was I'm no good and I won't play next year.

His takeaway for every coach listening: what you say to a kid is not what reaches the parent. Ever. It is a game of telephone. That is exactly why the age of the kid determines who is in the room.

And one more rule from Coach Collins: do not post it, do not put it online. Talk to people.

Coach Bill pushes for the actual language. What do you say to a sixth grader, or their parent, when what you really mean is not good enough?

Coach Collins' structure:

Coach Collins' best analogy, straight out of Madison. The city runs the biggest outdoor swim meet in the country every summer, with something like twenty public pools feeding into an event called All City at the end.

When the seven year olds swim the 25 freestyle, there are roughly thirty five heats of it. The whole beauty of it is that every kid is in the heat that matches their time. Eight swimmers per heat, and if you win yours you get a ribbon. The top eight in the city are in the top heat. Everybody else is racing someone they can actually race.

The kids leave those pools smiling. They competed. Nobody got lapped.

Basketball cannot sort that cleanly, and both coaches acknowledge it. But that is what a coach is trying to do. Not rank kids. Put them in the right heat.

"Who else got cut?" Or "how many?" Or "who did you keep?"

Coach Bill admits he struggles with this one, because nobody wants to be the only one. That is embarrassing. And when a kid truly is the only cut, the obvious follow up is why cut one kid at all.

Coach Collins' half joking answer: I can only keep ten. Well, keep eleven. I only have ten jerseys.

The real answer is that the gap between the tenth and eleventh player is usually enormous, and that it is about level, not about the number.

There is also a safety piece Coach Bill raises. Is it actually safe for this kid to be on this court the way they are right now? Coach Collins' addition: and would they even be happy there?

Coach Collins' youth program has had sixteen kids show up for fifth grade. You cannot carry sixteen. So you are cutting four to six kids, or you are telling families to go find four more players and another coach, and nobody wants to do either. Sometimes twenty kids show up and only one parent volunteers to coach, and then the program has one team whether it wants to or not.

Coach Bill's advice for the parent who says they have never coached: go to coachingyouthhoops.com, download it, follow the steps.

On the club side, Coach Bill tries never to make the cut a dead end. Didn't make the A team? Come to our camps. Play in our three on three. Keep the skills moving. And plenty of rec, city, and church leagues run equal playing time, which is its own valid path.

Pick the room based on the kid's age. Start positive, be specific about the gaps, give a 364 day plan, and end on why this level is a better fit. Assume the message will get scrambled on the way home, so put the parent in the conversation. And keep a door open somewhere so the cut is not the end of the sport.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesWho is in the roomThe Drew storyThe script for delivering a cutPut them in the right heatThe question every cut kid asksWhen cutting is a math problemFind a pathway for everybodyCoach's takeaway

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

https://gc.com/basketball

https://nukehydration.com/

Youth basketball has become more connected, more measurable and more shareable and GameChanger is rebuilding its basketball experience around that shift. The new update combines personalized player profiles, automatic highlights, flexible stat tracking and ball-tracking video with tools that make life easier for coaches and club directors. It’s an attempt to bring the video, data and storytelling once reserved for higher levels of basketball down to the youth game.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Playing at the Proper Level

Links mentioned in this episode

Should Your Kid Be Playing Up, or Is That Just You?

Talent, maturity, and the parent in the parking lot.

Tryout season continues, and this one is about the hardest call a youth coach makes: getting kids at the right level. How you decide, and how you tell the parents.

(Also settled early: nobody has ever called Coach Collins "Coach Steve." Coach Bill's fourth grade girls have been debating whether to call him Bill, Coach Bill, or William, and at least one of them knows his full name.)

Coach Bill lays out the case. You have a team that can do X, Y, and Z. You have kids above that and kids below it. Then you have the tweener: too good for her grade, maybe not good enough for the level above. Do you push her up for the challenge? Can she handle no longer being the best player in the gym, when one level down she would be?

Coach Collins refuses to put it in a box, and Coach Bill gives him a hard time about it the whole episode.

His frame is academic. If your kid is genuinely ready for calculus, they should take calculus, and the parent usually knows that better than anyone. But you do not want to push so hard that failure follows, and you do not want them so overwhelmed they quit and go play volleyball.

The line he borrows: you never want to be the best kid in the gym. Caitlin Clark was playing against much older boys young, and her parents knew she wanted that. That is a real thing. It is also rare.

At younger ages, Coach Collins leans toward keeping kids with their age group. His reasoning is blunt: nobody is scouting a fourth grade girls game on a Tuesday.

Coach Bill's counter is that it does not matter whether scouts are there. Parents believe they are. That belief is where all the angst comes from, and a coach has to manage the belief whether or not it is grounded.

Coach Bill's example is not hypothetical. A dad pulls his daughter out thirty minutes into the very first practice, says nothing beyond "we gotta go," then calls later to say she deserves to be played up. So you play her up. And she is not ready, or she is simply not as good as the other girls.

Now what happens to the kid?

Coach Collins' most useful point. A kid can be physically good enough to play up and nowhere near ready socially. A fourth grader with sixth grade talent and third grade maturity probably belongs with the fourth graders, even though she is better than all of them.

That is also why he will not hand over a formula. He has made good and bad calls on this with fifteen to eighteen year olds, and he does not always get it right.

Every parent thinks their kid is special. Coach Collins' test is behavior, not talent: is your kid going outside and shooting for three hours on their own? The truly obsessed ones are already obsessed in fourth and fifth grade. Nobody has to make them do it.

His own example is his son, whose obsession was never jumpers. It was building things. YouTube channel, trick shot videos before trick shots were a thing, out back all day. So he fed that monster instead. The question a parent has to answer honestly is whether the drive is coming from the kid or from them.

Coach Bill's addition: at that age the parent pushing is real and common, and a coach cannot do anything about it. All you can do is put the kid in the right spot.

"I'm worried about all the kids. You're worried about one kid. So I understand what you're saying, and I hear you."

Coach Bill's amendment: they are worried about two kids. Their own, and the kid they think theirs is better than.

Publish the rubric. Same point as the tryout structure episode. If you communicate how the team is built before tryouts, you take the mystery out of the placement.

Be timely. Everyone is on pins and needles waiting for the roster. Do not let it drag.

Remember the kids feel it. They pick up the stress from their parents and from the situation, and depending on age they may have no way to say so.

Know that parents cannot see the moving parts. "Why can't my kid be on so and so's team" sets off a domino effect across every roster in the program.

The tough conversations. Cutting a kid, and moving a kid down from the top team.

There is no formula. Weigh the skill against the maturity, watch what the kid does on their own time, publish your rubric, communicate fast, and accept that you will not get every one of these right.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesThe tweener problemWhy there is no ruleThe real life situationReady is not only about skillHow to tell whether your kid is actually that kidCoach Collins' line for parentsWhat coaches can controlComing nextCoach's takeaway

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Is Your Kid Actually Hydrated, or Just Drinking Something Blue?

The couple taking on Gatorade from a Mississippi warehouse.

Coach Bill sits down with Marty and Lesley Frascogna, the husband and wife team behind Nuke Hydration and a sponsor of this show, which he discloses right up front. They found each other through a LinkedIn conversation, and Coach Bill's interest was simple: he was tired of picking up bottles full of dye and would never hand that to his own team.

Lesley owns this part of the story. Gatorade, Gatorade Zero, a stretch where their son drank Prime because he thought it was cool, and some Propel because, as she puts it, in her brain clear must mean healthy. The tipping point was standing over a grocery cart loaded with Gatorade she was about to hand out to a house full of kids and feeling guilty about it.

Marty's side was the Ironman. He came to triathlon with no background in it, and when his nutrition coach asked what he was actually putting in his body, the answer turned out to be not much: not enough sodium, not even enough fluid ounces. And he had played college sports. He thought he knew this stuff.

This is the running argument of the episode. Coach Bill had heard the Ironman version. Marty, an attorney for eighteen years and self described steady hand, says the Ironman was the setup, but Lesley took it and ran. She is the impulsive one. She had also been a florist for twenty four years and wanted a career change, and so did he.

Her one non negotiable from the start: it had to be ready to drink. Not a powder. A bottle a kid can hold. Marty asked about powder and she shut it down immediately. She was calling formulators the next day.

For the record, Coach Bill and Lesley referred to Marty as an Ironman six times before he brought it up himself. He wanted that noted.

Market research pointed to a real gap. Hydration packets are everywhere. Ready to drink is essentially Coke's Powerade and Pepsi's Gatorade and not much else.

When they walked into Whole Foods looking for the clean alternative that surely already existed, they found a couple of options with two problems. First, no cool factor. Their own kids laughed and said they would not walk around with it. Second, natural flavors. Lesley's view is that natural flavors are not really natural. They start from a natural product and then get heavily processed in a lab. That was a line they would not cross, and she notes that avoiding natural flavors is becoming a real consumer trend this year.

Their answer to what parents miss when they think hydration means water: most youth athletes are not drinking enough to begin with, they are not getting enough sodium, and they are short on electrolytes. Sweat goes out, salt has to go back in.

Coach Bill can vouch. He carries a large bottle, drinks three a day, and still came back dehydrated on routine bloodwork. Volume alone does not do it.

Marty's favorite frame, from his training: carbs are the gas, hydration is the oil. If you burn all the oil, you cannot retroactively pour it back in. The engine is already gone. He has actually blown an engine by skipping an oil change, so the metaphor stuck.

On timing, both agree with what Coach Bill preaches to his team. Hydration starts the night before. If your game is Saturday and you start Saturday morning, you are already behind.

This one they did not plan to collect. A high school team they work with gave players a Nuke two hours before a game, water alongside it, and another Nuke at halftime, in Mississippi heat. Not one cramp on the team. The coach said it was the first time in school history. They watched the opposing team go down every few minutes on TV, on a weekend when a player elsewhere died on the field from heat.

They have now seen it repeat for three straight weeks. They are also hearing from women who drink one a day and say it keeps their headaches and migraines away. A study with Mississippi State's kinesiology department on Nuke specifically is in the works, which should say whether the credit belongs to the coconut water, the Celtic sea salt, or the combination.

Coconut water as the base, for hydration and the added benefits, and because almost nothing else in the category uses it.

Celtic sea salt, not table salt. Lesley says the internal debate over which salt to use was close to infinite. They wanted something from the ocean, with the trace minerals that come with it.

Lemon and lime juice for actual flavor in the original Lime Time.

Five grams of added organic cane sugar. They deliberately did not go to zero. A little sugar helps hydration, carries flavor, and gives kids a small burst of energy. It is a fraction of what is in a conventional sports drink.

Stevia and monk fruit to balance the lemon and lime without piling on more sugar and calories.

They said no to extra vitamin C, extra vitamins, extra magnesium. Not necessary. The moment that defined the whole company came at the formulation lab, six months in, when they finally loved the taste and spotted an ingredient on the panel they did not recognize. They asked what it did. The answer was mostly color, with a little magnesium they did not need. Lesley's response: get rid of it.

Two halves. Nothing Unnecessary, and Keep the Energy. No, there is no caffeine in it, which is the first thing most people ask.

Nothing Unnecessary has become the filter for the whole company, not just the formula. Lesley catches herself planning a big elaborate activation in Nashville and then pulls it back to something simple that is all about the drink. Keep the Energy is about the daily wins: no sugar spike, no crash, one brick in the wall every day.

The bottle says no guilt. The team pushed back on putting it there. Lesley insisted, at a hundred and ten percent, because of exactly what she felt pushing that Gatorade cart. Mom guilt is everywhere, parents are doing their best, and if one decision can be made easier and feel good, that is the job. Coach Bill's version is the same from the coach's side: he does not feel bad handing it to his players.

Neither of them is a nutritionist and they say so. Lesley's honest answer is that the two go hand in hand and nobody is perfect. There is still junk food in their pantry. But fully hydrated and badly fueled is a moot point.

Coach Bill's version of this was handing out nutrition bars before early morning games, because so many kids skip breakfast and you can see how that game is going to go before it starts. Lesley's broader point: it is not just the kids who need educating. She did not understand the difference hydration actually makes until Marty started training. She thought eight glasses of water was just the recommendation so you do not die.

The second husband and wife pair to appear on the show, and Marty's first question was whether the first couple is still married.

They describe a good yin and yang: Lesley is passionate, impulsive, burn the boats, we are doing this now. Marty wants the long term plan and the strategy thought all the way through. The bigger problem is that they are never off. Date night turns into a work meeting. Lesley, diagnosed with ADHD at thirty six, needs the schedule to stay fluid, which frustrates a man who would like a schedule set in stone. They also have a warehouse and still fight over which corner of the house to work in.

Their kids, Lesley jokes, would like mom and dad to go back to their real jobs.

Two flavors now: the original Lime Time and the just launched OG Orange. A third is coming in the spring as a collaboration with someone they are not naming yet.

Direct to consumer at nukehydration.com, with a new site launching in about three weeks. Lesley ships it herself, nationwide, with handwritten notes. They are in independent grocery stores around Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham and expanding.

The growth they are proudest of is schools. Athletic directors are getting real pressure from parents asking for healthier options, and "we have always given the team Gatorade" is no longer an answer. Next goal: working directly with coaches to set up team shops so parents can buy straight from them.

And for anyone who does not want to commit to a full case, the $19.99 sample pack includes two of each flavor with shipping, and YOUTHHOOPS15 works on it.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com

SubtitleShow NotesBefore Nuke, they were a Gatorade familyWho actually had the ideaThe void they foundHydration is not the same as waterThe Mississippi football data pointWhat is in it, and what is notWhat NUKE actually stands forThe two words Lesley fought forNutrition and hydration togetherWorking together, married eighteen yearsWhere to get it

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