Preparing Your Season—Leading Up To The First Game

Every season presents new challenges, however the biggest challenge, especially for new or newer coaches, may be in preparing to teach everything that will be needed in order to successfully play the first game.

Years ago, while at a UCLA coaching clinic, Coach Wooden stressed to us young coaches that our priorities should be conditioning, fundamentals, and then team play. The pre- and early-season plan must take that into account.

Do this by designing your drills for the dual purpose of perfecting a skill while building conditioning. Wooden told us that, “before working together as a team, we need to break every element of the game down into its basic parts, then begin to put the pieces together. Practice and perfect each part or the whole will not be successful. It requires hard work and repetition, always modifying, always correcting, until it all comes together. 'Practices are where championships are won'.”

The identification and perfection of details in the teaching of fundamentals sets the teaching-coach above the average coach. Any coach neglecting details regularly attended to by the teaching-coach is practicing to be unsuccessful. “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Doing the little things well makes the big things work. This is probably the teaching-coach’s greatest attribute for success.

To read the rest of this article, go to: http://www.top-basketball-coaching.com/Preparing-For-The-First-Game

Yours in Sport & Spirit,

Coach Ronn