WHEN PLAYERS KNOW MORE THAN THE COACH

by ed riley copyright 2002

Because of the subject matter, I hate that a chapter like this even needs to be written, but it does. This is for you coaches who coach your players in the off-season. It's for the coaches who do not coach their school's team. So here's to describing a lose-lose situation.

My girls are now in 9th grade and playing high school ball. Some of them are playing freshman ball, some jv, and some varsity. Most of them are having problems understanding their coaches and the quality of their game is going downhill.

Most kids believe, or want to believe, that they know more than their coach. In my brain, this is a natural course of events. When I was a kid I knew so much more than my parents, it was scary. As I grew older, it was amazing to me how much smarter my parents got. Now that I hit that amazing 1/2 century mark, I realize that my parents were true geniuses.

Let's apply this to basketball. At some point in time, all kids think they know more than their coach. This is a daily dilemna that all coaches must face. When this attitude surfaces, our only recourse is to make them run, bench them, ignore it, educate them (yeah, right!), kick them off of the team, or whatever.

But what happens in that 1 in a 1000 situation, where the player actually does know more than the coach? This is truly a lose-lose situation. NO ONE WINS!!!!!

For the last 6 years I have been teaching my girls the game, skills, spacing, defense, shooting form, and more. Last year I tried to teach my girls a new offense, my Read-and-React Motion Offense, or RRM.

RRM teaches them to think the game, to live the game, to use their brains to tell their skills what to do. Most of my girls learned to truly understand the game. They learned to read the defense and creative an offense based upon that individual team's defense. It is ever moving, ever flowing, and ever changing. RRM taught them to see the opening in the other teams defense and exploit it.

Take a girl who truly understands the game like this, put them with a coach who doesn't understand it as well, and you get the following player: "I'm not schizophrenic, and neither am I," the player says.

The coach is the coach. He is to be listened to and obeyed. Anything other than this is anarchy. So this is one of the saddest things I can ever imagine for a player. Here are a few examples:

FOULS

Good players and teams are aggressive, both on offense and defense. When a player doesn't foul in a game, they aren't hustling and trying hard enough. I have always preached that if a player doesn't have 3 fouls at the end of the game, they didn't play aggressive enough. Some coaches may say 2 fouls, some may say 4, but they want the player to play aggressively. Now what happens to that same player when their high school coach tells them never to foul? If they do foul, they get benched. After a certain point in time, this player starts to lose their aggressiveness. The result = everyone loses, most of all the individual player.

Or, let's look at this one. There are lots of different passes that are each effective in their own time and place. There is a time and a place where the 2 handed chest pass, the one handed baseball pass, the lob pass, the bounce pass, and every other pass is the exact right choice for that moment in time.

A player who truly understands the game will have lots of different passes at their disposal and will use every one of them in a game.

Now imagine this player's surprise when their coach tells them they are not to make any more bounce passes. This player looks to the right and says, "I'm not schizophrenic!" Then they look to the left and reply, "And neither am I!" They ask themselves how can any player in their right mind delete one of the most effective passes in the game from their repertoire.

Another example is stopping the clock. Your team is down by 3 points with 10 seconds to go. The other team has the ball and is stalling to run out the clock. What do you do? Basketball sense tells you to foul the other team and stop the clock, right?

How does a player feel in this situation when their coach tells them specifically not to foul? We are back to schizo-city again, aren't we?

I used to think that cutting a player was the hardest thing a coach could ever do, and I was wrong. The hardest thing for a coach to do is to sit back on their hands when you see a coach destroy a player's attitude and love for the game. You know the coach is wrong. The true players know their coach is wrong.

Don't misunderstand me, I am not talking about differences in philosophies. I am not talking about why they use certain plays. I am not talking about different belief systems. I am talking about the basics. I am talking about coaches not knowing good ole fashioned basketball sense, when their players ooze of basketball sense.

So is the point of this to whine and cry and say "Oh whoa is me?" No! When this rare occurance happens, you do not want to be the ex-coach from hell. We have all seen the parents-from-hell and we know how they affect us. We sure don't want to become the same type of idiot.

As coaches, we understand the value of teamwork. We understand that the coach has the final word. So what do we do to salvage the player?

1. Be supportive, without putting down the coach.

2. Tell the player that the coach may have a reason that he is not sharing with the team.

3. Remind them that they play for him and under his rules for 3-4 months a year. After that, they play your style of ball for 7-8 months a year.

4. Encourage them to politely ask the coach in a 1-on-1 why he is encouraging the questionable acts, but not to argue with them.

5. Make sure you are patient with them after the season and you become their coach once again. It will take a while to break them of their newly found lack of basketball sense. So have a lot of patience!

6. If you have patience and a politically correct tone in your voice and can maintain this no matter how upset you get, then try talking to their coach.

8. And after they have almost broken your heart with their justified frustration, go to your local watering hole, you deserve it.

My last piece of advice is to keep on teaching your players to think on the court when you are the coach. KEEP TEACHING THEM TO SEE THE COURT AND OPPORTUNITIES! Don't let this scenario stop you from doing the right thing, WHEN YOU ARE THE COACH.