I just spoke to Allison McNeil, the Head Coach of Canada’s Women’s National Team about a clinic that she ran this weekend. She lamented the same issues of running clinics for volunteer coaches. However, her clinic cost $135, but the coaches paid only $50 due to government grants. Furthermore, she said that the provincial government wants every child to have a certified coach by 2015! While that is an ambitious plan, what an ambition to have!

Such a plan demonstrates a commitment to youth sports; it shows an interest in youth sports as an important element of a balanced childhood. The plan demonstrates a desire to provide the best possible environment for its youth athletes.

Since I wrote Cross Over: The New Model for Youth Basketball Development, I have written frequently about the basketball system in the United States and elsewhere. My biggest contention is not that the U.S. system does not work or is broken, but that it is not as good as it can be. With the money invested in basketball in the United States, I do not understand the apathy for searching for and building an improved system that meets the needs of all youth basketball players.

Volunteer coaches are the lifeblood of most youth sports organizations. However, as much as we value youth sports (and look at the attendance at the Little League World Series), and especially youth basketball, there should be an effort to create a better environment.

I spoke to a local recreation center recently. They have over 2400 children involved in basketball every year. Why not offer the opportunity for parents to add $1 to their registration fee to go toward coach development? Even if only one-quarter of the parents opt in, $600 is sufficient to pay for most one-day clinics. The organization could pay the clinician a $500 fee and have a raffle for coaches who participate for a $100 gift certificate to a local restaurant. This pays for the clinic through volunteer contributions and provides an incentive for coaches to attend.

Obviously, government grants or funding from the NBA, NCAA or USA Basketball would be ideal. However, without this funding, which does not appear to be coming any time soon, organizations have a responsibility to make efforts to improve their programming.

Imagine if all 2400 parents contributed $1. The organization could pay a mentor coach to assist dozens of coaches by attending practices and offering pointers and evaluations. The organization could purchase coaching materials for the coaches. There are many ways the money could be spent.

Alternatively, the YBCA offers a FREE online coach education course. Is it too much to ask of volunteers to work through a one to two-hour course on basic concepts of coaching?

If our government is uninterested in providing an ambitious plan or funding like in British Columbia; if the NBA, NCAA and ihoops are uninterested in leading reforms, including coach education; and if local organizations appear unwilling to use creative methods to finance better programming or efforts to improve coaching, what does that say about the way that we value youth sports?

By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

In reality, coaches like Hurley and Keller are the outliers; most coaches, and in fact the average coach if there is such a thing, falls on a spectrum somewhere between Hurley and Keller. The average coach, if you were able to quantify every coach who works with 6-18 year olds in the United States, is more likely to be a volunteer mom or dad or a semi-volunteer high school teacher than a could-be professional coach like Hurley or a money-sucking child exploiter like Keller (based on the depiction in George Dohrmann’s Play Their Hearts Out).

The need for reform or more coach development has nothing to do with intentions. I firmly believe that 99% of coaches start coaching for the right reasons. I do not believe that anyone signs up to coach thinking that they are going to ruin a child’s life or intentionally teach the wrong things. However, that happens. Often, it happens because the coach does not know better. They have vague memories of their childhood experiences playing sports, and they emulate those. Of course, we remember emotional experiences far more than the mundane, so many people remember their coaches as yellers and screamers even if it happened infrequently because those are the emotional experiences etched into their memories, while the daily activities which more typified the experience are long forgotten.

While learning from a mentor is valuable, blindly doing what someone did 20 years ago is not. If I ate the food that I ate as a child, there is no way that I would maintain my current weight. Food recommendations have changed. When I was young, Gatorade was viewed as a health beverage, while chocolate milk was deemed bad because of the sugar. Now, many in sports recommend skipping the Gatorade, but drinking chocolate milk as a post-exercise recovery beverage. When I was young, pasta and cereal were health foods; now, many suggest moderate intakes of each because of the carbohydrates. When I was young, fat was evil. Now, there are good fats and bad fats. If I fed my son as I was fed, and my parents had every intention of providing healthy, nutritious food, I would violate many of the new ideas on healthy eating and food consumption.

In coaching, things that were standard procedures when I was a young player are no longer viewed as best practices. Few if any sports scientists would recommend that basketball players run long distances at a slow jog as pre-season training or static stretch before practice, but that was conventional wisdom when I played. Because it was conventional wisdom, and every coach did it, those who coach today without any additional education or exposure to new ideas and training methodologies perpetuate these practices from a bygone era. They are not intentionally coaching poorly; they simply are not professional coaches and do not spend hours researching sports science because they teach history, raise families, etc.

While these coaches should not be criticized for their volunteer efforts, we also should not stand by idly as they perpetuate poor practices for another generation. Rather than allow coaches to languish on their own, and face the wrath of parents who expect professional coaching at recreational-league prices, leagues and governing bodies should attempt to assist these coaches through coaching materials, affordable clinics, mentoring and more.

Parents will not send their child to an unlicensed barber, yet they will drop off their son or daughter and leave them with a coach who in all likelihood has no formal training as a coach. Bars require bartenders to be licensed mixologists and to have a certificate in handling food, yet we expect nothing from those who play such an important role in the development of our children at young and impressionable ages.

Youth sport is when athletes need the best coaching. Initially, athletes need coaches who inspire or ignite a passion for the game and for improving. After playing for a year or two, players need good instructors who can enhance players fundamental skill development. Players who fail to develop the interest in playing at a young age and/or who do not develop good skills by the early teens are much less likely to continue playing either by choice or by cut. These coaches are tasked with teaching the basics and establishing the right practice habits and attitude for the sport and training. By comparison, teaching plays to experienced, knowledgeable, motivated college players is a much less complex job. College coaching has its complexities and challenges, but they are reduced from an on-court perspective when they are able to recruit players who have been well-coached as youths and high school players.

It would be ideal if we had a system to pay youth coaches to make youth coaching a full-time job. This would raise expectations, and it would make coach education and development a mandatory requirement for aspiring coaches. As it is, however, we rely on the generosity of volunteers to sustain our youth sports, and we should never forget that. My youth coaches were a real estate broker, an accountant, a couple doctors, a call center manager, a history teacher, a 5th grade teacher, a construction worker and a Gap manager. They went to work early or worked weekends to be able to coach my teams. I thoroughly enjoyed all of them and appreciate everything that they did for my teams.

I was lucky. On the spectrum of coaches from Hurley to Keller, my coaches were far closer to Hurley than Keller. Unfortunately, it seems like every student who took my Introduction to Coaching course this summer had a coach who was much closer to Keller than Hurley. Some coaches were poor because of their treatment of athletes, and some were poor because of their lack of knowledge. My coaches made up for a lack of knowledge, especially in soccer as it was a fairly new sport in the early 80s, with their enthusiasm and ability to create a great team environment. I may not have learned to “Ben it like Beckham” or even to juggle a soccer ball, but I had fun, stayed in shape and made friends, and have nothing but good memories.

Could my coaches have better? Sure. They coached in an era before the Internet and when ESPN was one very new channel, not an ubiquitous sports enterprise. I never saw “real” soccer until late in high school. Finding new and current information and connecting with other coaches was more difficult then. However, after we developed an interest in the game, we could have used more technical and tactical instruction to improve our fundamentals and game understanding.

This is the need for coach education. Well-meaning coaches who want to develop their players, but who lack the time to search through the Internet or bookstores to decipher the good information from the bad. Leagues and governing bodies need to do the searching and sorting for the coaches.

While we need to appreciate our volunteer coaches, we also need to raise the expectations. Being a warm body should not be enough to coach youth sports. A 1-3-hour coach training should not be too much to expect, even from a volunteer. According to the Duracell commercial, something like 50-60% of firemen are volunteers: do they simply show up at a fire? They are volunteers, yet I assume that they go through training and are required to sustain some sort of fitness level as well as a working knowledge of firefighting procedures. Do our homes deserve greater protection and commitment than our children?

Leagues and governing bodies have a responsibility to create a convenient, painless coach development program for their volunteer coaches, and coaches – whether teachers or volunteers – have a responsibility to do more than show up on time. This isn’t about winning and losing games; it’s about creating great experiences for children, much like those that I was lucky to have as a child.

By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

The epidemic boils down to two issues: (1) Lack of education and dissemination of information to coaches and (2) the Peak by Friday mentality.

The female body differs from the male body, especially after puberty. These differences, according to most experts, affect or even cause the disparity of injury rates between males and females. To suggest otherwise is foolish based on what is known currently.

However, researchers have amassed plenty of evidence to suggest that anatomy is not the sole reason for the disparity. I am uninterested in the arguments of the male vs. female body because there is little that I can do to change someone’s anatomy. The other issues, however, can be impacted by training and skill development and therefore interest me.

Are injuries a result of poor coaching? Yes. Are they a result of poor parenting? Often. However, in most cases, these coaches and parents are not malicious. There is no intent to harm. There is ignorance. There is a void in the education of coaches, especially in terms of movement-related skills. As I wrote recently, basketball coaches, even at the NCAA or WNBA (or should I say especially at the NCAA and WNBA levels), are not movement experts.

Youth coaches typically volunteer their time and are not Coaches, but parents who work, raise children and coach as a hobby or to spend time with their sons or daughters.  Rather than blaming these coaches, as a semi-recent New York Times article appeared to imply, we need to cherish these parents who volunteer, as there would be far less opportunity for children, especially females, to play sports without the volunteer coaches. Rather than chastising these coaches, we need to nurture and provide them with resources. If we are to place blame, the blame should fall on the organizations who sponsor and generate income from the leagues, camps and tournaments that fail to nurture coaches and provide coaching resources.

At the high school level, we also have part-time coaches. They teach or work another job and coach for a small stipend. Even if they had the interest, the stipend they receive would barely cover the cost of attending a great conference to learn more (and I am not talking about Nike Clinics).

These are our coaches at the developmental levels: volunteers, amateurs and part-time coaches. However, these are the years of growth and development. The developmental years are the time when athletes develop practice habits, techniques, skills and mechanics. If these are developed incorrectly or inefficiently, these athletes must re-learn their habits, techniques or skills at a later age or they simply fall out of the competitive stream because they can no longer compensate for their deficiencies.

In the United States, our professional coaches, for the most part, coach at in the NCAA and WNBA. We should place higher demands on these coaches, as they earn an income commiserate with high expectations. However, to my knowledge, not one women’s college basketball coach attended the Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group conference despite it falling during a relatively dead period (first weekend of June). How many colleges are within a two-hour drive of Northeastern University? There were no fewer than three presentations directly related to ACL injury prevention, and several others that were relevant, yet nobody attended. Why? Because basketball coaches specialize in basketball. They are hired to win games, not to keep their players safe.

The second problem is that this mentality seeps into the lower levels, and our expectations for coaches at every level center on winning. Good coaches win; bad coaches lose. We cannot differentiate one’s coaching ability from their record.

Therefore, coaches take a Peak by Friday approach to their teams; they concentrate on the next game, not on their athletes’ development. If you ask most coaches to spend 10-15 per minutes at practice on movement skills – skills that enhance performance as well as reduce injury risk – they will say that they are too busy. No coach is fired because he or she has too many players suffer ACL injuries, but plenty are fired for losing too many games.

To make inroads into the ACL epidemic, and to improve the quality of coaching and play in general, we need to raise our expectations of our coaches. At the grassroots, recreation levels, this is difficult because most organizations are thankful to have anyone without a criminal record offer to coach. However, if this is our expectation when finding or recruiting new coaches, what should we expect? Finding coaches is often a difficult process, and volunteering for a youth team can be a thankless task as every parent in the stands suddenly knows more than the coach. However, what can leagues and organizations do to improve the coaching experience? When a league finds a great coach, how can it keep the coach rather than watching him or her leave when his or her daughter or son finish playing in the league? These are the questions that need to be asked.

When a league finds a great coach, why not offer him a position overseeing other coaches? As a volunteer position, he or she may not be able to invest many hours, but why not create a mentor system for experienced and novice coaches?

These questions do not address ACL injuries specifically. However, ACL injuries are a symptom of a larger problem. If we do not raise our expectations of leagues, and leagues fail to nurture and retain good coaches, how can we expect these leagues to implement the available neuromuscular training programs? If we do not address the Peak by Friday mentality first, how do we ensure the adherence to these programs once introduced?

Writing about ACL injuries is a hot-button topic now, so articles attract eyes, and eyes translate to dollars. Writing about coach education or the win-at-all-costs mentality lacks the same hotness. ACL injuries are the acute injury, but the coach education and preparedness is the chronic problem. When a player injures her ACL, the injury sparks new interest and articles. However, there is no event to spark the same interest in general coach training.

If we really want to make a difference, we need to start young. Sport coaches need to look beyond sport-specific skills to the general movement skills that form the foundation of all sports skills. With physical education cuts and a reduction in free, spontaneous play, sport coaches must fill the void and ensure the proper execution and training of these general skills.

Will this help win games? At 7 or 8 years-old, who cares?

These sport coaches need the tools to change their approach, and developing and disseminating these tools fall to the organizations and leagues. I am amazed that leagues do employ a Technical Director or some other position to oversee the quality of the coaching. In Europe, I was the Head Coach of a professional team, but in that capacity, I was also in charge of the underage coaches. We met about philosophy and drills and teaching concepts. I attended practices.

Of course, this was a professional position – I was doing my job. However, why is there no quality control? On TV, I hear advertisements for the Jr. Jazz and their 10,000 players. If you raise the cost of the league $3, you could pay a Technical Director $30,000/year to attend practices, lead clinics, mentor coaches, identify mentor coaches, etc. What if each league gave a Coach of the Year award based not on record, but a professional’s objective evaluation of the coach’s teaching style, feedback, learning environment, etc.?

These ideas appear impossible to implement. Why? The reason that leagues do not implement these ideas is because they derive no benefit. Parents are not choosing leagues based on the coach training that the coaches receive. Parents generally do not know what to look for or what questions to ask. Leagues thrive based on marketing like most businesses. If people thought critically about their beverage choices, would Coke be a thriving international company? No. Instead, we buy the easiest product to find, the one with which we are most familiar, regardless of its effect on our health.

We make the same choices when we choose leagues, teams, etc. Since familiarity trumps effectiveness in our choices, leagues derive no benefit from adding expenditures to improve the league.

Youth sports is a business. Ultimately, parents dictate the business through their choices. Business will chase the dollars. If parents insist on quality coaching, leagues that can demonstrate the quality of their coaching through certifications, mentorships, etc. will derive benefit from these efforts.

What if a league, rather than charging coaches to attend a Saturday clinic or asking them to volunteer more of their time to attend the clinic, paid the coaches to attend or gave the coaches free gear or products to assist with their coaching? Would more coaches be interested in coaching clinics if they were paid to attend or given gifts for attending? Rather than creating another impediment in finding coaches, use the clinics as a reward for volunteering. Change the narrative.

Eventually, when we see some of these changes implemented with recreation leagues, YMCAs, middle school leagues, AAU, NJB, BCI, etc., we will create the environment where the neuromuscular training programs which have been shown to be effective in reducing the incident rate of ACL injuries can have an effect. Before we shift the philosophy or mentality of the coaches and establish long term development and coach preparedness as the expectation not the exception, these neuromuscular training programs will remain sporadic and the injury rate will remain the same.

YBCA tentatively has scheduled a clinic on October 11 at the University of Utah. More information to follow.

 By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

Author Timothy Gallwey (1974) argues that this is the natural learning process. Falling is a part of the process, and it is not good or bad. The natural learning process removes the evaluative aspect. The child did not know that he made a mistake. One minute he was running; then he wasn’t. Then he was running again. He did not judge himself or worry about falling. The fall did not cause embarrassment. In his mind, there was no evaluation, no mistake.

The motive to avoid failure is socially learnt between the ages of 5 and 9 (Sagar et al., 2007) as we become aware of the evaluations and criticisms of others. Conroy (2003) found that the description of one’s treatment by his or her mother between the ages of 5 and 10 significantly predicted his or her fear of failure scores. Coincidentally, we do a majority of our learning before we reach five years old when this judgment begins to set in.

Think back to when you learned to walk; if your prefrontal cortex was developed fully, you may never have learned. Your mind would have thought about the mistake, worried about others’ judgment, and tried to control the movement. You would not have bounced up again as if nothing happened, like the little boy. As Gallwey explains, “The first skill to learn is the art of letting go the human inclination to judge ourselves and our performance as either good or bad.”

Fear is a normal reaction to a real or imagined threat (Sagar et al., 2007). Fear of failure is the fear of the consequences of the failure (Conroy, 2003), especially an anticipatory shame and humiliation associated with failure (Conroy & Kaye, 2003). The fear of failure in young athletes stems from (1) a fear of shame or embarrassment; (2) not being good enough; or (3) letting down parents or coaches.

When a child makes a mistake, where is the first place that he or she looks? The coach or the parent. Why? The fear of letting down their coach or parent, and the fear of being take out of the game (a sign of not being good enough).

How can we change this behavior? FF is a learned habit. “Repeated emotional responses and learned coping strategies are mental habits,” (Hanin, 186). How do we, as coaches, break this habit? As the child illustrated, we possessed this skill. Unfortunately, like with any skill, athletes often relapse to old strategies, even after learning new ways to cope.

In The Art of Possibility, Benjamin Zander writes about an orchestra rehearsal. Someone makes a mistake, and he stops and says, “How fascinating!” There was no judgment or negative reaction. If there is no judgment or negative consequence, there is no shame or sense of not being good enough or letting down of others to fear.

Smith and Smoll (1997) studied the coaching behaviors of youth baseball coaches and found that punitive and critical comments comprised only 1.5% of the behaviors coded, but these behaviors correlated more strongly with children’s attitudes than any behavior. Smith and Smoll (1997) found that coaches were “blissfully unaware” of their behaviors and children’s perceptions of the way they were coached were more accurate than the coach’s perceptions of their own coaching (p. 18).

Smith and Smoll (1997) found that the “most important factor determining outcomes is the manner in which this important social learning situation [youth sports] is structured and supervised by the adults” (p. 17). Smith and Smoll’s (1997) study showed a 26% dropout rate among players with the control group coaches, and only a 5% dropout rate among the players from the intervention group who received coach instruction. One principle in Smith’s and Smoll’s (1997) intervention was to strongly discourage punitive and hostile responses, as they have been shown to create a fear of failure in athletes. Smith and Smoll (1997) suggest that while many volunteer coaches are competent with their technical knowledge of the sport, few have any formal training in creating a healthy psychological environment for youngsters.

In a classroom study, Robert and Evelyn Kirkhart (1972) found that children thrived when the ratio of positive comments to negative comments was 5:1. However, as the positive to negative ratio sank to 2:1 and 1:1, their attitude was “despairing.” In a study of married couples, Gottman (1994) found that marriages were more stable if there were five times as many positive feelings and interactions between husband and wife as there were negative. This concept – termed the “Magic Ratio” – has been adapted into sports through the Positive Coaching Alliance.

This does not mean that instructors cannot instruct. In a follow-up on the 30th anniversary of their landmark study of John Wooden’s teaching techniques, Gallimore and Tharp (2004) asked Wooden about his lack of positive praises. In their study, about 75% of Wooden’s comments were information about the proper way to do something, while only 6% were categorized as praising. When asked, Wooden responded, “I believe that is the positive approach. I believe in the positive approach. Always have, (p. 128). The goal is to make the instructors aware and to reduce the blaming, while improving the affirming and the information-richness.

For athletes who have a fear of failure, coaches can use Carol Dweck’s (2006) concept of Mindset to re-shape the player’s thinking to a Growth Mindset, as opposed to a Fixed Mindset. In Dweck’s (2006) theory, people attribute their failure or success to innate talents which are fixed or to their effort, which can grow or expand their ability. Those who attribute failure to a fixed lack of talent are de-motivated by mistakes and fear failure because it suggests that they are not good enough. However, when they can alter their perceptions and see how their effort affects their performance, mistakes become a part of the learning process.  A learning-goal orientation (Growth Mindset) positivelyaffects effort, task choice, and performance (Duda, 1987) and is linked to lower levels of tension and worry about performance (Wolf, 1998). An outcome or ego orientation (Fixed mindset) leads to a greater sense of pressure, tension, and worry (Roeser, 1996), three states associated with the fear of failure (Dunn & Dunn, 2001).

By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

So, are coach education programs meaningful? I received this comment today via email from Coach Townsend, a varsity girls’ basketball coach in Arizona:

The information alone is great. You would have to attend multiple clinics, classes or read multiple books to get all of the information that is presented in this curriculum at once.

I was amazed with the all of the information that was presented as well as the fact that it was free to take the course and be certified.  I had to pay over $30 to take the NFHS one that I didn’t learn half as much with and it took 8 hours to complete.  Overall, I really feel that any basketball coach would benefit from taking this course!

For someone with an audacious nickname like the “Special One,” he recognizes the long process of becoming a head coach:

“The first step was to study, the next step was to develop young players and the third step was to work alongside a big coach at a pro level. I repeat, the process was step by step.”

Mourinho attended a sports university where he studied and then moved to Scotland to pursue the FA’s Coaching Courses. He started his coaching with U16s.

To improve basketball coaching, we need to alter our perceptions of what it takes to be a good coach. This week, after the fallout from the Hanley Ramirez incident in Florida, Dime Magazine asked if former professional players make better professional coaches. To me, too many former players feel entitled to coaching positions and do not want to engage in a process similar to Mourinho’s. Scottie Pippen famously said that he only wanted to coach the Chicago Bulls, and he felt that his playing career prepared him to step in as the Head Coach without any coaching experience at any level. He may be right. However, his attitude toward coaching suggests that the profession is easy and requires little work or study. I find that insulting.

If the greatest soccer coach on the planet believes in the process starting with studying the the game, the sports science and the coaching methodology and then moving to coaching young players before moving to the professional level as an assistant, why should we expect anything less of our basketball coaches?

Mourinho talks about the different philosophies that he learned during the FA Coaching Course:

“Your methods made me think about methodology in a different way. The way that you used small-sided games to develop technical, tactical and fitness elements – a global view of coaching.”

Many coaches rely on their playing experience to create their own coaching philosophy, so the ideas and practices of past generations are passed to future generations and many practices go unchallenged. Despite no research to suggest that static stretching before basketball reduces injuries or improves performance, most teams continue to static stretch before practice and games. It is part of the basketball culture that is passed down from generation to generation because coaches accept its validity without asking about its efficacy. Unless a coach pursues outside information, how does he change his philosophy and adopt more up to date training principles?

Small-sided games are a valuable tool for basketball development as well, yet many coaches run laps around the track for fitness or use 5v0 drills to teach offensive concepts. Why not use small-sided games? Why do eight and nine-year-olds play full-court, 5v5 games just like professional players? Why not teach the game step-by-step?

Mourinho clearly gets coaching. He says that he tells youngsters who are trying to follow him:

“Don’t accept what I tell you as pure truth.”

Mourinho learned from some of the best minds in soccer, like his opponent this weekend in Louis Van Gaal as well as Bobby Robson, yet he used these experiences to help formulate his own philosophy. He did not copy their methods or ideas. He asked questions. He adopted and adapted. Too many young coaches copy their mentors blindly without questioning methods and methodology or searching for the most effective way. If it was good enough for them as a player, it is good enough for their players – however, don’t we tell players that good enough is never good enough? That good is the enemy of great? Why should a coach accept good enough when he does not accept good enough from his players?

Mourinho professes a global approach to coaching, rather than divide all aspects of the game into segments.

“My fitness coach, for example, works with me on the tactical systems, advising on time, distance, and space.”

In basketball, the strength & conditioning coach is like a separate entity. I know several college coaches who ignore their strength coaches’ recommendations and there is little to no continuity or integration between fitness training and skill development or tactical training. Basketball players now seem to go to a strength coach/personal trainer for their physical development, a shooting coach/skill instructor for the on-court skill development and their team coach for their tactical development. There is little to no integration. Even at the college level where a head coach oversees all aspects, most coaches do individual workouts where they address skill deficiencies and use practice time for team concepts and strategy. There is little integration between fitness, skill development and tactical development.

Mourinho says:

I want to develop tactical aspects of the game: how to press, when to press, transitions, ball possession, positional play. After that, other things come – the physical and psychological aspects are part of the exercises.

Using small-sided games enables a basketball coach to follow a similar philosophy (the foundation of Blitz Basketball) and use a global approach to team, fitness and skill development.

Mourinho believes that he has a flexible management style, but that he is very demanding in training. He understands that different situations call for different tactics. With youth and high school teams, some timeouts and half-times need a calm and reassuring coach, while other times the coach needs to motivate or light a fire under the players.

Mourinho is indeed special. He understands coaching as a profession and as a passion, not just as a disposable job like Pippen. He appreciates the growth of a coach and the process to become a good (great) coach. Unfortunately, in the United States, we rarely see this same type of process, as most move directly from playing to assisting to head coaching without the first two stages. If we value coaching, and player development, we need to create this process of coach development to raise the standard of coaching at every level.

By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development and Director of Coaching for the Playmakers Basketball Development League.

From Dr. Michael Yessis’ Secrets of Soviet Sports Fitness & Training:

The development of coaches in the Soviet Union is a scientific, well-planned undertaking. Unlike the U.S., where colleges turn out physical education teachers – some of whom become coaches without any additional spcialized training – the U.S.S.R. has developed programs designed specifically to tranform young men and women into skilled athletic instructors. Space in these programs is limited, and competition for admittance is keen. All applicants must be serious athletes themselves, and they are required to take rigorous four-day entrance exams in subjects ranging from physics and chemistryto biology and mathematics. Those who make the grade then undergo four to five years of a tough, scientifically oriented curriculum in one of the country’s physical culture institutes, which culminates with academic examinations that last for days.

The men and women who move successfully through this rigorous program become high-level coaches; those who don’t become teachers…coaching is viewed as a career that requires special training and education. Every five years, the coaches return to the physical culture institutes for a semester to receive refresher courses.