Some youth academies worry about winning, we worry about education. You see a kid who lifts his head up, who plays the pass first time, pum, and you think, ‘Yep, he’ll do.’ Bring him in, coach him. Our model was imposed by [Johan] Cruyff; it’s an Ajax model. It’s all about rondos [piggy in the middle]. Rondo, rondo, rondo. Every. Single. Day. It’s the best exercise there is. You learn responsibility and not to lose the ball. If you lose the ball, you go in the middle. Pum-pum-pum-pum, always one touch. If you go in the middle, it’s humiliating, the rest applaud and laugh at you.

Unfortunately, many youth coaches seem to avoid these three things, which leads to a breakdown in the talent development process.

First, we have a Peak by Friday mentality where winning takes precedence over education (development). Rather than concentrate on developing skills, coaches focus on game preparation for the next game. Coaches and leagues use a short-term mentality.

Second, many coaches rely on constant or block practice. An example of block practice is doing one skill repeatedly with little to no variation. For instance, a team could run through its offense 5v0 for 20-25 straight repetitions to memorize the offense. Another example is sending players to the free throw line to shoot 10 straight free throws as shooting practice. Block practice leads to immediate practice performance improvement, but does not transfer well to games. Block practice appears organized and well-planned, which is how we imagine good practices. However, if the practice does not transfer to the games, is it a good practice?

Finally, we worry so much about children’s self-esteen that we have removed many traditional games and drills because we fear that a child will feel ostracized if he loses at a practice game. We have turned failure into such a negative that we must avoid it at all costs, which robs players and children of important learning opportunities.

To improve our developmental environment, we need to remember these three things: development before winning; contextual interference to improve learning and transfer; and more safe competition where players can fail and learn from mistakes.

Youth sports should emphasize fun, development and learning. If professional athletes have this much fun in training, why aren’t 10-year-olds?

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

1. Fun
2. Skill development
3. Excitement and personal challenge
4. Achievement and status
5. Fitness
6. Energy or tension release
7. Friendship

If fun is the primary motivator for sports participation, and sports participation is an important factor in overall physical activity and health, creating fun experiences, especially initially, is an important means for increasing physical activity and improving health.

Those who participate in organized activities show higher rates of moderate-intensity and moderate-frequency physical activity (Santos, et al). Unfortunately, children today do not participate as often or as intensely in unorganized physical activities as in previous generations, which increases the importance of organized sports leagues and programs. Participation in community sports also has a positive correlation to increased physical activity (Sallis, et. al).

Those from a higher socio-economic status participate in more organized activities (Santos, et al), likely due to an ability to afford the fees of organized leagues, teams and clubs. Access to facilities has correlated positively with increased physical activity (Sallis, et al.), yet not everyone has equal access to facilities. Affluent students participate in a wider range of activities with greater participation rates than do those from poorer families (Wright et al).

For poorer students, school physical education and school sports may be more important for overall physical activity than for middle-class or affluent students because of access to equipment and facilities (Wright et al) which further underscores the detrimental effects of cutting or reducing physical education classes and after-school sports activities. Only 49% of students in high school are enrolled in physical education, and only 27% attend P.E. daily (Aaron, et al).

Since the decline of physical activity is pronounced as students move from middle school to high school (Santos, et al) with an “age-related decline of 26% to 37% in total physical activity during adolescence” (Aaron, et al), school sports that cut participants reduce opportunities for physical activity.

Students who are physically inactive in middle school are very unlikely to initiate an activity in high school (Aaron, et al), which highlights the importance of sports participation in elementary and middle school.

When those who have not participated in organized sports were surveyed, 75% of the children said they wanted to play but felt that they lacked the skills or talent (Chambers). Therefore, competitive sports which cut athletes may not only limit participation, but prevent some from trying out.

Playmakers Basketball Development Leagues are designed to be less expensive than typical youth basketball leagues and all inclusive: there are no cuts. PBDLs emphasize fun and skill development, the top two motivators for youth sports participation. While many schools cut sports and reduce physical education, PBDLs strive to provide a safe environment for players of all levels to learn and develop skills, thus giving more children the confidence to participate in basketball, whether on school teams or just in pick-up games for fun.

• Aaron D.J., Storti K.L., Robertson R.J., Kriska A.M., LaPorte R.E. Longitudinal study of the number and choice of leisure time physical activities from mid to late adolescence: implication for school curricula and community recreation programs. Arch Pediatric Adolescent Med. 2002;156: 1075–1080.
• Chambers, S. T. (1991). Factors affecting elementary school student’s participation in sports. Elementary School Journal, 91(5), 413-419.
• Gould, D., Feltz, D., & Weiss, M. (1985). Motives for participating in competitive youth swimming. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 16, 126-140.
• Sallis J.F., Prochaska J.J., Taylor W.C.: A review of correlates of physical activity of children and adolescents. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. 2000, 32:963–975.
• Santos, M. P., C. Esculcus, and J. Mota. The relationship between socioeconomic status and adolescents’ organized and non-organized physical activities. Pediatric Exercise Science.16:210 –218, 2004.
• Wright, J., MacDonald, D. & Groom, L. (2003) Physical activity and young people: Beyond participation. Sport Education and Society. 8(1), 17-34.

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

I must admit that I am biased against big camps. I run basketball camps, but even this week, while running a camp in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, I felt that we had too many players of disparate abilities to create a great camp. We made it work, the players improved and had fun, but it was far from my ideal learning environment.

With a young group, our focus this week was basic technical skills (dribbling, passing, pivoting, shooting, individual defense and lay-ups) and beginning tactical skills (give-and-gos and pick-and-rolls).

Kobe’s Camp, however, appears to focus on running different offenses:

The kids will be taught the flex offense, the Princeton offense, and of course, the famed triangle offense, among many other things. “It doesn’t really matter what age group they are, these kids can learn these things — especially at that age, because they’re sponges,” Bryant said.

Really? I agree that children are sponges and learn things quickly, especially when the instructions and skills are age-appropriate. However, I do not see how teaching the Flex offense to eight-year-olds is age-appropriate.

I worked a camp where every coach had to teach the same generic pass-and-screen away offense. It took all week to get players to follow directions and pass and screen away. Every team practice was spent memorizing the offense. However, if the players did not run the same offense with their teams at home, did all this practice time transfer to improved performance?

When I run camps, I teach general skills. Rather than learning the Flex offense or the Princeton offense, I teach players how to use a screen, how to make a backdoor cut or how to use a dribble hand-off. At my camp in Idaho two weeks ago, we learned all these skills. Through the six-week Playmakers Basketball Development League, players learn all these skills in general ways, not specific to one offense.

Now, this week, I used drills that I would use with a Flex offense team. Some of the girls at the camp run the Flex with their team, so I adjusted some of our general shooting drills to mimic cuts in the Flex, so they practiced the type of shots that they get with their team. However, the tactical instructions remained general: the goal was to learn how to read and use a screen in any offense, not in one specific offense.

When I was young, we ran the Flex. We set the cross screen and received the down screen to cut to the elbow. There was no deviation. Without a shot clock, we turned over the offense time after time until we got a lay-up or elbow jump shot.

When we moved to high school, we no longer ran the Flex. Now we memorized a new offense. Through these years of playing, we never learned to curl off a screen or flare off the screen or cut backdoor based on the defense; instead, we memorized where to run in a particular offense. If the shot was not open in the Flex, rather than flare because the defender went top-side, ball-side over the screen, we caught and waited for the next cutter or we re-screened if we were not open.

There is nothing wrong with the Flex offense or the Princeton offense, and there is nothing inherently wrong with teaching an offense at a camp. However, in the limited learning time available, how do you want to appropriate your time? Is teaching an offense that the players may never run again the best use of valuable time? Is it the most fun or inspiring use of time?

I try to teach to the age group. With younger players and beginners this week (10-14 primarily with a few 15 and 16-year-olds), the focus was fun and basics. We played dribble tag and speed tag every day. Why? The games are fun and with beginner players, these types of games improve their dribbling more than learning moves and doing more advanced drills. They learn naturally, one of Kobe’s emphases:

“Fun. I want them to have a good time,” Bryant said. “That’s where sports start. I want them to enjoy themselves, and not get bogged down by this or that. These kids are going to learn a lot of things at this camp — they’re going to learn them without knowing that they’re learning them, and they’re going to have a good time doing it.”

I agree completely with the attitude. We played tag because it kept the entire camp involved, is fun and develops skills without a lot of instruction.

We also spent time on lay-ups. We did speed lay-ups, power lay-ups, lay-ups off a pass, lay-ups off a catch, etc. We did a progression into the “Rondo,” and also learned the “Rondo Up-and-Under.” There was a 12-year-old who has never played in a competitive game before (from a remote town) who used the Rondo to create a shot in a 5v5 scrimmage on the last day to cheers from other campers.

We went through a defensive progression to learn to defend the ball and played lots of 1v1. We shot every day, going through the first three stages from 180 Shooter: 5 Steps to Shooting 90% from the Free Throw Line, 50% from the floor and 40% from the 3-pt line.

We played a lot of 3v3 and 4v4 half and full-court scrimmages to five baskets. I prefer short games with a definitive end to increase competitiveness. Also, short games allow you to change teams if the teams are unbalanced. When I worked bigger camps, each coach had a team of 8-10 players and the teams remained the same all week, even if the teams were unbalanced. We also played 30-minute games, which meant half the camp sat on the bench and watched (or sometimes more than half the camp if there were not enough courts to keep all the teams playing at once).

I usually play cut-throat at camp, so players are generally out for no more than 30 seconds in a half-court game and a minute or two in a full-court game. That keeps all the players engaged. Also, because no coach coaches a specific team or group of players, but assists everyone, the coach’s egos do not get in the way of helping the players. No coach is playing to win. Along the same lines, we did not spend time memorizing offenses. Instead, our goal is to teach general skills that players can apply to their teams at home regardless of the system that their coach employs.

Like all coaches, I have my biases. I am biased toward small-sided games, active drills and fun games that engage players while developing a number of basic, general skills. I dislike long lines and players sitting out.

While offenses taught properly can develop basic skills, is it the best way? Is playing 5v5 games with 8-10-year-old players the best way to develop their athletic, technical and tactical skills?

If you have more thoughts on camps and skill development, please join the discussion in the forum.

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

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In Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, he quotes British management scholar David Collinson about the work climate at Ford Motor Company in the 1930′s and 40′s:

“In 1940 John Gallo was sacked because he was ‘caught in the act of smiling,’ after having committed an earlier breach of ‘laughing with the other fellows,’ and ‘slowing down the line maybe half a minute.’ This tight managerial discipline reflected the overall philosophy of Henry Ford, who stated that ‘When we are at work we out to be at work. When we are at play we out to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two.’”

Pink continues and uses Southwest Airlines mission statement which says:

“People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it.”

Do you approach practice like Ford Motor Company, separating play and work or do you believe in SWA’s approach where people accomplish more when they are having fun? Should you basketball practices be fun? Do coaches and leagues eliminate play too early in players’ development? Is it possible to have fun and develop good players and teams?

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

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The A.D. joked with another coach on campus about our post-season practice. The coached asked, and I said that it was going to be a fun practice, basically King of the Court for an hour.

The coach made a remark about fun at practice, saying something to the effect of “Why are you making practice fun? I try not to make practice fun.”

I do not understand this attitude. There is likely a reason that the school finished without a J.V. team last season – it was not fun. This season, when we were losing games during the pre-season schedule, we were adding players. We went from 8 players on the day that we split varsity and junior varsity to 12 players at season’s end. Therefore, one cannot blame all the quitting on the losing.

We were more competitive than last season, and the players had more fun. Isn’t that the goal of sports and coaching? I am far from the most technical volleyball coach, but the majority of the players on the team improved, including the three players who had never played before. We did not do a lot of hard drills. We spent the majority of practice playing in different game situations. I would describe our practices as easy. However, we were a couple breaks away from winning the league championship (we were an inch away from an ace on game point in a game that would have created a three-way tie for the championship with us holding the tie-breaker).

I do not understand the mentality of intentionally making high school sports not fun. If I was a more technical volleyball coach, my team would have been more prepared and I would have done a greater variety of drills and a little more specific teaching, rather than trying to teach based on my instincts from when I play.

In basketball, I am a far more technical and knowledgeable coach, and I keep the practices fun at the high school level. We won the league championship this season AND every girl really enjoyed the season. Winning and fun are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to enjoy practice, work hard and improve at the same time.

It makes no sense to take the fun out of playing a sport on purpose.

By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.

Coaches make the same mistake. Many coaches worry about motivating their players. However, in most cases, players choose to play basketball. It is not homework or Algebra. Basketball is an inherently fun activity. Unfortunately, many coaches intentionally eliminate the fun from basketball in an attempt to meet some higher goal.

Sirota, et al. suggest that workers bring three goals to work and players’ goals differ very little:

• Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
• Achievement: To be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.
• Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.

When players lose motivation, often one of these three things is the issue. Often, when a player receives less playing time, he may lose motivation. Coaches think the player is sulking because he does not play and believe that the player should think about the team first.

However, the issue often is not the playing time. Instead, some players feel that they did not have a fair chance to earn playing time, which affects their motivation. I coached two de-motivated players several years ago. I spoke to them at the beginning of the year and explained that I was a new coach and they had a new opportunity. I set the expectations for them to meet in order to earn playing time and stayed true to my promise when they met the expectations. The de-motivated players became the hardest workers on the team because they felt like they controlled their own destiny, rather than feeling like they were in a hopeless situation where it never mattered what they did.

Some players lose motivation because they equate a lack of playing time with a lack of accomplishment. With a player in this situation, create small goals for the player and give them an important role on the team. To keep younger players interested on the bench, I have had players watch for certain things. At a timeout, they tell the starters that one player is left-handed or during the action, they call out screens from the sideline. They contribute to the success of the team even though they do not play as much.

Finally, some players feel like they are less a part of the team if they do not play. In these situations, the coach needs to include the player and point out their contributions to the team, even if those contributions consist solely of working hard in practice to prepare the starters for the game.

Sirota, et al. provide eight ideas to use to maintain your players’ motivation:

1. Instill an inspiring purpose.
2. Provide recognition.
3. Be an expediter for your employees.
4. Coach your employees for improvement.
5. Communicate fully.
6. Face up to poor performance.
7. Promote teamwork.
8. Listen and involve.

By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

This seems to be the general consensus. Competitive coaches look at fun as a bad word, and often appear to go out of their way to make the game not fun.

Anson Dorrance, the Head Women’s Soccer Coach at the University of North Carolina and winner of 18 NCAA Championships and 94% of his games, does not view fun as a bad word.

“Our underlying theme has always got to be that there are a billion people in China who don’t even know we’re playing soccer today, so let’s relax and enjoy ourselves because this isn’t the end of the world.”

Is his program less successful because he is not ultra-serious?

Former assistant coach Bill Steffen says, “When people ask me, ‘What do you remember most about working at UNC?’ The first word that comes to my mind isn’t winning or training or tradition, it is fun.”

Why do coaches think that always being a hard-ass is the best way to inspire players to perform their best? Why can’t the game be fun?

Last week, I attended a college game with a couple coaches who I helped when I coached during college. We talked about the first time we went to an AAU National Championship Tournament and the rules that the coaches imposed on the players, especially no swimming. Coaches and parents were concerned about conserving energy for the next day’s game. The girls were 10-years-old.

The second time that the coach went to Nationals, he eased up on the rules. He also finished second in the nation. Why not allow players to swim after a game? The girls wanted to socialize and have fun. Isn’t that why parents sign up their kids for sports in the first place?

Adds [UNC athletic department physician Bill] Prentice: “I’ve been around athletics all my life, and I have never seen any other situation like this. I used to sit there and think, “How [in the world] do these guys get away with this?’ Then one day you realize that maybe everybody else is doing it wrong. A lot of the other coaches have forgotten that it’s supposed to be fun. Maybe Anson and Dino have figured out that one of the keys to being successful is to treat the sport the way it was intended to be played. It is just a … game.”

It has been determined that players who seek to avoid failure will avoid achievement-oriented behavior, participate in situations only if assured of success, develop various coping or ‘face-saving’ behavior to pre-explain their failure, exhibit lower effort in practice or game situations, and only increase effort if the team is successful (wins) (Cratty 1983).

Obviously, this does not lead to enhanced performance. The author suggests that the older players may have developed this negative type of motivation due to the coaching:

The avoidance of failure may be the result of the significant number of situations in which the athlete has been exposed to coaches who exhibit command-style techniques. Command-style coaches not only make the majority of decisions in an athletic situation, but also create an environment in which failure is more threatening to the athlete than success is rewarding. The longer players remain in that situation, the more they are apt to exhibit many of these counterproductive characteristics (Stewart and Meyers).

In Developing Game Intelligence, Horst Wein writes:

This rigid and authoritarian coaching style does not develop intelligent players with awareness and responsibility. To get more intelligent players on the pitch in the future, coaches need to stimulate more and instruct less.

To develop better players who make better decisions and to enhance motivation, coaches need to move away from the command coaching style.

Players will never reach an elite level if their motivation to succeed is stifled. Players who play with fear will never reach their maximum performance.

The only way to develop is to make mistakes. Without mistakes, there is no growth or development; the player simply does what he can already do. Nobody develops without bumps in the road.

Coaches should understand that youth athletes:

1. are best motivated when they believe personal success is self-determined by their skills and performance;
2. prolong their performance when internally motivated;
3. Do NOT trivialize the importance of fun…regardless of age.

By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

A writer friend of mine was trying to concentrate on writing when some school-age children started up a hilarious, noisy game below his window. He asked them to leave. Since he was breaking up what clearly seemed a delightful scene, he paid them each a quarter for doing so. The next day they came back and caused the same annoyance; again, he paid them to leave. This routine continued for over a week, until one day my friend found he was out of quarters, and he suffered through the racket as best he could. He discovered that he could work despite the disturbance, and thence he gave no more quarters. The children stopped coming. Two weeks later he ran into one of them at the market and asked why he and his friends no longer came around. The child replied, “What do you think, we’re going to come for nothing?”

Unfortunately, the story describes the effects of organized youth sports for many players. Children play basketball for fun, shooting around with friends, playing pick-up games, and trying new moves. Because of their interest, their parents sign up for a youth league believing that the organization and structure will enhance their enjoyment of the activity.

The organization changes the activity just as the quarters changed the activity for the children. In organized leagues, winning and competition take precedence over playing and enjoyment. The motivation shifts from play for the sake of play to practice to prepare for a game.

When this shift occurs too early, the game loses its fun for some players. They depend on the external rewards – winning, playing time, an ice cream cone for making a basket – to maintain their motivation rather than playing because they love to play.

While some players quit when these external rewards disappear or fail to increase, others persist for various reasons. However, without the internal motivation, they will never maximize their talent or love the activity. As Daniel Pink says, players thrive in an environment of “autonomy, mastery and purpose.”

When the game becomes focused on results, rather than learning; and the coach takes control of the activity rather than empowering his players; and the practice loses meaning to the players, the effort, enjoyment and improvement diminish.

That does not mean that coaches should ignore discipline, drills or hard work. However, it does mean that coaches and parents should be mindful of their approach and their words (rewarding effort, not just performance), and coaches should strive for an environment of “autonomy, mastery and purpose.”

Stanford University professor Bob Sutton linked to an interview with Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz who argues that you learn more from your bad managers than your good managers.

Bartz says:

I also think people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager…When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine.

When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?”

Sutton highlights the point about noticing:

The implication is that when things are going great, you don’t engage in very deep cognition about them, because little is happening to give you pause or upset you. In fact, this point is consistent with research on cognition and emotion suggesting that people in good moods do not engage in as much mindfulness,deep thought, or self-doubt as people in bad moods.

When you play for a good coach, therefore, you do not notice the reasons why you like playing for the coach. Everything seems good. Therefore, you try and copy the coach, but oftentimes you fail to copy the parts that made the good coach a good coach.

For instance, I played for my father for years and consider him a great coach. However, technically-speaking, I run practices almost completely opposite of his practices. We never scrimmaged, we ran the Flex and we had a very structured press break. I use games to teach almost every skill, prefer motion offenses and do not use a press break.

I think he was a great coach because he created an environment free of fear, and all the players knew that he cared about them as more than just players. I do not remember exactly how he accomplished this – I cannot remember if he spoke to each player personally during each practice or if he took the players who played less to the side and gave them goals to earn playing time.

On the other hand, I have used experiences that I did not like as a player and as an assistant coach to shape my coaching philosophies. I paid attention to the things that I disliked and tried to change them as a coach.

A couple years ago, I read an article about John Gagliardi, a football coach at St. John’s University in Minnesota:

Who wouldn’t want to show up for practice, when Gagliardi has basically eliminated all the things football players traditionally don’t like about it? There is no calisthenics or lap running, and no drills designed to build agility or quickness. There isn’t even any tackling — instead, the Johnnies line up 11 on 11 and play touch football for 90 minutes, the way most of them have since they were little kids tossing around footballs in their backyards. And if you happen to mess up, don’t sweat it — Gagliardi isn’t likely to get up in your grill.

“You don’t chew ‘em out, you don’t get on their tail all the time,” he tells me. “I think what drives most people away from things is not the physical abuse, but the mental abuse.”

Of course, by traditional football standards, Gagliardi’s approach to motivation is pure heresy. But looked at another way, it makes perfect sense, because he has essentially created a football program powered not by his own threats or intimidation or screaming, but by the players’ natural passion for football.

It makes a lot of sense. Learn from the things/coaches that you do not like and do not repeat the mistakes.

By Brian McCormick
Founder, 180 Shooter