Coaching Youth Hoops (Youth Basketball Coach)

TeachHoops.com SportsConflictLab.com: Bill Taylor's company, teaching conflict skills to coaches, administrators, and parents. Managing Sports Conflict by Bill Taylor: available at SportsConflictLab.com, from Coaches Choice, or on Amazon. NukeHydration.com: clean sports hydration with no caffeine. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order. CoachingYouthHoops.com: full season practice plans by age, with videos and images for every drill and play. Part 2 of Coach Bill's conversation with Bill Taylor of Sports Conflict Lab, author of Managing Sports Conflict. This time Coach Bill puts him in the hot seat with the situations youth coaches actually face, and asks what he believes now that the championship winning version of himself would have flat out rejected. The playing time question A player walks up and asks, "Why am I not getting more playing time?" Plenty of coaches get angry and shut it down. Bill Taylor says addressing it is in the coach's own best interest. There are almost always things the player can do better. Talk about practice habits, effort, strength training, and ask questions. It is not a guarantee of minutes, but it gives the kid a path, which makes them a better player and your team better. Shut them down and they are left with unmet expectations and no way through. And you have taught them the wrong lesson: avoid conflict, or you will get yelled at. Sports, he says, may be the most amazing environment there is for developing people. We do not get to play forever, but we use what we learned for the rest of our lives. Hot seat: "Why did my daughter only play four minutes?" You just lost, and a parent catches you on the way out of the gym. Not the time. Many programs use a 24 hour rule, and there should always be a cooling off period, for coaches and for parents in the car ride home. Even if you have no policy yet, make it right there. Tell them you are happy to talk, nothing will change in the next 24 hours, and schedule a specific time tomorrow. Scheduling it is the key, because it tells them they will not be blown off. Hot seat: "Coach doesn't like me" A twelve year old gets in the car and says it. The worst thing mom can say is anything that supports the idea. The best thing is a question: why do you think that? Bill Taylor has watched his own kids decide someone did not like them, only for that person to become their biggest advocate. He frames it as victim or hero. A victim blames and gives up control. A hero asks, what can I do about it? If the reason is effort, can you increase your effort? And worst case, go talk to the coach, who will probably say, I don't dislike you at all. Hot seat: an assistant in the head coach's face Middle of a game, parents in the stands, players on the bench. Again, this is not the time or place. The head coach shuts it down and addresses it later, and that later conversation may decide whether the relationship continues. Then ask the questions. Why were you upset? Was that appropriate? How did it look to everyone watching? How does it help the kids, or your own career? Questions pull someone out of emotion and back into logic. A policy helps here too, because people can be reminded there is a process they are not following. Should kids see conflict? Some parents say it is healthy for kids to see conflict. Bill Taylor says conflict done right builds trust, communication, accountability, and clearer expectations. Yelling and name calling is not that, and it teaches nothing useful. Even good conflict resolution rarely needs an audience. Things get misread, and people end up judging others by their worst moments, which are not who they really are. What the old Bill Taylor would have rejected The old Bill Taylor believed conflict was bad and had to be squashed. Now he knows two things. First, conflict is guaranteed in every relationship. Death, taxes, and conflict. Second, it is a necessary tool for building better relationships. His mind was blown on day one of his master's program, wondering why conflict skills are not taught to elementary kids, since your success and enjoyment in life depend so heavily on them. Looking back at the training dispute that started it all, he would have realized it could not really be about the training. The athletes had done that work and seen the results. Something else was going on below the line, including some outside influence he did not discover until much later. Asking questions would have shown he cared, taught him more about his athletes, and maybe uncovered the real issue without blowing up the program. The book Coach Bill's favorite part of Managing Sports Conflict is that it reads like a manual. Bill Taylor's first draft took nine months and was so long that he admits he would never have read it himself as a college coach working 60 to 80 hours a week. So he rebuilt it to be short and immediately usable, built around five core tools, easy to reread and come back to the key chapters. Coach's takeaway If you are teaching kids how to break a 2 2 1 press, you also need to know how to handle conflict, because it is going to happen on your team. Take a breath, ask questions, dig for the real issue before you talk, and set up a time and a process to deal with it when emotions are not running the show. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TeachHoops.com SportsConflictLab.com: Bill Taylor's company, teaching conflict skills to coaches, administrators, and parents. Managing Sports Conflict by Bill Taylor: available at SportsConflictLab.com, from Coaches Choice, or on Amazon. NukeHydration.com: clean sports hydration with no caffeine. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order. CoachingYouthHoops.com: full season practice plans by age, with videos and images for every drill and play. Coach Bill welcomes Bill Taylor to the show. Twenty eight years of coaching, a national championship, a pile of conference titles, and coach of the year honors. And yet the topic today is the one part of leadership he says he was not very good at for most of that run: conflict. Successful, and still bad at conflict Ask Bill Taylor during most of his career and he would have told you he handled conflict great. He would also have told you conflict was bad and something to stamp out. Then, in his ninth of twelve years at Lipscomb, he ran into a conflict he could not solve. It kept getting worse. Some of that was on him, some was on the people involved, and some came from an administration that did not have the skills either and escalated it without meaning to. It started with his athletes questioning the training. The same training that had made them run faster than they ever dreamed and won conference titles. His reaction was basically, why would you question that? Success, he says, can hide conflict. And a coach with positional power can easily mistake "I said stop and it went away" for a resolved conflict. If people still have feelings and problems, even unspoken, it is not resolved. It is still changing how they see you and how much they enjoy the game. A master's degree in conflict management opened his eyes. The championships were great, he says, but that is not why we coach. If something is keeping you from being effective as a leader and a developer of people, check your ego at the door and learn the skill. Every program needs a conflict policy Coach Bill asks how to tell a real conflict from a parent who is just being a jerk about playing time. Bill Taylor's answer: it is a conflict either way, and the same tools apply. Learn how to handle emotion, learn communication, and you will manage it better whether or not the other person has any skills. The idea that grabbed Coach Bill from the book is the conflict policy. Bill Taylor believes every coach and every organization should have one, at every level. Hold a meeting, explain the parent's role, and lay out exactly what happens when someone has a problem. Do it for athletes, assistants, and administration too. Without a known process, emotion builds until it pops, usually at the worst possible moment. That is how you get the parent running onto the field, or the parent who texts the coach in the middle of a game. Handling it in the moment Coach Bill shares a recent game where an athletic player of his was getting blown by. When he pulled her, she was visibly upset and said the other girl was just better. Conflict happens in real time, even on Thursday Night Football. So what do you do when you cannot stop and walk through a four step process? Do the best you can in that moment, and do not meet emotion with emotion. Get it down, get it logical. If you have a plan, you can point to it: I get it, you are upset, we will work through this later like we talked about. Then follow up when emotions have cooled and you can give that player your time, energy, and attention. That follow up is what shows you care. Why the player has to be in the room Coach Bill's policy is that if there is a problem, the player needs to be present, outside of safety issues. Bill Taylor agrees. If the conflict is between the coach and the child, you cannot resolve it with only the parent there. You get the parent's version of what the child said, filtered by emotion, and then any solution gets relayed back with plenty lost in translation. He calls going around the person you have a conflict with a three way conflict, and it rarely solves anything. At what age should a parent ask, "Did you talk to coach yourself?" It depends far more on maturity than age. Kids whose parents let them do hard things are more resilient and more able to walk in and talk. Even when a parent needs to be there to help, the child should be the one speaking. Be a great question asker Coach Bill's approach in those meetings is to ask the player questions. Is this an individual sport or a team sport? Why did I pull you out? What did I ask you to work on? Bill Taylor says that is exactly right. Nobody likes being told. When we are asked good questions and speak the answer ourselves, we own it and we are far more willing to change. A formal policy also sends a message. Most people avoid conflict and hope it goes away. It never does. It usually grows. A policy tells everyone, we are okay with conflict, we want to address it, and we want to do it right. Handled well, dealing with conflict is a superpower. Conflict is unmet expectations Parents are protective, and that is their baby. Bill Taylor's advice is to communicate your motivation in every way you can: you are trying to help their child become the best person and athlete they can be. His definition of conflict is simple: expectations not being met. If a parent's expectation is a full ride and a pro career, the numbers say that expectation needs to change. If it is for you to take care of their kid and help them grow, you can show them that is exactly what you are doing. Ask them why they have their kid in sports, because their why drives their expectations. Money has changed the conflict Families are cashing in 401ks and taking out second mortgages for travel ball, rankings, clubs, and training. The whole family is invested now, and bigger money in college and pro sports has made the possible outcomes look shinier than ever. There is nothing wrong with spending that money, Bill Taylor says, but be clear on why. Your why sets your expectations, and your expectations decide how much conflict you will have. Coming up in Part 2 Coach Bill brings up the coach who shuts down a player for asking about playing time instead of teaching them how to ask. Part 2 picks up right there, then puts Bill Taylor in the hot seat with real youth sports scenarios. Coach's takeaway Conflict is not a sign something is wrong. It is a guarantee. Build a conflict policy before the season, keep the player in the room, ask questions instead of handing down answers, and get clear on everyone's expectations before they turn into a blowup. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TeachHoops.com CoachingYouthHoops.com: full season practice plans by age, from drills to offensive and defensive schemes, with videos and images for every drill and play. Custom plans available if your team needs something more unique. Season Organization Checklist: free download, also found under the Free Resources tab at the top of CoachingYouthHoops.com. Covers practice planning considerations, game day prep, skill development guides, and team building ideas. NukeHydration.com: clean sports hydration, now in Lime Time and the new OG Orange. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order. HeySami.com: takes the scheduling chaos off parents and coaches. Not an app, just texts that pull every team’s schedule into one place. Want Coach Collins to speak at your spring clinic? Email [email protected]. A new season is right around the corner. Coach Collins is fresh off an October of clinic speaking engagements, on a plane nearly every weekend, and he is already booking spring clinics. Today the guys tackle preseason planning: what to map out, what to aim for, and how to handle the things no plan will catch. Coach Bill points coaches to the Season Organization Checklist in the Free Resources tab at CoachingYouthHoops.com. It is thorough on purpose. A coach planning a full preseason can use all of it, while a CYO coach with only a couple of practices can skip what does not apply. Many of the questions are there just to get you thinking, because a lot of new coaches do not even know what questions to ask. Coach Collins is not asking anyone to do six months of work up front. The practice plans are already done. What you do need is a map. When is your first tournament? When is your last? What needs to be in by when? Do you have an out of bounds play? A press break? If you are not thinking about it ahead of time, you will find yourself at your last practice on Thursday, playing Saturday, with neither one installed. Coaches get absorbed in the layup line and everything else in front of them, which is exactly why you need to think whole, part, whole. Coach Bill’s first step is simple: take five minutes and decide what a successful season looks like. Keep it to three things. That might be three skills you want to improve, like layups. It might be kids who are happy and want to play next year. It might be winning half your games. If you already know you are not a strong team, set goals that fit. A target number of rebounds per game. Scoring a certain number of points every game, adjusted for age. You can also set three game goals to chase each week, with sub goals underneath. The point is to have something to work toward. Coach Collins adds that planning looks very different by age. At the middle school level you have a better idea of what is coming. At third grade you might not know what you will see, and suddenly you are facing a fifth grade team. So decide what you want the start to look like and what you want the end to look like. Maybe you need a zone defense in, your man to man sharpened, and better movement off the ball. How will you build that across the season, and what should it look like after your last tournament? A third grade team and an eighth grade team getting ready for high school will have very different answers. Both coaches land in the same place: the unknown. You find out the opponent runs a zone and you have not touched your zone offense. Five kids will be gone for a tournament. Coach Bill recently got a 9:30 PM text from a parent asking if he knew everyone would be out that weekend. Nobody had told him. Coach Collins compares it to teaching, when a kid gets sick in the middle of class, and to parenting, where you never know what is around the next corner. You are building and flying the airplane at the same time. Planning handles about ninety percent of it. The rest is being ready to adjust. Control the controllables. And even with the best plan, you will not get through everything. Coach Bill notes that high school coaches who see their teams six days a week still cannot cover it all. Breaking it down lowers the stress. Coach Bill gets into the details. Know your gyms. How many hoops do you have? Two in one gym and four in another changes how you set up drills. How long is your slot? If you only have an hour, every minute counts. In California he can practice outside into November, sometimes December, rain and daylight saving time permitting. Coach Collins, already checking whether the snowblower is ready, is not impressed. But the principle travels. Have kids arrive half an hour early, outside or in a lobby, for stretching and passing without dribbling, so the nice balls stay off the cement. Kids are warmed up and in the mode, and nobody runs in five minutes late eating into your hour. Look for ways to extend practice on the front end or the back end. Even planning a week or two ahead helps. Download the checklist, define three goals, and map out what needs to be in by your first tournament and what it should look like by your last. Know your gyms and squeeze extra minutes where you can. Then accept that the unexpected is coming, and be ready to adjust when it does. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com Start with the free checklistMap it out before it sneaks up on youDefine success in five minutesPlan the start and the finishThe hardest thing to plan forSqueeze more time out of every practiceCoach’s takeaway Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TeachHoops.com CoachingYouthHoops.com: practice plans for every age, with skills, pictures, and videos laid out step by step. New and updated for this season, with free samples so you can see what they look like before you buy. NukeHydration.com: a cleaner alternative to the sports drinks loaded with additives. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order. HeySami.com: pulls TeamSnap, PlayMetrics, LeagueApps, and coach emails into one schedule, updates the family calendar automatically, and sends traffic, weather, and when to leave alerts. Coach Collins puts today’s topic on the Mount Rushmore of youth coaching headaches: the A and B team split. Coach Bill agrees. It causes more angst, more emails, and more “I’m leaving” conversations than almost anything else in the youth game. Coach Bill raised this topic recently on the Hey Sammy podcast with a sports mom, and her answer was simple: it comes down to communication. His addition is that parents sometimes have to trust the coach. A B team placement might sting, but in the vast majority of cases nobody is picking on your kid. There are bad actors in every system, but the coach is usually trying to do one thing: put the kid in the best possible position to succeed. Coach Collins goes back to the classroom. You do not put a student in pre calculus when they are ready for algebra. A parent might believe their son or daughter belongs in pre calc, but if they are not ready, the right class is the one where they are learning alongside kids at the same level. The pushback coaches always hear is that the kid will get better playing with better players. Coach Collins disagrees. A kid who does not know the law of cosines does not get better by sitting in a room where everyone else does. They get frustrated, their classmates get frustrated, and nobody is where they need to be. Coach Bill adds that the teammates feel it too. You meet kids where they are. Each group is learning with kids at their own stage of development. Better cohesion. A players are not frustrated by a teammate who cannot catch the ball or does not understand a five out offense, and that player is not drowning. Both groups are challenged. Split a sixth grade class evenly and the strong kids stop being pushed while the developing kids struggle. Fewer blowouts. If your B team plays legitimate B teams, the games are competitive. Both coaches admit that does not always happen, since some “B teams” are really A teams. Coach Collins notes that at the youngest ages, second and third grade, you may not need a split at all. Friends get separated. Kids may not be playing with their buddies. The emails, texts, and threats to leave. Some families will head to another program that promises an A team spot. Apples to oranges. Another program’s A team might be your B team. The label does not tell you the level. Roster numbers. Two teams means you need enough players showing up for both. Scheduling. Finding the right competition for two levels is real extra work. Coach Bill’s verdict: the pros still outweigh the cons over the long run. A split does not mean the groups never see each other. Coach Bill scrimmages his A team against his B team regularly, which pushes the B players to get better. To keep the A team sharp, he scores something other than points, such as rebounding. If the B team outrebounds them, the A team runs the difference. Or whatever the B team scores becomes the number of down and backs the A team runs at the end of practice. When the list goes up, many parents hear “you don’t think my kid is good enough,” or “my kid is stuck on the B team forever.” Neither is true. The right message for the kid is: okay, you didn’t make it this year, let’s get after it. More reps at home and more work. It is an education process for the kids and the parents. That is why the coach has to set expectations before the season starts. We are having an A and B split. There will be tryouts. Here is how you make the A team. And placement on the B team does not mean your kid is not good. Coach Collins recently read an article about playgrounds. They used to be dangerous, and now they have swung so far the other way that a kid can barely twist an ankle on one. His concern is that this generation has had almost no failure at all, and some failure is okay. His own son hit a wall in his basketball career, did not like it, and learned a lot from it. Coach Bill’s point is that the stinging part is exactly what prepares kids for life, as long as the parent teaches them how to get through it. Your friends may have made the A team. You may be working your tail off and still not be there yet. That is okay. Coach Collins has heard it plenty of times: my kid has worked harder than anyone. Maybe so. But he could spend ten thousand hours practicing singing and he is never going to be Beyonce. Effort matters, and it is not a guarantee. Coach Bill has heard the variation aimed at the trainer: you’ve been working with her, so why isn’t she on the A team? The money I’m spending! His answer is that he does what he can with the time he has, and the player still has to put in extra work on their own. If you have the numbers and it fits your program, an A and B split is better in the long run. Put kids in the class they are ready for, use practice to push both groups, and communicate early and clearly how teams are built and how a player makes the A team. Everybody wants to make the A team. Tell them exactly how. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com The parent perspectiveAlgebra before pre calcThe pros of an A and B splitThe consPushing both teams in practiceWhat parents hearA little failure is good for kidsHard work is not the only variableCoach’s takeaway Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HeySammi.com: Takes all your kids’ sports apps and puts them into one daily plan so you know exactly where to be and when. Get on the waitlist. NukeHydration.com: Clean hydration made for young athletes, no artificial flavorings or additives. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off. CoachingYouthHoops.com: Brand new, revamped practice plans built by age level, with free samples to try before you buy. What Skills Should Your Young Players Actually Be Working On? Three skills per age group, and the drills to build them. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com Coach Collins shows up looking more relaxed than he has in years, with no season to plan and no tests to grade, and the guys dig into a big picture question: what are the best ways to develop grade school players in a short amount of time? Before getting to how, they start with what. For fifth grade and below, Coach Bill’s answer is ball handling, because one superior ball handler can beat a team at that age. Coach Collins adds handling pressure, meaning not panicking when doubled and knowing how to pivot. Round it out with layups, and those are the three skills that matter most. Stationary ball handling is fine for a minute or two of warmup, but real development needs pressure. Coach Bill uses a drill called Stuck in the Mud, where defenders can move their hands but not their feet while players dribble through them, then finish with a layup at the other end. He also runs a one on one cone drill where the dribbler goes around the cones and attacks the hoop, with the defender’s cone moved closer as players improve. Coach Collins’ advice is to keep changing drills as kids master them, like letting the stuck in the mud defenders take one step in each direction. The best youth coaches he sees are always tweaking. By middle school the priorities shift. Shooting comes first, and Coach Collins separates shooting from scoring: shooting is catch and shoot, and it is built on reps, form, and footwork, ideally to the point where players can self correct. Defense comes next, with stance, footwork, help defense, and how to shift in a trap. The third skill is a little more abstract: becoming a student of the game. Can a player adjust to different offenses and defenses, and run more than one system? That only happens if coaches put them in those situations instead of playing a two three zone for two straight years. Coach Bill builds this through reads rather than plays. His Blitz offense is a base, and from there players learn to read and adjust to whatever the defense throws at them. You do not have time to teach every situation, but you can teach rules and scenarios that let kids figure it out on their own. Coach Collins adds that shared terminology, things like midline and helpline, makes all of it easier to teach. The final takeaway is focus. Most youth coaches get a couple of short practices a week, so you cannot boil the ocean. Coach Bill picks three things to develop each season and drills down into each one, which is exactly how the new Coaching Youth Hoops practice plans are built, by age level, so you know what a second grader needs versus a fifth grader. As Coach Collins puts it, there are free samples on the site, just like Costco. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com TitleSubtitleShow Notes 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

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

TeachHoops.com NukeHydration.com: Clean sports drink started by a sports mom and dad out of Mississippi. Coach Bill is drinking the Lime Time. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off your first order. CoachingYouthHoops.com: Build a custom practice plan for your team or print and go with one of the ready made practices. No more ChatGPT practice plans. How Do You Cut a Kid Without Killing Their Love for the Game? Are You Sure the Kid Heard What You Actually Said? Who Should Be in the Room When You Cut a Sixth Grader? What Do You Say When a Kid Asks “Who Else Got Cut?” Are You Cutting Them, or Putting Them in the Right Heat? Why Does Every Cut Conversation Turn Into a Game of Telephone? 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: Eighth grade: parent and kid together. Seventh grade: depends on the situation. Sixth grade and below: usually just the parent, at least at first. 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: Start positive. Here is what your kid is really good at. Name the gaps plainly. Here are the weak spots and the skills they need to get better at. Reframe the comparison. It is not that your son or daughter got worse. Some other kids got better and worked on these things, so we are moving them up. Give them the runway. You have the next 364 days. Here is exactly what to work on. Land on the upside. This is a better fit for the level and for the teams they will play. More playing time, more reps, more chances to build the skills they could not get otherwise. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show Links mentioned in this episode ⁠TeachHoops.com⁠ ⁠LakeShowHoops.com⁠ — Joey's club in the Bay Area. Contact info is on the About Us page ⁠CoachingYouthHoops.com⁠ Beyond Pulse — the wearable band Coach Bill is testing with his team ⁠NukeHydration.com ⁠— the fifteen second voice note evaluation app Coach Bill is also testing 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: A good director. The leader of the program is what families actually see. Good coaches. They are the ones interacting with the athletes every week. Gym time. Everything else is theoretical without it. Community roots. You do not start a program where you have no influence. Joey's is in Danville, where his son goes to school and has his friends. 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

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