The Gold Standard with Don Showalter

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All right. So welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Today's guest is Don Showalter. Don has over 40 years of high school coaching experience. He has worked with the USA Basketball program for over 20 years now and has never lost a game with USA B.

winning 9 gold medals as the head coach. He has coached NBA stars like Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards, and Jalen Suggs, just to name a few. Coach Sho also runs Snow Valley Basketball Camp, being recognized as one of the nation's best basketball camps for teaching fundamentals.

Welcome to the show.

Glad to be here, George. And I know you have a wide range of listeners, so I'm happy to be on your podcast, Transforming Basketball.

So first question I have for you, for coaches coming into, you know, maybe taking a new job. I know the high school season's just starting at the time of recording anyway. How do you establish your standards over rules? How did you do that with USAB?

And what is a practical step that coaches can take instead of being a dictator to more player-led?

That's a great question. First of all, standards, to me, standards and rules are completely 2 different things. Standards are what you try to attain, what you try to reach for. Rules are put in place more for things that you really want to restrict.

So rules always have a negative connotation to me. Standards have something that's very positive. For instance, you have a rule that you be on time or you can't, don't be late. That might be a rule. A standard would be you show respect for everybody and everything.

So The respect factor comes in, hey, I'm going to be there on time because I respect my coaches. I respect my fellow teammates. I'm not going to make them wait on me. So the standard is respect as opposed to don't be late type of thing.

And I think what happens too often is coaches and players too, but coaches sometimes give a standard and then don't hold players accountable. to that standard. It's just like you're running a drill and you have to get maybe 50 layups in a minute.

That's your standard. So you don't get 50 layups in a minute. What do you do? We don't lower our standards. Our standards stay the same. What we try and do is that we redo it and have the players raise their standard level to get to what we want done.

So I think that's very, to me, that's a really important aspect of building your culture of Trying to get your program to where you want it to is identify standards you think are important and then do everything that you can with your team to uphold those standards.

What I'm hearing you say is hold players accountable to those standards. Otherwise, they cease to be a standard, essentially.

Right, exactly. If you change your standards, that's more of a mood change. That's not a standard. Yeah, I feel we won, had a big game last night. Maybe our standard is a little more lax today. No, your standards are the same regardless, winning or losing, whatever it is.

Yeah, the importance of having that really clear process. I want to talk about Snow Valley a little bit. Obviously, I had the pleasure of being there for 2 of the sessions. You run 4 sessions every summer. And I loved it. It was incredibly intense and we're up At the break of dawn, pretty much 5:45 AM, I believe we have to kind of report.

But my point is, afterwards, everyone, and not just myself, but just speaking of everyone, everyone's so charged up and they could go again. And my question is, how do you build this environment where there's fun, people are getting better, both coaches and players, but then everyone feels rejuvenated instead of burned out?

That's an interesting point because Generally don't ask players like on the last day what they liked about Snow Valley because they're so tired and I'm not sure. So I always wait for about 2 or 3 days and then you get a lot of positive comments about everything.

You know, I think part of it is, first of all, staff that we hire, including yourself when you work, but the staff we hire is so important. You know, they provide the energy. And then we really try to emphasize bringing enthusiasm and passion.

Every day to you. And that's not only true with Snow Valley. I think that's true with every— with your team every day. You know, you have to really come prepared to bring that enthusiasm and passion to your team, just like you do Snow Valley Basketball Camp.

And then your players feed off that. And then the players know you love the game. And if you love the game, that transfers over to their love of the game. You know, when we first started, we just finished our 30th season at Snow Valley Basketball School last year.

And it's all skill development. You know, we play a lot of short-sided games to emphasize our habits with our skills. But I think when we first started, many people said, ah, you know, this is just not going to fly. Kids are not going to want to get up early, you know, long nights.

Some kids aren't done playing games until 10:30, 11 o'clock at night. Coaches won't want to work it. You know, we've got a lot of negative vibes coming before we ever started. So Jerry Slackhouse and myself, we said, you know what, we're going to play.

We think it's a really good Midwest camp. And 30 years later, we sell out 375 to 400 kids per session for 4 sessions. So I think that the basis of Snow Valley Basketball School is, first of all, the staff that we get. Secondly is how they perform, how they function with the kids.

The kids know that the staff cares for them. And The Kids Zone staff really cares about their getting better and their improvement. The kids feed into that and they have tremendous enthusiasm as well.

Yeah. And I remember, you know, a few of the coaches lost their voices just because they've been cheering around the cabin. It's just so much fun, so much excitement in all the games. And, you know, mind you, we're, you know, it's like 16, 15, 16-hour days, 2 games, 2 small-sided games that I love.

One, I, you know, used already before going there, but that you guys do every year is Cutthroat. I think that's an awesome game, you know, for coaches listening. 3-on-3. If players don't do something that is part of the rule of the game, like say they, you know, they— what was one of the— we always start with those 3 rules last year.

Do you remember?

Yep.

Catch and square up to the basket. Uh, the second rule was you have to move after you pass. Third rule is you always turn and thank the passer after a made basket.

Yes. Yeah. So like they don't do that, it's a turnover and that team's off immediately. And that's a game that you can always, you know, coaches can change the constraints. And then another one that I learned while I was there was the Braveheart one.

And that one is just so much fun for a dynamic start. Basically, it's just, you know, offense starts on the baseline, defense starts at the half-court line, and they have to sprint yelling as loud as they can, you know, to the opposite side.

And then the ball gets passed into the offense at the half court and it's playing from there. And that was just so much fun. I think that's where guys lost their voices.

Yeah. And Kenny Spielbauer and Chris Kern do a great job with the younger division too. So that's a fun way, you know, you talk about kids enjoying the game. Well, you know, they enjoy those kind of competitive aspects of the game as well.

So you throw that in with your skill development stuff, I think it really makes a nice camp. But also then you talk about standards, you know, the standard that we have, we uphold is, you know, we have very, very few problems in the dorms.

We have very few problems with anything really, because we set a high standard. And if you don't come with a high standard or fulfill it, we let you go out of the camp. But we, we don't get very many of that at all.

Absolutely. I remember we had the pleasure of meeting when I was moving to Slovenia to learn about coaching at the time. And you were one of the mentors we had. And I remember, you know, coaches should be 5 things. They should be teachers, they should be authentic, organized, humble, and adaptable.

Why are these 5 keys so important to you?

And we came up with these 5 different things several years ago after I would watch coaches perform. I go to practices and really I tried to put in a bucket 5 different things that I thought good coaches really did well. And, you know, the organization, humility, those kinds of things stuck out to me as well.

But I think when you look at what great coaches do and the longevity that coaches have in the game, I think these 5 things really kind of tell the difference between being a good coach, great coach, and maybe just a coach who is, dabbling in the coaching profession and not really, not really maybe serious about becoming a better coach.

I think of those 5 that you mentioned, I think humility is probably the one that I would say has the most impact on coaches because, and players. Jay Wright always had a, I had a great example from Jay Wright watching many of his practices.

He just kept saying, you know, if you are humble, you're going to continue to learn. Once that humility leaves, you're done. You're not going to learn anymore and you might as well get out of, out of the game. And he said that to players too, as well, as well as coaches.

So I think that humility part is something that, that we all try to do, you know, no matter how many years we've been in the game, we always want to learn more about the game because there's always more to learn. And so I think that's a huge factor in coaching and good coaches becoming really good coaches.

Absolutely. And in terms of humility, what does that actually look like? Is that when you're doing a game or drill with a player and, you know, they say, coach, I don't like this, it's, you know, it's not fun, I'm not enjoying it? Is part of being humble also working with your players and saying, you know what, that's fair enough, let's see what else we can do with this to make sure that you're both having fun and obviously still getting developed, putting the work in?

Well, yeah, I think as a coach, and you raised a good example, what does humility look like? I think from a coach's standpoint, humility looks a lot or is a lot about asking your players, talking to your players, getting their viewpoint because we learn from our players probably more than we learn from maybe other coaches.

And every team is a little different. And so I always try and make a point of conversing with my players, And what that does, first of all, it develops trust because your players trust you that you're trying to do what's best for them.

And you make a point of saying, hey, you give me some information, some ideas, and I may use it or I may not, but I'm going to make sure that I decipher what's best for our team. And so that builds that big trust factor between you and the players.

Once you have the trust of your team, Once you have the trust of your players, basically they will do anything for you as a team, as a coach. So I think of the many different standards we have, the trust is probably the most important.

And then right after that is caring. When you learn from your players, which I try and do all the time, take advantage of what they think because they're out there on the court really diagnosing the game as well. They have a sense of Hey, you know, coach, try to really do what's best for us as a team and for me personally.

And I might venture on with this. When I started coaching international basketball, I think one of the things that made me a much better coach, coaching international basketball, simply because number one, the rules are different.

Yep.

And so I had to do a better job of coaching because our kids couldn't call a timeout when it got down to 10 seconds. We had a 24-second shot clock. So the game was much more of a fast-paced players' game than what we have here in the United States.

And I just think that substitution, 24-second shot clock are 2 things that made me a much better coach coaching international basketball.

I agree with that. The shot clock, I think to me is such a big one. I want to move on, pivot a little bit. You said players never graduate from skills. And I remember, I think the example you gave me was You know, Steph, just because Steph Curry is the best shooter doesn't mean he gets to stop working on his, you know, shooting ability.

If anything, he works harder than anybody else.

Yeah.

Like, can you just speak about that?

Yeah. First of all, I think, you know, to me, there are really 2 types of drills that are important in, in your coaching as you coach. First one is I do think you have to build habits. With repetition, especially with young players, 7, 8, 9, 10, who are less skilled.

They got to develop their left hand. They got to develop shooting. And then as they get more proficient in their skills, then you add what I call decision-making or constraint drills to find out really how much better are they getting in their skill, their skill work.

So I think those are 2 types of drills that coaches really need to make sure that they have. with all their practices. So now you revert back to, all right, for instance, I coached Jalen Green, great shooter. But Jalen was always one that said, you know what, kind of like Steph Curry, I'm not going to be satisfied with just doing what I, what I'm doing now.

I want to get better with more practice on shooting. So I'm, I want to work on my one dribble pull-ups. I'm going to work on my left-hand dribble Pull-ups. So there's always something you could do to enhance your skill development, not thinking that I'm good enough, I don't need to do it anymore.

And so with players that are like, I've been able to coach with USA Basketball, we may do the same drill we did with my 10-year-old team, but we do it for like a minute as opposed to we do it for 10 minutes with my 10-year-old team.

So we may do a pivot drill. We'll just, I call that, you know, we kind of refresh the drill, refresh the skill. So we don't forget about it. And we're, you know, we're working on that skill, whether it be rebounding, shooting, passing, whatever.

And then make sure we do that. I think one of the things that I really emphasize to coaches, and I've learned through my own experiences, it seems like my teams always got better as the season went on. And, you know, I talked to a lot of my assistants and we kind of Came to the conclusion that some of that was because we still worked on skill work throughout the whole year.

We're not just going to work on working on our team defense or team offense the whole time, but we're going to have some segment of practice continue to work or refresh our skill work. And so that comes into play with, you know, hey, you're never quite good enough that you say, hey, I don't have to work on these skills anymore.

You know, it's not like Steph Curry gets a diploma and says, Steph, you graduated from the shooting work, so you never have to work on shooting anymore. You know, the piece to it is, hey, you know, I still have to continue to work on shooting and keeping the habits that I've learned about becoming a good shooter, refreshing those every, every time.

So I really think that's an important piece that maybe coaches forget as they progress throughout the season.

Yeah, I remember you said 1/3, like, set the practice skill development, team offense, team defense. And to this day, I still use that kind of template for how I structure my practice session.

Yeah, you slip in your— you put the third. Let's say you have an hour of practice, you have 20 minutes of skill development. You may not— you put 5 minutes at the beginning of practice, 5 minutes in the middle of practice. So you disperse those skill development pieces too.

Yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't have to be like all in one chunk.

Right.

So, and specifically you mentioned, you know, a little bit of, you know, Jalen Green. More specifically, when you're focusing on decision-making in small-sided games, let's say during the USAB training camp or practices that you have, do you have a go-to drill that immediately reveals which players can make reads under pressure?

Well, I think the main go-to read for us is our cutthroat. You know, because you're doing those types of things in a game-like situation under kind of intense situations where you've got to make reads and you have to make good passes and you have to move after you pass and those kinds of things.

I think one of the things that is really good, and I know, I know Alex really, really well. We've talked about this from the, these are restraint pieces of the game, but I think you keep adding restraints to like the catch drill. In other words, all right, you have to shoot within 10 seconds, or you add a 4th defender later.

So in other words, you start out 4 on 3 and then you add the 4th defender maybe after a pass. And so you're making, sometimes basketball is, it's not a pretty sport. It can be ugly, which is okay. I mean, that's what happens in the game sometimes.

Yeah.

The decision-making drills to me are Huge factors in developing your— going from skill development into decision-making restraint drills that you do in games. And so I think it's important that coaches understand I have to have both types of drills in order to make my team better.

And you do that with, you know, all right, 2 dribble limit. You can put 2 dribble limit with your cutthroat. You can put every player must touch the pass. touch the ball before a shot's taken. You know, you must have a paint touch before you can shoot it.

So you can add all different kinds of things to what you want done. And I think cutthroats is a great way to do that. Also, 3-on-3 is a huge factor for that. And with our USA teams, we do, we play some, we play a lot of 3-on-3.

And I would encourage coaches that are listening, if you don't have 3-on-3 as part of your practice session, You need to instill that 5 or 10 minutes in practice. And not only does it give you great decision-making skills, you can see exactly what skills you are deficient at.

So let's say a kid has trouble with his weak hand, left hand. He's, if he's right-handed, he's trouble with left hand. I mean, that's, you could pick that up immediately in a 3-on-3. So now you go back and say, all right, hey, we got to do a better job of working with our left hand.

Because that's hurting us in our offense for 3-on-3 work. So I think you can evaluate really well your ability to skill development, how your skills are like. You can really evaluate that in the 3-on-3, 4-on-4 situations. You know, 3 things that we emphasize in our half-court offense, which is really our half-court offense for my 10-year-old team I coach with my grandson, and then also You know, with our junior national teams, you have to have great spacing.

And 3-on-3, 4-on-4 gives you great spacing. You can see that players can see great spacing. Secondly, I think that you really need to have paint touches. So we emphasize getting to the paint, kicking the ball out, putting pressure on the defense that way.

And then third thing is ball reversal. You get more reversals. It's kind of interesting because we've charted a lot of stuff, obviously, as coaches do. But, you know, every time the ball gets reversed, In the game of basketball on your offense, your shooting percentage goes up about 8%.

If you just come down the floor, keep it on the same side and shoot the shot without ball reversing, we shot about 38%. We get the ball swung one side, it goes up to 8%, about 46%. You get swung back to the original side, another 8%, about 54%.

So that's, you know, and that goes With our U16, U17, U18, U19 teams that we, that I specifically work with. So you get a good picture of, hey, you know, we got to get this ball. You can do it a lot of different ways.

You ball reversal through paint touches and kickouts off of the side, through the post, you know, through baseline drives and hammer passes. But once that happens, you, you get a good feel for the shooting percentages that you get. And players, then they can buy into those things because they can see a result of that.

That was great. That was a lot in there for coaches. I think it's a lot harder to hide in 3-on-3. I think since you, you know, since we kind of worked together or you showed us, you showed us a lot of some presentations and a lot of different kind of what you could do with 3-on-3 that builds into your actual offense, given us a lot of different ideas, I remember.

And it's, you know, I'm just a huge proponent because I feel, I just truly believe you can do anything that you're working on in 5-on-5. In a more simplified version in 3-on-3, and to your point, you know, you can't hide. So players are going to have to be forced to dribble with their left hand, make the reverse pass, and everyone's involved.

Like in 5-on-5, you can get away and hide in the corner. Maybe you don't have to—

sure.

Oh, but that's not going to happen in 3-on-3.

Talk about, you know, accountability of players. And 3-on-3 holds your players accountable, you know. Hey, can they pass? Can they use your left hand? You know, so I think it's a good way to have your players understand that, you know what, if I'm not a very good passer, it shows up a lot.

And then you as a coach can relate that to them. Hey, look what happens. We play 3-on-3 type thing.

And I want to ask you as well, you know, you work with young kids, you've had tremendous success doing that. And one of the things that I've read while doing research was this 7-second communication rule that you have. And I think this is partly because you don't want to talk too much and then they just kind of Stop listening to you.

What does this 7-second communication rule look like? I mean, 7 seconds is really quick. Talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah. I think I read an article or somebody sent me an article that they did some tests with adolescents and compared it to goldfish. And they just found out that 7 seconds was about the max that the focus for adolescents was as compared to goldfish.

They swim around a bowl and they can focus on swimming around a bowl, following each other for 8 seconds. So it's almost like goldfish have a longer attention span than adolescents. So, you know, I took that and a good friend of mine, Kevin Eastman, who's a great friend of mine, but he and I have talked about this at length and he always talks about teaching in soundbites and not paragraphs.

So when he was working with the Celtics, You would just give little soundbites as opposed to, hey, this is how you should do it, blah, blah, blah. You know, so the players get used to hearing soundbites such as, you need to stay lower.

You, you need to look like a basketball player. Keep your knees bent. And you have different phrases that you remind players of, you know, all the time. Everybody knows what a basketball player looks like.

Yep.

They have their knees bent, you know, they're wide. So you get, as a coach, I think that's one of the That's one of the things that allowed me to become a better coach is my terminology got better. And so when I taught players, my terminology was much better and I could just teach in like soundbites.

So, you know, for instance, Jaylen, Jaylen, Jayson Tatum was, you know, he may not have been the best player I coached at 16 or 17, but he probably wanted to become the best player. He was very coachable. And so I would always tell him, Jason, you're not ever going to get much better unless you play with your knees bent.

And when you catch the ball, you're standing straight up. So my terminology to him was, hey, catch the ball, look like a player, catch the ball, look like a player. So you're teaching in soundbites, not stopping him, not stopping the whole group to teach.

You're teaching in short soundbites. I think to me, you know, I call that a Kevin Eastmanism. But to me, that made me a much better player as I, as I progressed through my coaching career and worked with really high-level players. I agree.

And I think just knowing the terminology, for me anyway, from my perspective, helped me tremendously. So instead of having to, you know, tell a player to play off their man and be in the gap, right? Like me knowing now that I can just say gap, gap, it's so much easier for me as a coach to know where they should be, what it looks like with that one word.

And it just helped me tremendously to even understand the game, you know, just adding terminology to things.

Well, I think what that does too, and you raise a great point with it, because I think what that does is it allows your practice to have a great pace to it. Not stopping practice all the time to correct. You know, there are times where you have to, but I think to me, the better coaches that I've watched throughout the years, you know, as part of that You know, organization, humility versus, you know, coming up with being who you are type thing.

But I think that really paces where you really want to keep your practice at. And so you don't stop it and you don't explain it because that really takes pace, takes time off the, you know, of your practice session. So to me, the best coaches do that really good.

Yeah.

And the game's not like that, right? The game has like that Yeah, exactly. I want to ask, how do you help coaches navigate this 8-year-old point guard problem when parents and coaches who are obsessed with position and rankings rather than just developing these young kids and making sure they're having fun and coming back to keep playing the game?

Well, as long as there's people out there who rank kids, that's going to be a problem. And that's not going to go away because that's how people That's how rankings, you know, that's how they make their money. And so you put that into it.

But it's interesting because to me, and I think to a lot of our coaches that work with USA Basketball, we have learned a lot from the international game. From a standpoint of, you know, I think we do a poor job. I talk about this all the time when I go to coaching clinics, is we put our players in a box.

You're a point guard, you're a 2 guard, you're a 3 guard. And I still find myself doing that. But now it's more one of the things we look for in players. When I go evaluate players, one of the main things I look for is versatility.

How versatile are the players? Can they play more than one position? Not only can they play more, but can they guard more than one position? So if you're a big, can you guard in a switch? Can you guard a smaller player? So to me, international game has really influenced our game in a positive way.

From the standpoint of, you know, we're done putting players in boxes. And when I talk to a parent about that, and I have a lot, I say, the main thing is not that your player is a point guard. Is he a basketball player?

Can he play the game of basketball? And so that's my point of emphasis to anybody I talk to that comes to me and say, you know what, my, I got an 8-year-old kid. It's probably the best point guard in, you know, In our county, whatever.

Well, you know, I always say, well, can he play basketball? And so I think that phrase in itself has helped me as a coach relate to people that can easily understand the fact that, you know, it's not just a point guard. It's not just a post player.

It's not just a, you know, 4 man. Can he play?

Yeah.

And how you do that then is, all right, let's play 3 on 3. Let's see how he can play. There's no point guard in 3-on-3, 4-on-4. So now you go back to your constraint drills, your decision-making drills, and you don't have that situation as much.

So I really think that's, you know, I look at Luka Dončić, he's a point guard right now. He's doing everything, bringing the ball up the court for Lakers, you know, type of thing. So I think our game in the States has kind of gotten hopefully a little bit away from putting people in boxes.

And where positions are in the court.

Yeah, I remember my first coach, Scott Galloway. He would always say, yeah, you know, you're playing the 4, but you have to know all the positions because you never know. Today you're playing the 4, but maybe next season you're at the 1. So he made it a big emphasis to like, okay, you do have a role on this team.

This is the position you'll be playing on this team, but your development is important. You have to know all the other positions. And of course, at practice, we would, you know, do everything. So I was able to bring the ball up and dribble and just have fun with it.

That goes back to the fact that teach all players all skills. If you're coaching a 10-year-old team, you might have, at that age, you're going to have a player that's probably head and shoulders above everybody else. So what do coaches do that want to win games?

They're going to put him in the middle of the zone. They're going to play the middle of defense playing zone. He's not going to be— so now let's go on 3 years later. He's still the same height. Everybody else caught up to him.

He has no skill.

Yeah.

So my point is you teach all players all skills from that point.

Great point.

Yeah.

Coach, I want to thank you so much for your time. It's been great just catching up and talking to you again. I have one more question for you before we let you go, and that is a transformative tip question. We ask this to everyone, and it's, if you could leave coaches with one piece of advice that would instantly transform their practice environments, what would that be?

I don't know if it instantly transformed their practice environment. But I always say, you know, you as a coach, you need to bring 2 things to practice every day. I don't care what kind of day you've had. You know, if you've had a tough day in the office, if you've had a tough day with administration, if whatever.

But when it comes to practice, you better bring enthusiasm and you better bring passion to the court. If you don't do that, Your practices probably will not be very good. And so I always say, I've said that in relationship to that, I've said players really don't have bad practices, coaches do.

And so if you come with that enthusiasm and passion for the game, your practices will be okay. They're going to be good. If you don't bring those 2 things, if you just come with a bad attitude as a coach or bad body language as a coach, And we talk about bad body language with players, but bad body language as coaches is just the same.

If you come with that, your practicing will probably not be very good.

No, excellent. Thank you so much, Don.

Well, thank you. Appreciate, obviously, a lot of respect for what you do and for what Alex does. So more than happy to be on anytime and continue good luck with what you do and your family there in Brazil. That's awesome.

Thank you so much.

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