How to Build Better Basketball Players & People with Kareem Kalil

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast, and I'm your host, Alex Sarama. This is the podcast where we help coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to create the ultimate resource to help make sense of how contemporary skill acquisition ideas can be applied within the basketball world.

Throughout the podcast, we'll unpack how an ecological dynamics framework alters our perspective If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, then this is the podcast for you. Welcome to episode 4 of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. My friend and colleague from last year, Kareem Kalil, is joining us today.

Kareem, thank you so much for coming on.

Happy to be here, Alex. It's a great, you know, I miss our time together in Italy, so I'm happy we're getting a chance to reconnect a bit.

I miss the clay court tennis the most. So I wanted to start with, uh, transformational coaching, and, and this is actually going to be the main focus of our episode today. And it's one of the reasons I started Transforming Basketball, to really spread the message behind what transformational leadership is all about.

And I think that this is probably one of the reasons we first connected in the first place, Kareem, and I think we're so aligned In this regard. So just for the benefit of the listeners, maybe could you outline kind of how you first got in touch with me, I guess through Cori, your wife, and then kind of what led to where we are today with you being on this podcast 2 years later, maybe even 3 years later?

Yeah, so I was a small Division III college basketball player and actually gravitated towards the field of education during my undergrad and joined a program called Teach for America, which places young teachers in different cities to try to have an impact in, you know, shaping the lives of youth and making a difference in their education.

And I found pretty quickly that it was hard to impact young people in domains that they weren't quite interested in. So I was a math teacher, and, you know, kids don't choose to be in math class. They have to be there. And so I found there was a lot more power really in coaching and mainly coaching in a sport that changed my own life as a young person and taught me a lot of different leadership approaches that I still use to this day that I never would've learned in a math class, for instance.

And so got drawn to that little by little, became a lot more interested in my coaching than in— and I shouldn't say interested, but just felt like there was a lot more potential for me to have impact in that area just because I was such a believer In this, this idea of transformational coaching.

And so was refining my approach to coaching, found Alex on Instagram, but I didn't have an Instagram. So I had to ask my wife to write Alex a DM. I was like, what the hell is this? Hey, my husband really wants to be in touch with you.

Can you please reach out to him? Alex actually reached out to me, which was very kind of him in a bit of a funny scenario. And he ended up coming to Denver and we co-led a clinic with ProSkills Basketball and a good friend of mine who's the director of ProSkills Denver, Ross Schrader.

From there, I decided to actually go out to Italy and serve as a player, really a human development expert and really a coach and an assistant coach. And with, with that specific focus with College Prep Italy, with Alex and the staff there, and then we've stayed connected since then.

So that's a little bit of my background.

Excellent, Kareem. So I think that takes us nicely into human development. And something we've spoken about is how within the future, we believe that basketball organizations of many levels, especially, you know, I think the programs that have the resources to do so, will have a human development coach.

And we believe it's something that's really important. But what is it? What is this field all about?

I think the purpose of having human development experts in a basketball organization is the role really being to make sure that every single player in said organization is able to really thrive and really develop. We know there's so many important nuances to just serving a person at their core.

And if you are a basketball coach and you are only coaching basketball skills, you're not really going to get the root, what makes a player who they are and what will allow them to really Develop at optimal levels.

And it's an evidence-based field, right? Because obviously this links into what you've literally just started yesterday.

Yeah, I mean, it's a field that has a lot of— there's a lot of research that supports it in different areas. I actually just enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Colorado here to study human development in the, in the Human Dev and Learning Sciences department, and my specific focus will be on coaching.

And so I'm kind of still scratching the surface of that research, but And frankly, it is a bit of an understudied area and it is, there isn't too much really well-known research in the area of human development in the world of coaching. And so I'm excited to hopefully contribute to that research in the future.

Definitely. I think it's going to be really interesting too. Obviously delighted to have you as an ambassador and, you know, helping me with Transforming Basketball too. So I think it'll be really interesting as we do more podcasts, blogs in the future, just kind of where your research is taking you.

How you're applying it practically, etc. So transformational leadership is obviously a huge element of this field, human development. And we looked at— both of us have read some of, uh, John Kotz and Jennifer Turnridge's papers on transformational coaching. So got a definition here from another paper by Bass and Riggio, and it says transformational leadership involves behaviors that are designed to empower Inspire and challenge followers to enable them to reach their full potential.

For a basketball coach listening to this, what does that mean, Kareem? And what does it practically look like?

I mean, the keyword there being full potential, right? And it isn't— that extends so far beyond the basketball court. I think the best coaches in the world have these really dynamic relationships with players that allows to connect with them on a deeply personal level.

And I would argue that isn't really understood. Like, what does that mean, right? Like, what do we mean when we say a great relationship with a player? Well, I think one thing that we know is that you are treated as more than just a player.

Like, you are treated as a person, and a person who has a desire, which I believe is a fundamental human desire, to contribute to society and to push forward the lives of the people around you. And That's complex. And I think I'd be interested to hear kind of your thoughts, Alex, of what you think coaches should take from this approach practically, because I think it is very abstract, right?

When we talk about empowering in words like enabling people to reach their full potential, like, what does that actually mean?

Absolutely. I think for me, it's— I like the idea of autonomy. I think that's a key part of transformational leadership. And I'm not just saying in the sense of On the court, you know, through something like co-design where you're allowing players to design tasks.

Obviously the CLA is linked to this, but I think it's giving players and looking at them as people, like you said, giving them freedom, freedom of choice. I think what I'm seeing a lot of, Kareem, is the opposite. And I think this is a key kind of transformational coaching where it's the distinction between transactional and transformational.

For me, it's kind of the whole essence of this is coaching to inspire. And like you said, like drive the greater good. And we're looking, it transcends just basketball. And the opposite to that, and what I consider the traditional approach in basketball is I'd say controlling through fear or the coach kind of being in a very hierarchical position where they're right here on top and the players are down here.

So I think to me, like when I first kind of tried to understand transformational coaching and apply it, It's kind of like reversing that paradigm shift of what we've always believed an effective coach is and looking at the players as equals, not as subordinates who we are gonna instruct, scream at, yell at, but looking at them as human beings and getting to know them as human beings.

And that's like, I think one of the biggest things we did at Prep, really making just an intent to have genuine conversations with them, do stuff off the court. And, you know, it sounds like a bit of a cliché because a lot of people talk about it.

But then what we actually did, right, Kareem, is we designed processes which actually helped us do it and held us accountable to making sure that we were trying to be as transformational as we could be.

Yeah, I think one of the things we hear often, and what you said, Alex, just made me think of this, are phrases that are commonly used in US basketball coaching that are not really fully valuing the importance of the environment in the human condition, right?

So one thing you hear a lot is like, this player has that dog in them, right? And that's a very common saying. Or this player has a really high motor. So I think these research fields go beyond just describing players as cogs in a machine.

And it's more about Okay, like, what is it in their environment, like, both presently and in their past, that has led them to behave this way and to act this way? And what can we actually create in their environment that pushes them beyond this, or like pushes them to enhance this?

Like, this player is not playing with a motor. Like, that is— that might be an observed thing, but that's not who they are. They like People are products of their environment. And so how do we actually infuse the environment with different relationships or different connections that create the outcomes we want in our players?

So it's kind of a more nuanced look. Like, no player is just a dog. Like, that is not a way that I think we should be talking about players because it just is an oversimplification of who they are.

Totally agree. So, I mean, to unpack this further for coaches, Kareem, I've got 4 tenets of transformational coaching as written by John Kotz in a research paper. So I was thinking we could just break these down and kind of look at practical ways that we could try to be transformational as an organization, as coaches, whatever.

So the first one, it talks about idealized influence. So coaches gain the trust of the athletes and their respect by acting as positive role models and following a consistent set of values. So maybe, Karim, could you just talk about actually how we went about that at Prep?

Because one of the first things we did as a staff was actually deciding our values for the year, and then we obviously involved the players, and then we kind of presented those values to the players, which we were able to constantly refer back to during the season.

Yeah, I think I actually have— that values work was the first thing we did at Prep as a staff, and as part of a new program with players coming from all over the world, we essentially outlaid just 4 clear values that we wanted to live.

And we talked about specific examples both on and off the court of how they should be living those out. And it's something that we expected players to use in their language and in their vocabulary. And one thing here in this tenet of idealized influence that I think I kind of have a more recent example of in my mind with the program I lead high school is we actually last Saturday to kick off our year in the school year, we had a meeting where we talked about how we wanted our players to show up as young

men and role models in the building. And we talked about just the sense of healthy masculinity, which is a challenge, I think, for young basketball players and young male basketball players in general. And we talked about what that looks like and In specific examples.

And even from like, okay, how do we treat like first day of school? You have a girlfriend that you're walking around with. Like, how are you walking around with them in the building in a way that's not controlling and that shows them and your partner as an equal, right?

So like this, I think that sends a really important message to our players about, hey, this is more than just about basketball. Like, we're having a basketball meeting and we're not even talking about this. We're talking about what it means to be a role model.

And like, we're modeling that for you as men.

Yeah, totally. Like a lot of the time, Kareem, when I hear talk about culture and values, I feel like the way it's done is somewhat cringey, but I felt like the way we did it was the complete opposite. It was actually very authentic and sincere, and I think the players saw that and they really respected and it actually resonated with them.

So, I mean, I've got our 4 values here that we agreed on as a team at College Prep. I'm just gonna read them and then maybe could you just build on how we actually communicated this to the players? So I've got growth. We had growth as our first Our first value is valuing mistakes, effort, becoming a better version of oneself.

Our second value is creativity, seeking knowledge, solutions, being intellectual, and fighting the status quo. We had joy, approaching the game and our work with a sense of purpose and conviction. And the last one was chosen by Linus, the captain, fight. We compete with a high level of effort and resilience, especially under adversity.

And I think, you know, these values resonated very much with our players and staff alike. So, you know, how did we kind of communicate this with the players in a way that was meaningful as opposed to, you know, something that's not very tangible and cringy.

Yeah, I think that one of the biggest things we did again for this, for this area of like being a role model was every coach was able to share like why this value is important to them. And also I think one of the coolest things we did was just have like Linus just really thoughtfully choosing that last value and grounding it in his experience with the program and saying like, hey, You know, I want— like last year when we played these games against these Eastern European teams, we didn't really know how to respond.

And like, this is something that's important to me and who I want to become as a person. And so that was, I thought, the most powerful one because it's like where it wasn't just top-down, like these are our values and this is what happens when you break them.

It was very much co-created.

100%. And I think too, we just constantly referred back to them. And, you know, sometimes I needed to be reminded to do that more. But it's so easy, you know, in a practice when you're debriefing, you know, guys, is this, you know, we spoke about fight, is this example in our wall pick and roll right now?

Are we showing fight getting over and navigating these picks? You know, it's making it specific. And I think that's when the players understand the value and the importance of it. So let's go back to the 3 other dimensions of transformational coaching. And the second one after idealized influence is inspirational motivation.

Coaches inspire athletes by clarifying expectations and by fostering perceptions of team unity, meaning, and challenge. What does that mean to you, Kareem?

I mean, I think this goes to your point that you made just now of this isn't just something we talk about at the beginning of the year and never refer back to or hang up on a wall and forget about, like clarifying expectations.

So we have these values. Okay. It's one thing to talk about value. But when we can come back to it repeatedly and have those expectations just really crystallize and just be very consistent about it, then it becomes an expectation and it's something that begins to become culture, right?

Culture is what you repeatedly do. And I think this idea of inspirational motivation, like, hey, I know it's hard right now at 6:30 in the morning to have joy and I'm tired, but like, I'm going to bring a creative activity to you because that's what we said was important to us and that's what we committed to.

Yeah.

committed to. And so we're gonna keep bringing that and we're gonna keep expecting you to do that because that's what we're holding everyone to here. Like, that's just— and when I think about creativity, that was something that like I was really proud of in our program because every one of our coaches embodied that.

Like, no one was showing up to a player dev session with a stale activity, right? And, and I think, Alex, you were a great model for this. And I think this was something that we, we all aspired to kind of your level of of creativity

and ingenuity and that the kind of design mindset. And that showed in the way we coached. And because that was the way we coached, I think players showed that in the way they played. Like, we had some really, really incredible, like, game, you know, there were players who would do things in games and come up with solutions in games that you're like, Wow, that's very creative.

And you think about like why that was a routine thing we would see there. And it actually was very much embedded in just how things operated on a day-to-day level.

Absolutely. And this is where I don't think you can get away from how using a constraint-led approach well, and what I don't mean, I don't mean using a games approach and instructing heavily within small-sided games. I mean using a CLA. It's completely linked to transformational coaching.

It's like within inspirational motivation, it spoke about team unity and challenge. Well, that to me just speaks about every single activity we did within the practice environment was meaningful and challenging for the players. And I think this really ties into the third point, intellectual stimulation.

Coaches provide opportunities for athletes to engage in the coaching process. And I think that, Kareem, is Okay, we did co-design frequently where players could actually design their own activities and constraints. But even when you look at how we played offense and defense, conceptual offense, conceptual defense, where yes, we had our principles of play, but decision-making and kind of responsibilities were shared.

You know, they had chance to really shape what we did. And I think that's where both the CLA and transformational coaching, they're completely linked together.

It's about like the beautiful thing about basketball and the reason that I love the game so much is there's so many choices involved in the game, right? It's so dynamic. And so I get so heartbroken when I hear coaches say things like, oh, you must stay in the paint, or like, you cannot do this.

Or, you know, it's like you actually have to give players a choice if you want to meet this idea of intellectual stimulation. You can't— just because I, as a player, was taught that I shouldn't be— when I was in middle school, I shouldn't be shooting from far away.

That doesn't mean that I should be doing that. Because if I do that, then you're taking away the opportunity for our young players to make choices and to be intellectually challenged and to find solutions on their own, which frankly, within a course of the game, when you're out of timeouts and Going down the stretch, that is a critical skill.

So the last part of this, Kareem, is individualized consideration. And Kot defined this as coaches show genuine care and concern for the unique needs and abilities of each athlete. You know, I think you already spoke about how as coaches we really attempted to fulfill that every day.

I think this could be maybe a great opportunity to describe Team Pulse because I felt like that was one of the best things we actually did at college prep.

Yeah. So Team Pulse is just the idea of every week as a coaching staff, we would sit down and we would basically report on every player in the program. And we would co— like every coach was delegated with the task of like having a real clear pulse and connection with 2 to 3 players.

And we would essentially report back how that player was doing to the greater group. And the greater staff, and we would code them either red, like they're really struggling, yellow, like they have some challenges right now that they're coping with, but it's still kind of throwing them off, and green, like everything's going well.

And for every player that wasn't a green, we would kind of create a list of action steps and have some discourse to find the proper action steps that were designed to get those players back in a place where they were thriving. We knew that if a player was not in a green place, it is going to be very hard for them to develop as a player, right?

Like, if you are struggling, whether it's with a death in the family or with a breakup, and you're showing up to practice and you just have that, like, we have to give individualized consideration to the players who are going through that. That is so crucial.

I think I heard when we were in Vegas, actually, was talking with an assistant coach at Mizzou, and he was talking about how every practice Coach Gates, the head coach of Missouri in NCAA Division 1 basketball, will make physical contact with each player to just gain an understanding of how that player is showing up to practice that day.

And that is a great example of this. Like, we need to know how players are doing. And that's kind of another way, just like Coach Gates did that with physical contact, we did that with Team Pulse. And we were essentially like, every week we're going to make a plan for any player who's not doing well, and we're going to follow up.

And that's like a way of showing players that we care for them.

Absolutely. Big shout out to Mizzou. I think one of the most progressive programs in the whole of college basketball. Like really, they're genuinely interested in evidence-based ideas, which is, it's what we need, you know? So I wanted to just read this bit, Kareem, and this to me, I came across this in a paper the other week and I was quite shocked by it.

It was a paper by Lefebvre and Evans in 2016. And what they were looking at was they were kind of assessing coach development programs in a whole variety of sports. And they assessed 285 different coach development programs across the world. And they found that the clear majority, 261 of those, focused primarily on technical and tactical skills.

Only 18 focused on coaches, the coach's interpersonal knowledge and behaviors such as leadership, team building, I'm guessing. And then there were only 6 really focused on the intrapersonal knowledge and behavior, AKA some of the ideas we've spoken about today and applying transformational leadership and really having the players benefit from that.

Would you say that's a pretty damning indictment of not just the basketball world, but the sports world? And how can we move beyond this?

Yeah, to me it's just a huge missed opportunity, right? Like, how can you have— that's crazy, 261 of 285, that's over 90% are focusing on something that I would argue doesn't even matter if you don't have the interpersonal and intrapersonal approaches, right? Like, you cannot— you will not be able to reach players on a technical level if you can't first reach them On a personal level.

And so that's just totally backwards to me. And it makes sense. Like, that's what we see. You know, I think a lot of even just, you can observe what's happening with our young athletes or even what we went through with young athletes. And, you know, we've all had great coaches and we've also had coaches who we did not get that level of transformational coaching with.

It was very transactional. And so. Yeah, that is, that is quite damning and it's quite devastating. It's also, I think, why you and I are doing the work we're doing.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, there's this big misconception, Kareem, that participation in sport is an automatic positive. I would challenge that in a huge way because, and this is aligned with research too, and it's research has actually shown that the outcomes of sports participation, especially at the youth level, but even the professional level, they're dependent on several social and other contextual factors.

And obviously, one of the biggest factors and one of the biggest outcomes as to whether this sport will be a positive or a negative factor is the role of the coach, right? And it's like, if the coach is not transformational, then what is the chance of that sporting experience being a positive one?

And even research by, it was Amanda Vizek on Fun Maps. She even showed that for Olympic-level athletes, Fun is a huge part of what motivates them and what they actually desire within the training environment. Yet within the basketball world, I think we've got it so wrong.

So I mean, what do you think needs to change, Kareem, at an individual and an organizational level for some of the ideas we've discussed today to become more widespread?

I think this is actually a great way to wrap. You remember Ingrid, who we coached together?

One of the players at the camp.

I got a text from her yesterday and it said, just out of the blue, she sent me a screenshot that says, and the career continues, exclamation point, exclamation point. And she said, you have made the women's club basketball team for the 2023 club semester.

So Ingrid was a player who had not had much basketball experience at all, right? And because of the way she was coached, she genuinely learned to love the game and now she's You know, at a Division 1 school playing at a club level, which is very— it's quite competitive.

And it's because she gained an appreciation and a love for the game because she was coached in a transformational way and using the CLA. And I think when we have players who have that love and appreciation for the game, like, they're bound to give it back.

And so I think like that is the larger hope that I have in this work is that like these ideas like When the sport can serve its purpose, which I believe is like to develop people and to make you feel as a person complete and more complete than you were without the sport, then that I think will pay itself back.

And we'll see hopefully a shift away from more transactional approaches to coaching to coaching that is really meant to develop humans.

That's an awesome way to wrap up. So I think this leaves a lot to a lot of future conversational points, which we will have Kareem on the Transforming Basketball podcast and through the blog. And I think what we're really going to try and do in the future is share some very practical ideas for coaches and other practitioners in the basketball space to adopt more transformational behaviors.

And that's going to be one of our biggest kind of outcomes with Transforming over the next few years. So big thanks for jumping on today.

Thanks, Alex. Excited to keep speaking with you and to kind of stay in touch here.

Really appreciate it, man. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you would like to learn more about the work we do, head to www.transformingbball.com to access our free resources and help spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed this episode, then please subscribe and leave a rating or review On your favorite podcast platform.

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