Using the CLA at Brose Baskets

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Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball podcast. Today I am joined by Simon Bertram. Simon and I go back a few years. I did a trip to Bavaria in Germany where I did a project working with the local federation on using the CLA as a coaching framework and embedding it into the coach licenses and had an awesome week with Simon and his colleague Razvan at the federation.

Since then, Simon has shifted roles. He's now working for Bamberg, one of the leading clubs in Germany, renowned too for some of the work they've done in the youth space. And they've really shifted towards using a constraints-led approach. So this is going to be a really interesting discussion.

Simon, great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me, Alex. I'm glad to be here. It's a big honor.

Absolutely. So, you know, I think you're one of many coaches in Germany who are going down this route. And I think Germany is probably one of the countries which I'm most excited about in terms of more coaches trying the CLA. I know there's a lot of coaches we still have to get on board at different levels of Germany, but, you know, I look at guys like you, all the other German Guests I've had on the show, especially like Felix Engel.

Then you've got coaches like Florian, you got Stanley Ritt, and you've got all the guys at Alba. You got Elias, who's doing great, great work. He came to Borgo Romero with me for 2 weeks last summer. So it's really interesting. I think there's a vibrant community, a lot more coaches I haven't mentioned, and I'm sorry, I've, you know, forgetting their names now, but it's exciting.

There's something going on. Do you see that too in Germany?

Yes, I do see it, but it's restricted to the professional level, I'd say. So once you go down into the more like non-professional clubs or leagues, it's getting harder and harder to, to get people dive into the CLA approach. So it's really interesting to see that all the professional youth coaches we have in our community, I hardly know anyone who's not doing the CLA anymore.

But once you go down in the, let's say, lower leagues, youth coaches.

Yeah.

On a non-professional level, it's really hard to convince them of doing the CLA. So I can see it with our U10 coach, for example, with the coach of my son's team, and he's not following CLA and it's hard to get him, get him doing it.

So.

So it's, it's exciting. And I think I was just having the conversation with Norbert Alba the other day, and he does amazing work in the Alba team. And I think it's always tough because I think a lot of the time I feel the same way as coaches sometimes.

Inside our own country, we're not as respected. And I've like hardly done anything in England. This is the first time I'm living here after 8 years, but we're always kind of, it's always abroad maybe that these ideas are picked up more. And I think it's interesting though, because at the same time, I think with the setup of German basketball and some of the resources available in the infrastructure, especially like JBBL, you know, under-16s, NBBL, under-19s, I think you could do a lot.

What do you think is preventing these ideas becoming more widespread? Because it's, let's be honest, there's still some very big academies and, you know, Bundesliga teams who are definitely not using this approach in their academies.

No, for sure not. I think it's one aspect is time, because I know a lot of people would claim not to have time to develop themselves and to start reading things, watching things, and who are also open enough to new ideas. And that's also a mentality thing, and I think it's Also age-related maybe, cuz most of the coaches I know are my age, so I'm 37, soon to be 38, and most of them are in my age range.

And the older people get, the more they are reluctant to learn or adapt new things. So that's, I think, the major thing. And if you go down on the lower levels, everything they do is voluntary. So they come to the gym twice a week or 3 times a week and they do the stuff they've been doing for the last 20 years.

So why should they change? So that's the most important thing when we talk about that.

Definitely. And I think this is why I wanted to get you on, because it's really interesting because at Bamberg, you guys have gone all in on this approach. I think it started a few years ago when Razvan and Markus Husemann, who we've had on the show already, at the federation were very brave in wanting the CLA to be done throughout Bavaria, incorporated into coach education.

And I think, is that correct, Simon, that that was when you really went all in on this approach?

It's half correct, I'd say, because I, I told you before that I was already doing CLA things without knowing that I had done it. So, or that I was doing it. So when you came, I started researching and I started, how am I approaching this, this CLA thing?

And I found out, okay, so most of the things I've done were already one-on-one, always. I barely did one-on-zero stuff. So on-air stuff. But when you came, you helped me putting everything into a frame. So this was like the major thing for me that I knew, okay, so I'm on the right way already.

Yeah.

So now I have a frame, I have a terminology that was for me the most important thing. And from that terminology, I was able to get the roots down to all the things that I've been doing or that I've done before. So this was for me the most important thing.

Love that. So I think one of the hardest things is being able to incorporate these ideas across the whole club. And, you know, since starting Transform It, we've had messages from so many coaches, like literally several hundreds. And the most common message is, I'm doing this, but I can't convince the colleagues at my club to do this.

What advice have you got? So how, how have you guys done this at Bamberg? And, you know, that's a very prestigious club too, so I can't imagine it was easy.

Yeah, so it's not that the process of Getting there is not finished yet, but also the majority of our coaches we have here, also the full-time coaches, or let's say halftime and full-time coaches, are also very young. And when I took over in Bamberg 1.5 years ago, the under-14 team, my assistant coach Niklas, he was also already kind of doing CLA without knowing it.

So when I came, I introduced this to him and he saw the progress that we made with the kids. It's not that you see the results like within 1 week or 2 weeks, but like over the time he said like, listen, hey, it might take a little longer, but it gets deeper into the kid and it lasts there.

So, and that's what he said. So, hey, listen, with you, I learned basketball completely new. So for me, it's like transformation that went through is something that also the other coaches now have started following. And I think it only goes by example and you can only lead this thing.

By doing it, and then the other catch up to it and they see it. And ultimately I would say you can see it in the players, in the players' eyes. So, because when they come to our practice, they know, okay, so everything we do is kind of fun, but we also learn.

And it's not like we always allow them to get out of our frame, if you can say so. And that's what they really like and what they really encourages them to show more effort out of themselves.

Yeah.

And I would say that this is also an important thing. So in the end, you can only convince people by showing them results. And ultimately it's what I learned. We have to get back from the weekend result. So if we lose on the weekend, it doesn't matter to me anymore.

I mean, of course I love winning, but when I see progression, I can also lose because I see, okay, players are developing. So I, I texted you about this kid. We have with 1 meter 90, 12 years old. So I put him in a position where he needs to bring up the ball.

So he's not a traditional guard, so he loses the ball. So I don't care about this, you know, and you need to get away from the result-driven approach and see the kids developing. And what does it bring to me if I keep winning, winning, winning, winning?

But in the end, I ultimately don't have any players in the JBBL or in the NBBL or in the So this is in the end our goal to get the kids prepared to become a pro.

That's it. So I love it, Simon. It's, it's tough because being back working in the reality of youth basketball, because, you know, when I was running the prep, it was a very high level team, but now seeing youth basketball again in my, when I'm in London, it's amazing seeing the reality.

I feel like I've been in the bubble the last 8 years and a lot of other coaches like yourself and all the coaches who are on the Transforming Wave. With me, we're all, we've made crazy progress. And I feel like since I've come back to the UK, I've gone back in time because over 8 years, like, I'm a completely different person and coach.

I've studied like crazy, but you're still seeing the exact same things as when I was growing up in the UK. Like, youth teams still playing zone the whole game, like having literally no principles of play whatsoever. And it's just, it's so disappointing, but hey, we just gotta keep advancing, moving on.

And I'm going to say, I caught up with Nicolas in Belgium because we were there with our Lions teams at a Christmas tournament. It was right after Christmas. And it was very cool to see another team who trained in this way. And I think we were the only 2 clubs in that whole tournament, probably 200 clubs.

We were in the minority with Bamberg and the London Lions. I think the only clubs there really all in on CLA, but you could really see a difference just in terms of How the players were interacting, how even warmups, you know, you'd see our kids, both of our clubs going on and we were doing full-sided games for warmups and, you know, all the other clubs doing all their traditional stuff.

And that was really cool. So one of the things, you know, we've done at Lions to really implement this is we meet a lot as coaches and really get on the same page. Did you guys do the same thing at Bamberg? Was it a lot of conversations across different age groups?

Do you have like principles of play? That you're following each age group?

Yes. But we are not there yet. So it needs to, we need to meet more often. So we have one meeting a week now for 2 hours. In these meetings, we mostly talk about current stuff, not about the future stuff that we are planning to do.

So it's mostly about the current situation, about the weekends, who plays where. And what I found out is what, to me, what is most important Is to spend time together in the gym. I'm trying to be at the JBBL practice at least once a week to see my 14, under 14 kids practice there.

So because we now did the switch that I started sending up some kids from my under 14 team, I pulled up kids from U12 now. So we are kind of doing a switch now where we do the, where we put the better players or the stronger ones now in the all next age group.

And for me, like work shadowing other coaches and giving them feedback and talk about practices. So when I came to the JBBL practice, I talked to, to our head coach, Jan, and I said, like, listen, why did you do that? And why wouldn't you do this and this and that?

And I also picked up stuff from his practice. I think this interchange or this exchange of thoughts needs to be more pushed. And when I was coaching in Nuremberg with Rassmann, we had one practice a week where all the performance teams from under-12, under-14, JBBL, and NBBL were together in one gym.

And I think this is very important to see the other coaches work because most of the time we, we as coaches are always in our own bubble. You know, I hardly see any other practices. So this first helps me to get to know new ideas and new impact, and it helps to exchange thoughts.

So I think this is the most important thing that we need to do and that we need to push on.

I love that. And obviously, I think, you know, the Norberg Tornadoes, great club, a lot of, uh, Razvan, Diogo, all those guys doing great work there. I think what you're speaking about, it's what I call the siloed effect. And I've written about that a lot in the book.

And it's, I think at the highest level, you see the silos in all the different departments, like different player development from team development to scouting to athletic performance to physio. It's all very fragmented. But at the youth level, you see the same silos in the age groups where you said each coach in the bubble, and that's where just Being able to meet, talk about things, that's the way you get out of these silos.

And it's fun, Simon, because I go, I could go to any Lions practice now and I see coaches using the same language, the same principles of play, players, you know, having the same mannerisms, working hard, same intentions. And that's so satisfying seeing that versus having nothing.

And the good thing about it that every coach can still be himself or herself. But there's one thing that came up to my mind also about the things why I wouldn't, why people wouldn't jump on the CLA approach. Is because you need to master the game.

If you want to coach CLA, you need to be a master of the game. You need to know which outcome do I want with this drill or with this exercise that we are doing up next and what comes after that. So you cannot just do random practices or 1-on-1 and then go into 5-on-5 immediately, for example.

Sometimes, of course, you can do it, but you need to have a plan. That's maybe frightening for most of the coaches because they find out, okay, I'm not As good as I thought I might be. And for most of them, it's hard to acknowledge their mediocrity, maybe.

So it's hard to say, but maybe it's, it's the right term, you know?

It's a painful truth.

Yeah.

It's just made me think about this is what you would say to people who say that the CLA has been done for years, but it's merely being rebranded. It's like old wine being put in new bottles. Because I disagree very strongly with that.

What would you say to that? And then I got my ideas.

Well, I, I'd also say, I mean, some people claim that CLA is nothing new, which might be true, but it always comes down to the combination of things. So CLA is not only the thing you do in practice, it's also how you do it.

And also, as I said, like before, it's also combined with the terminology. And if you, if you do CLA, but you might not have a terminology that appears to that. It's appearing as a, is it? No, it's, uh, that is connected with practice, then it can be very hard to do it properly.

So I'd say it's the quote that you mentioned is maybe not completely correct, but also not completely false.

Yeah. What I say to that is it's like, yes, coaches have done small-sided games for years for sure, but it's not, it wasn't understanding the CLA framework and it was typically they did those games alongside very traditional drills, number one, which we would not do within the modern day using the CLA.

Also, there is no understanding of manipulating constraints. So what I think you saw is we've seen the same old school small-sided games being played over and over without coaches tweaking them and scaling the constraints. And that to me is the biggest difference because that's when you understand the theory behind the CLA, it changes how you can actually shape the activities.

And that's what it comes down to. Why I always say to coaches, learn the theory because you'll be a much better coach when you know the theory.

Yes, it is. And regarding the things that you talked about, the tournament in Belgium, also the warmup stuff, for example, when we warm up as a team, we practice. So we don't do anything different that we don't do in practice. So we, all the things that we do in warmup is, are the things that we do in practice.

So we start with one-on-one. We start like guided defense, 1-on-1. We play 2-on-2, we play 3-on-3, we play 4-on-3, we play 5-on-4, play 5-on-5, and we don't do anything else. And then other coaches come to me, like they say, like, what are you guys doing?

Playing already? I said, yeah, why not? Why shouldn't we? In the end, this is the essence of what we need to do.

Absolutely.

And we need to let the kids play. And you can tell like the kids are enjoying it. And they always, the other team from the other side, they do like line drills and they shoot from free spots. On rebound, pass the ball to the next one.

And we do jungle shooting, for example, and they look over to us and they are, our kids are laughing, but they're also very determined. And then they look at us and they say like, oh, it looks fun and blah, blah, blah. So it's really, it's really nice to see that, that our approach apparently is a nice thing to do and also for the kids' development.

That's it.

Fun doesn't exclude progress. So this is what I always say.

Jungle shooting, a Transforming classic. We've obviously got it on the website for the coaches who don't know what it is. It's funny, Sama, because I relate to that when I'm with the G League team, the Rip City Remix this year. When I've been doing this with our associate head coach, George Galanopoulos, he's excellent.

And George and I have really had some fun exploring the CLA together this year. And pregame, we do it all with our players in the G League, and the G League players are doing this. They love it. And we get looks like we're aliens from opposing coaching staffs because, you know, they're doing all their Dance reversals the other end.

And, but we're there, we're using former players on our staff as defenders. We're guiding it. We're playing like 1-on-2s, 1-on-3s, different constraints. And it's awesome. The players love it. So I want to shift this, Simon, to Talent ID, because let's be honest, Bamberg is, is especially compared to a city like Munich in Bavaria, it's, it's obviously a very small town.

And, you know, you guys are trying to find the best players possible with potential in that region to, you know, come through the academy and hopefully one, one day play for the BBL team. So could you talk a little bit about how you're going about recruitment in schools?

Because actually I want to selfishly learn this too, because at Lions we're going to start this and go into like loads of schools throughout London and we haven't done anything like this yet. So I'd love to hear about some of the things you're doing in this space.

Yeah, sure. So I'm glad to talk about that because that's also something I picked up from the Federation and especially from Razvan. Again, everybody who doesn't know Razvan Munteanu should search his name.

He'll be on a podcast soon, so don't, don't worry.

I just wanted to mention that because he's been a huge impact on, on my development as a coach. So you, you guys both have had a major impact on my work as a coach. Well, so we started using a company, or we started working with a company, it's called 4 Talents, and they developed I don't know how to call it, but an algorithm where you can measure certain things and they put it together to one, let's say, outcome where you can see like how tall it's gonna be, uh, how fast they are in comparison to

their age group kids and everything. So we started doing those measurements and when I came to Bamberg, this was one of my big, let's say, goals to implement the same thing that we did for the federation. For talent identification here in Bamberg too.

So I'm glad to say that we can do it now that we started already with our performance teams. And when we have school activities, most like the last 10 years, for the last 10 years, we haven't gotten out one kid from these school activities into our performance teams.

And I asked myself, like, how can this be? We are moving about 20,000 kids a year. In Bamberg and the surroundings.

And for 20,000 kids in your basketball programs?

No, no, no. Well, they get in touch with our—

wow.

I don't know how to say, but it's not the performance work, but the difference. Yeah.

The, the, like the participation or grassroots.

Yes.

Yes.

That's a huge one. Like school activities. We have like elementary school days where we go into one school and we, we do like stationary practices so that one class stays with me for 10 minutes. Then the next station with the other coach, and we haven't gotten out one kid.

So I started thinking, okay, we need to change this because we are a small town club. And let's say we have around 160,000 kids in our driving distance. Let's say 1 hour, 160,000 kids between 0 and 18 years. So that's not a high number and we need to find the nuggets out of these small kids.

And I started implementing a new approach that we built flyers with a QR code on it. And every time we go to school activities, we have coaches who are actually coaching and we have one coach who's not coaching, but only scouting. So he goes and says like, hey, this kid is interesting.

What's his name? This kid is interesting. That's a sporty kid. He's fast. He might be tall. After we are done, we hand out those flyers with a QR code. And when they scan it, they land on the landing page of 4Talents. Then they start to register because we have like a questionnaire with like, how long have you been doing sports?

What kind of sports are you doing? Have your parents done performance sports? What sport? How tall are they? And when they're done with the questionnaire, we get their registration and then we invite them. So then it says like, you are now invited to the next talent day of Bamberg Baskets.

On the 21st of April, and then they hopefully all showed up there, and that should be around 80 to 100 kids. And then we do the measurements with them. So we do like all kinds of anthropometric measurements, like wingspan, standing reach, size of their shoes, size of their feet, whatsoever.

You can imagine that.

Yeah.

Tougher run. Uh, we do all kinds of tests with the OptoJump. I know, I don't know if you're familiar with that OptoJump. You can measure like the height of a jump. The airtime and everything. And all these things get into a database, online database.

And about 30 minutes later, you get like scores for every kid. So for speed or agility, for example, it's a 1 to 7 star score. 1, of course, is not very good. 7 stars is outstanding. And then all the kids who have done it— now I'm getting into German-English— the thing, they get like compared in their age group.

Yeah.

With their peers. And then you can see, okay, this kid has been excellent in agility, but cognition wasn't that good. For us, it's a huge tool to see, okay, how, first of all, how tall a kid gets. Then in combination with his agility, coordinational, and cognitive test results, we kind of get a, how do you say it, a player that is hollow.

From the kids that we started recruiting with Coach's Eye, we get a more objectified outcome after the testing and we can say, okay, from these 80 to 100 kids we, we had today, we might take 30 into our U12, U14, JBBL, whatsoever team.

And we tried to add them if they had played basketball before. Perfect. If they hadn't, okay, so start learning it because this kid might get 205.

Sure.

Or 198, but he's super fast. And the more often you do those measurements, The more valid the results become. So we started doing it with Federation and with the 2007-born kids, and they are getting very close to the height they got projected with.

So it's a nice tool and it helps a lot to objectify your coach's eye because the coach's eye, as we know, is not always right.

Yeah. It's interesting, Simon. There are some things, and this is why we have a relationship where I can say this. There are some things I like and some things I don't like with the test. And I think for me, I'd be, I'm always careful.

I think in basketball, we know that height matters. And I think doing some type of height test is good, right? For sure. The thing I always get worried about is these cognitive tests and these agility tests. And I've been very critical of things like the NBA Combine over the last year or 2.

And people even in the NBA have asked me. questions about, and I share why, because it's not representative, things like an agility test. With the cognitive test, I'm guessing, Simon, is it something like them reacting to like a flashing object or what is it they do?

Oh, it's a number. It's a number connecting test. So you have 30 seconds to get from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. And so whatsoever.

So honestly, and I'm happy if someone wants to challenge me on this, who's listening, great. Honestly, I don't see a value to that. And it's interesting to have this discussion because, you know, previously I would have thought that something like that was useful, but then I just think like when we compare that to the cognition required of playing basketball, I just think it's completely different.

Right. But I really like, for me, the things that stand out are the efficiency of your process to how you're actually going into these schools, number one, and doing that. And then getting like, getting those players and just inviting them to like a day where you have, you know, the kids picked from all these schools.

I think that's incredible. And then doing like the parent survey, the looking at height, some of those tests I think can be very useful. But I think my point would be to summarize, I think looking more into the cognitive side of that and if it's really of value, and I'm happy to be proven wrong.

My gut feeling is it isn't. And my question would be, would you supplement that with CLA activities? Because that to me would be the true way to see how they're responding to things, like what their perceptual skills are like. I'm guessing you would, right?

Yes. So it depends also on the gym we get because we would like the combine, but also basketball-related stuff. So, because as I said, like for me, cognition is nothing I really emphasize on. So for me, it's really Speed and height.

So, got it.

Yeah.

That's the main metric.

And cognition for me is just like a good thing to compare because you see differences between, and it helps to support your opinion because we have, for example, one player in our U14, he's learning very slow, like super slow. And his results in the cognition test were super bad.

Okay.

And the kids who are actually fast learners, and it helped supporting our opinion.

Sure.

Sometimes we had a different outcome than we expected, but it helps to get our coach's eye more. This is the database that we get, and sometimes it supports, sometimes it's against your coach's eye.

Got it.

But depending on the gym that we get, we do basketball with them too. So especially with the kids who are not in our performance program, because I would like to see them actually play basketball.

Yeah, sure.

I think so. Let's do, let's do a one-on-one. From the free throw line with constraints. Let's see how, how the kids adapt to that. So it's really important to do that too. So, but I'm just with you that the tests are not like, and for us it's also not, let's say, a thing to get rid of kids.

We say dropouts in our program only happen if they want to get out. Yeah. Or after under 16, because that's huge. Under 16, you can really tell if someone is going into the pro direction or not.

Agreed.

And so for us, dropping out with the kids is after you're 16.

Yeah.

Because we can tell, like if we have a 14-year-old who's biological 12, you cannot tell how good he will be.

And I love that.

And we keep them as long as possible.

I love that, Simon. That's what I call as many as possible for as long as possible. And it's, I would encourage club teams in Europe to obviously, like you guys, not be turning kids away, especially under 12s, under 14s. And even trying not to select and just under 14s, if you can have 3 or 4 teams with the same level of coaching, do that.

Great.

Like, and it's also like, not only from a performance level side, but it's also a sort of social responsibility you have as a club. Because when the kids come out of my U14 with 5 or 6 practices a week into like a club where the coach is low level from like low level quality.

And maybe twice a week they fall into a hole.

Absolutely.

And it's our responsibility to keep the kids. And you never know, like maybe after year 16, one kid says like, listen, I really enjoyed the time spending with you 4 years now, but I'm, I would want to do something else. I'm not willing to sacrifice my free time anymore.

So this will solve itself most of the time. So, and that's why we say, listen.

Yeah.

You only get out of our program if you really want, or you say, listen, we enjoyed the time, but now here's the end station for the final destination for you. But we would like to keep you as a referee or as a coach or whatever.

We will always show them alternative ways how to stay in touch with performance basketball, if not as a player. So, yeah, I think it's also a really important thing that we also see this side, not only the performance side.

Yeah. It links in from one of my favorite quotes of Mark O'Sullivan. He says, talent is the graveyard of evidence. No one sees the dead bodies. And that's, that's it. Because very rarely the best players at U12s, U14s that all these coaches in Europe are selecting, very rarely the best, they're the best prospects at U19 or pro.

Unfortunately, all the better kids who could have been far better players, we never hear of them. Why? Because they drop off. Like you said, if they go, if they're not selected for a U14 team, they go to like another worse club, they get worse coaching, less practices.

No wonder they're not gonna flourish.

One more thing, if you, if it's okay for me.

Yeah, do.

Uh, from our testing, we had one player, he's born in 2010 and he's not, let's say he's not a performance athlete yet. He doesn't have the mindset. He's like, sometimes he's there, sometimes he's not, but he always has excuses. So he's learning for school, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So he always is, he's very reliable. But after the testing, we found out he will be between 198 and 202 from his height. And this put him into a very different light because now we said like, listen, we might need to invest a little more on him because he will be big and he's athletic.

So we need to have patience with him. So that's another outcome of these testings that you learn how to approach players differently.

Like. Yeah.

Because sometimes they're not ready yet. I was a late bloomer too. I mean, I never did anything related to performance before. As a player, I was close but never good enough, but I always had the knowledge, so I knew how basketball worked, but I didn't have the physical abilities.

And sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes the players have the abilities but not the mindset yet. And this is something it needs to be developed with the players. And sometimes you see this.

Yeah.

Because we cannot afford as a small program to lose kids that are getting between 198 and 202.

For sure.

And we need to stick with them. So that's why he's now in a different light for me, because before that, I mean, he's tall for his age group, but not that tall. So now I, he was there, fine. He's not there. Okay, fine too.

And now I see him different. This also helps sometimes because you have your stars and everybody knows they're good. But you have also the late bloomers and you might not see them for that. So that's exactly how it works.

And I think this links to my last question, Simon. I think a lot of the time when we look at talent ID and prospects in basketball, we get so focused on only looking at the player. And I think you've done some really good work looking at the holistic side of things and you call it, you know, looking at the person behind the player.

And I think that's really important because unfortunately, Simon, what I see in a lot of European clubs Especially the big, like bigger academies like EuroLeague, ANGT type clubs, is they treat their players as commodities and they own them. It's actually very colonial. And that's my controversial take.

And it's like, we own the player, we do whatever we want. We're going to coach them aggressively. We're going to yell at them. We don't care about like evidence-based ideas to really take care of their bodies and their holistic development.

So.

How can we look at this at the other side and still develop players to an exceptional level while doing it in a transformational way?

Well, that's a big question and it's a very good question. I don't know if I'm able to answer that properly, but I'd say, so I might start differently. I don't know if people know it, but I was a 3x3 head coach for the Bavarian Basketball Federation.

And on this end of our profession, it's always hard to get players buy into 3x3. And I had some players back then playing for a big club in Bavaria. I'm not saying who it was, and they wanted to join my team for the Bavarian Basketball Federation.

And they also wanted to play for the national team. They were like 2 days before we went to the annual meeting of all the German federations where the best players presented themselves and where they get selected for the national teams. 2 days before that, the club called me and said like, listen, the guys can't come.

So I'm like, why? Everything's paid. They're supposed to be there. And they said, no, no, no, we decided differently. And I said like, listen, did you talk to the players? And they said, no, we decided for them. And then the players called me and they said like, yes, they are.

They came to us today and we cannot come. This is impossible. And we want to come. And they just decided over their heads as if they own them, as you said it, like a very colonial approach. Coming from that, like I would never tell a player not to do this.

Or whatsoever. So if you want to go to a camp in Berlin, join ABA Berlin, please be my guest.

Go.

If you want to go to the federation, to the courses, go. National team, go. If you want to do this and this and that, if you do, if you want to do a different sport, do it. So as long as you can manage everything around it, please be my guest.

I think we as coaches need to realize that we are not God.

Yeah.

For players, that, that the generation also Changes because they're more individually, like most of the players, they wear headphones during warmup, for example. Yeah. And they do their individual warmup routines and everything. I would never tell a player to change this routine, but take the earplugs out.

Of course, that's one, or the earphones out, because this is for me, not like, this is not a team player. But to get back to your question, the holistic thing is, as I said before, you need to see the player as a whole first, and you need to ask yourself.

How do I want to get treated as a player? I mean, that's always what I ask myself. I never had good coaches who really paid attention to what I wanted as a player. It was always, so this is the way I want it, so please do it.

And I think I kind of lost my way to answer your question, but that's good for me or for us as a club. The player is the most important, not the player's the most important thing, but the person. How do I answer your question?

Oh, I forgot it.

You answered it, Simon. That's it. That's it. It's, for me, it's, it's that attitude where you're putting the players first. And that unfortunately is what most clubs are not doing because it's the coaches who are first and their egos. And that's why when I created Transforming Basketball, that's why the name I wanted to do it.

I wanted it to reflect the transformational side because everyone looks at us for CLA, CLA, great. But for me, it's actually the transformational side of how we coach, how I interact with the players. I think a lot of coaches don't see that. They just see the activities and they're missing the most important piece, which is this.

It is. But you know, like I told you before, before we started the podcast about the book I'm currently reading that is about an amateur football club in Germany, and the book is called Gentle Toughness. And I think this is what we need to be as coaches.

Sometimes we also need to be tough and we need to be strict when it comes to Certain habits that players need.

For sure.

Performance sportlers. So sports, sport guys, because in the end, ultimately, I mean, if you look at the top level teams now in EuroLeague, tell me one coach who's not a yeller out of your, right now, gun to your head, who's not a yeller in EuroLeague?

And we need to change. First of all, we need to change this. So we as coaches need to get to that level.

Yes.

To show that you can also do it differently.

Yeah.

But for as long as these kind of coaches are the thing that clubs are looking for, we need to prepare the kids for this. And sometimes I need to be somebody else because I, I would like to get everybody like feel okay around me, but sometimes I need to also show kids, hey, listen, this is how performance sports look like.

So if you want to get down this road, you need to be prepared to be mentally abused. It's a hard word, but you need to be mentally tough. You need to be mentally prepared to face pressure. And sometimes coaches put pressure on you.

And that's why I think this gentle toughness is a good term for us as coaches, that we do have to be tough out of the love that we have for our players.

And I think just to confirm my stance on this side, I think you could be tough without being transactional. Like, And that's where it comes to me. Yes. Like we know coach is going to be yelling and abuse, shouting abuse at them. I would never do that.

I could raise my voice, but I wouldn't be swearing. I'd be saying things like, guys, this isn't acceptable right now. This isn't the way we practice. This isn't the level we practice. And it's, for me, transformational coaching, it's not about holding their hand.

It's about holding them accountable to reaching high standards. And that's where I find ways to add pressure. Without doing it through transactional coaching, punishments, yelling. It could be things like playing stressful music, creating a time and score situation where the best players start -6 down in any small-sided game, or just simply feedback saying to them, guys, this is not good enough.

I'm not happy with how you're practicing. And sure enough, I think you find that when you push the players, when you demand excellence out of them in a transformational way, it's perfectly possible.

And maybe Let me get back to that one more time. What I do, I'm also not yelling, but sometimes I raise my voice and I ask them, listen, what was our plan? So, because before the game, I let them choose 2 goals and I give them one.

So for example, if we have, like, we've practiced kill cuts now, but I want them to do that not like automatically like robots, but they need to recognize their—

Conceptually. Yeah.

I can kill the rotation with that. So we had, last time we had the goal. So I said like, my goal is 5 kill cuts scores for the whole game. And they were allowed to set 2 goals at halftime. We were halfway there.

So I said like, listen, so we are good. You've done a good job. And after the game, we never do aftergame talks. So I let them—

Sure.

The locker room and let them do. And we talked about next practice and I, and I said like, listen, what, what did you guys want to do? Because they said, we want to have 5 gap steals. So we didn't achieve it. And I said like, so what does it mean to you?

And I always ask them questions to also make them feel part of this process because it's not my plan. It needs to be their plan and they need to buy into that plan. And you can achieve that by asking them a lot. So I never tell them you need to do this and this and this and this and that.

I ask 'em like, how do we want to do this? Were you in the lava or have you been in the—

Yeah.

Within the 3-point line? Or were you outside or whatsoever? So did you ball down the outside lanes and whatsoever? So these are all the questions we ask them and we try to make them accountable, as you said, but not by yelling, but putting pressure on them by asking them uncomfortable questions.

That's it, Simon. I love it. I love the specificity of that, actually setting KPIs in the game. I think all coaches at any level could do that. And I love the floor is lava reference. And I actually think it's a nice way to end because I believe it was my trip with you 3 and a half years ago where I came up with it for the first time and I tried it out.

So, uh, it's great. I love coaches all over. Really, for me, floor is lava is like, it's an offense in its entirety for under-12s, under-14s. So big thanks for joining the Transforming Podcast. Wish you all the best and thanks again.

Thank you so much. I think, I hope that everybody could follow my ideas at least. So.

For sure.

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