Basketball Training for Coaches

Mike MacKay of Canada Basketball, the coach Alex Sarama calls his biggest influence, describes two mentoring conversations that go wrong. In the first, an experienced coach gets an outsider who just tells them what to change. Their reaction, in Mike's words: "who does this guy think he is telling me what to do? I mean, I've been coaching for 30 years." In the second, a new coach gets a mentor who only asks questions, and thinks: "Why don't you just tell me what to do? It'd be a whole lot easier."

In both cases, the style of mentoring didn't match the coach. On EP19, Mike put the starting point simply:

Mike describes five levels of mentor. Use them as a menu when you choose any kind of coach training:

Mike's point is that it's never only one of these, and that novices often don't know what they need yet. Before you look for training, name the situation you want to improve. "Players keep asking how the rotation works" points toward a trainer and a rehearsal. "I am unsure whether the offense needs more time or a different solution" points toward someone who watches the activity with you.

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It's tempting to try to change everything at once. The last chapter of Alex's first book, Transforming Basketball, argues for a shorter one. It borrows MAYA, short for "most advanced yet acceptable", from a presentation Pinder and Askew gave for Skill Acquisition Ireland: the most ambitious change your setting will actually accept right now.

The book's first example is small on purpose: players change location on every shot in a shooting activity. Its advice for working with other coaches is to start from the activities they already run, blocked drills or small-sided games with no particular constraint, and show how each could be improved by adding a defender or changing locations. New ideas are phased in gradually instead of all at once.

Apply the same filter to yourself before you book anything. If your shooting segment is spot shooting, the next step might be a defender who passes and closes out. If your team runs a pass-and-cut motion, it might be one advantage game a week. Pick the training that helps with that step, not the one that promises to change everything.

Clinics, courses, books and podcasts build what the psychologist James Gibson called "knowledge about": what you can explain. What changes your practices is "knowledge of": what you can actually do in the gym, live, with players in front of you. Coach education research makes the same case.

Transcending Basketball includes a guest section by Matt Wood on what that looks like for a coach developer. The job, as he describes it, is to change the task constraints that challenge a coach's current practice, direct the coach's attention to what matters in their gym, and design the next learning opportunity with the coach rather than for them. It starts with knowing the coach.

His example has two parts. First, a workshop with curated video that makes coaches question the idea of one ideal technical model. Then coach and developer go into a live session, and the coach looks again at players they already know, this time noticing each player's own solution, for instance on free throws or shots from range. The workshop gives knowledge about. The live session is where knowledge of begins. When you compare clinics, mentors and courses, ask which of those two parts each one actually gives you.

The volume of material can work against you, too. Transcending Basketball makes the point plainly:

Pick one idea at a time and take it to the court, without expecting a shortcut. Talking on EP169 about the growing interest in the constraints-led approach, Alex said coaches often want "a cheat list":

The trainer model works on your own, too. Choose one behavior you can observe in your own coaching, rehearse it, and check it against how players respond. Two exercises from Transcending Basketball:

• Say less before players start. The book calls it a challenging but highly effective activity: give "the least amount of information, in the shortest possible time" before an activity begins. Explain how it starts and how it's scored, skip the rotations unless you're running bursts (where players stay on offense or defense for a set time instead of one possession), and let players figure out the rest.
• Record and re-do. Mic yourself up for one practice and listen back. Mark filler ("OK," "alright," "do you understand?") and any instruction that came out more prescriptive than you meant, then rewrite it as a suggestion and use the new version next time.

Then repeat it at the next practice and compare. Keep what helped and pick the next thing. Our coach development guide covers the review side in detail, including Simon Turner's "what, so what, now what".

If you need a behavior to pick, chapter 5 of Transcending Basketball sets out feedback as a set of contrasts, each one a habit you can choose to work on:

• Shotgun or sniper. Scattered feedback on everything, or one specific, measured point.
• White noise or silence. Not every moment needs a coach talking. Constant feedback isn't what players get in a game either.
• Absolutist or suggestive. "Have a think about this" instead of an instruction to follow every time.
• Instructive or questioning. A short question can help players notice an option they missed.
• One solution or many. The coach doesn't always have to know the answer. Set the game up and see what players find before giving feedback.
• Internal or external. Point attention at the outcome of the movement, not at how to control the body.

A tally sheet makes the behavior visible. When a member in our community asked how to stop slipping back into traditional habits, Adam Omiecinski suggested setting yourself targets before each practice, only asking questions whenever you feel yourself over-instructing, and marking a piece of paper every time you give very instructive feedback. George Vaz collected the replies in How to Avoid Reverting to Traditional Coaching Habits, and he is honest that behaviors won't flip overnight.

Training only sticks if somebody looks back at the session. In Transcending Basketball, the questions below are suggested for a director of methodology to ask staff after practice. They work just as well on your own, or with an assistant after the gym empties:

• "What did you notice about the level of challenge during this part of practice?"
• "What constraints could be used to increase or decrease the level of challenge?"
• "How did the players respond during this activity?"
• "How representative of the game was this?"
• "How could the representativeness of this task be increased?"

The book is clear that there are no correct and incorrect answers here. The point is to notice your own behavior and the things you hadn't considered, through many short conversations rather than one long one.

If You're Responsible for Other Coaches

One of the questions we get most often is how to bring these ideas to the other coaches in a program, or across a whole club. In Coaching Staff Development: Bringing the CLA to Your Club, Alex starts with trust. Most of his work with the London Lions coaches was building relationships first, because coaches who feel they are being aggressively "changed" won't adopt anything. Transforming Basketball makes the same point from the other side: criticizing an approach is not criticizing the coach who uses it.

After that, he suggests an informal workshop with small breakout tasks. Coaches describe the constraints-led approach in 60 seconds, use constraints to simplify a 1-on-1 that's too hard, or take one of the team's principles of play and design an activity that shapes it. The answers show you where each coach is. Then comes the part that matters most, which is seeing them coach on the court and giving feedback after practice.

His last tool is the staff development plan, the coaching version of a player development plan. He does them three times a year, co-designed: each coach names what they feel their biggest rate limiters are (the behaviors holding their coaching back), and you plan practical ways to work on them together. When you then watch their practice, you know what to look for. As he puts it, coaches have their own rate limiters just like players, and filming yourself running practices and timeouts is a great way to find them.

If you want to study one idea in depth, start with one of these:

• [Coaching Clinic with Alex Sarama](/coaching-clinic-with-alex-sarama) (free). A coaching clinic session with founder Alex Sarama covering the Transforming Basketball approach.
• [Introduction to the Constraints-Led Approach](/clinic-introduction-to-the-constraints-led-approach) ($49 USD). For coaches who want to understand how the Constraints-Led Approach applies to basketball.
• [Implementing a Conceptual Offense](/clinic-implementing-a-conceptual-offense) ($49 USD). For coaches ready to take conceptual offense from theory into practice.

Compare all of them on our coaching clinics page, see longer programs on coaching courses, or start with the free resource library. Whichever you choose, decide before you start which situation in your own practice you'll apply it to.