Exclusive Insights from the Transforming Community

If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, This is the podcast for you.

Hey coach, it's Alex Sarama here, the founder of Transforming Basketball. And today we have a podcast episode which I know you will love. That's because we are going behind the scenes of the Transforming Basketball membership community, the world's leading resource for basketball coaches.

To learn about a constraints-led approach and topics such as conceptual offense. We'll be showing 4 of the masterclasses that we've held inside our community. We'll be giving you a preview of 4 of the top masterclasses that we've held in our community. Our members get access to some of the world's leading CLA coaches every month, and these masterclasses were so good that we felt we had to share them with you.

Our first masterclass is with our very own Adam Omiecinski. It was titled CLA Design Principles, and he takes you through the process of how we're manipulating constraints and using small-sided games at Transforming Basketball. Enjoy the podcast.

So what I plan on going over today is activity design principles. Now these, Design principles are taken straight from this book here in 2019, The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sport Coaching and Practice Design. And principles is a very important word here because they're going to underlie everything you do.

They may seem— some may seem more important than others, and that could be certainly so. But either way, regardless, they're going to be playing a role in your practice design whether you know them or not. And I'm just going to try and build a little bit more awareness.

in this process of how they may be influencing day-to-day behavior in the, in your practice environments and the players you're coaching or whatever role you may be included in. So to start things off, I'm gonna ask you guys, how do you design activities?

And it does start with intention, which is kind of funny because that's immediately what Ben started with. I'll let you guys read that, but I'm just going to riff off intention right now. It's just like that. It's a compass. It provides a direction.

It gives you clarity of where you want to go. Now, you can have different sort of intentions. There can be times where I'm hyperfocused on this specific narrow thing, and that'll provide great clear feedback to yourself and the athletes about whether you're actually achieving that intention or not.

And, that may be useful. That's more of the exploit stage where we're simply just trying to maximize an adaptive behavior. Now, that may not be as useful for especially younger kids when they're first starting the sport, or if potentially, you know, you see your players walk in and they're super stressed out and they already have that narrow focus.

And like, if they don't get the immediate feedback they're looking for, it may cause more stress, the attention may narrow even more, and it may not be an adaptive session. So in those cases, whether you're working with youth or you're working with potentially athletes who need to kind of relax a little bit and open up degrees of freedom, You want to broaden the intention.

So instead of saying, hey, I want to work on full-court dribbling against 2 or 3 defenders with a passing option because we're really struggling against the press, and this guy is just— he's gonna have to take the ball up because we don't have anybody else who can handle it, you may just go, all right, I just want to focus on ball handling and passing.

You may play— end up playing a tag game where dribbles are allowed or something of that nature. It really is depending on the context and What kind of adaptive behavior you're seeking in that moment in time? But I think this intention is like the biggest thing for me because it's where we start.

It underpins, as you can see in here, it's always under. It's an overriding constraint, so it's always present whether we know it or not. So I think it's very important to be intentional in how we design our activities, how we design our sessions, and off the court how we live our lives.

If we're not intentional, things become chaotic, and we don't. And again, we don't know whether we're succeeding or not, and we are. goal-oriented meetings. So if we're not getting feedback, if we don't know what feedback to look for, it's very difficult to know whether or not we're heading in the right direction, which is why I have that compass.

Now, for each of the 4 principles, I'm going to show a brief video of an activity. And what I would like you to do, if you have a pen and paper, that's great. If not, type it up on your computer or just do it in your head.

For each principle we're going to go over, come up with potential intentions that you may see in each of these 2 activities. You know, actually, we'll recap after each principle what some of the examples people have. So here's the first video. Again, potential intentions for this activity.

All right, 30 seconds, ladies and gentlemen. Write down all potential intentions that you can think of for this particular activity.

Adam, do you mind if I jump in with a question before we jump into that?

You go for it.

Is the intention based solely upon the tasks that we're doing within the session? Or is it something that we can look at as a session as a whole? Because if I'm running a session where I'm teaching something new, my affordances and my teaching is going to be different to if I'm checking for knowledge or if I'm simply looking for a session where I'm trying to maybe get them to compete, because surely that's going to influence my practice design as much as the tasks themselves.

Absolutely. 100%. This is all scaled. Again, it's principle-based. So there's a macro You could even take this, you could even scale it back even more. What is our goal for the season? Let alone what's our intention for this session, this game? And then you can narrow it down to the activity.

I'm just discussing the activity because that's what I'm interested in. I'm, I've, I have no interest in being a head coach. So this is more my area. I enjoy creating small activities to improve adaptive behavior, but absolutely how you, your intention for your session and your intention for your season, the team you're working with will also, will always be an overriding constraint on Whatever task you're designing.

Cheers.

Thank you.

No problem. Anyone want to offer some of the constraints in there? I think some of the constraints are pretty obvious to this well-educated group that I've, I've had based off the interactions where we started with. See, the possibilities are endless. Thank you for sharing.

All right. So this is basically a picture of how you can go about designing your activities. It lays it out— your sessions, excuse me. So we have the intentions up top there with session goals. We have the level of the player. So coordination would be a little bit lower level players where they're just getting comfortable within their movements.

Adaptability would be higher level players who are a little bit more comfortable in the sport of basketball. Method: explore, exploit, execute. That's more, a little bit more time of the season. Are we exploring options? Are we exploiting affordances? Or are we simply just— is this like basically like pregame leading in?

We just want them being able to be extremely confident in their skill set and just seeing success after success. Level of representativeness. Obviously, it goes on a scale there. Then we have the tasks. And then for constraints, it's task, individual, environment. You can circle which— or circle, you can— it just guides you towards what constraints you're going to do there.

And then finally, we have repetition without repetition, the level of variability and stability in there. I personally don't use this, and I could see how this could be very advantageous in setting up your session. Like, this would be a great little— like, you could even have this more or less like a A few index cards just for each task and chop out task intention or even session intention, then task intention, boom, level of representativeness, task, rep without rep, and then just have those in your pocket as you're going throughout practice.

But it's just something I wanted to put in there and just show how it can be set up for an entire session. And now I'm just gonna open it up to questions and I'm gonna stop sharing my screen cuz I wanna see your faces and I don't wanna just stare at a blank screen and just hear voices anymore.

So.

All right, so if anybody has any questions, and it doesn't have to be about activity design, can be whatever, we got some time here for a little Q&A.

Yeah, I got a quick question. The small space drill, it's less of a question, more about sharing like my idea. What do you think about putting 2 defenders, 1 offensive player, and another offensive player and defender on the other side of the 3-point line and telling him it's either a pass Or 5 seconds inside the cones, and then like a 2-on-1 or something.

So what was your thinking behind adding in that, that element there?

The reason I'm thinking is because usually in a small space, like in-game, if there's a small space, there's going to be a trap or a double-up. Something's going to happen, another defender is probably going to come.

As always, Adam has so many incredible practical nuggets for coaches. That you can apply immediately in your next practice. Many of the ideas that Adam shared came from our time working together at college prep in Italy. This was an amazing 6 months as we were just coming up with so many unique ways to apply a constraints-led approach.

And obviously I'm so grateful to have Adam sharing all his wisdom within the Transforming Basketball community. In our next Masterclass preview, We will learn from Felix Engel in Germany. I only met Felix a year ago when he came to visit me and my colleagues at the London Lions, staying for our first ever Transforming Live Coaches Clinic.

Felix is just as passionate about a constraints-led approach as I am. And so naturally we developed a close friendship. And I'm also really grateful to have Felix as one of our Transforming clinicians Delivering camps and clinics all throughout the world. In this masterclass, Felix explains differential learning in shooting.

He's one of the best out there explaining what this is, and he'll take you through the underpinning theory of DL, as well as how he's using it practically with his players in Germany. Enjoy the next preview of his full masterclass.

Hi guys, welcome to the masterclass from Transforming Basketball, deep dive into differential learning. Since the origin is from Germany, Professor Dr. Wolfgang Schöllhorn, I figured, man, I have to tell Alex that I wanted to do the deep dive into that because I've read a lot of papers from him.

I've listened to a lot of podcasts from him. He's a very controversial person, but also Every time I listen to the things that he's saying, I feel, I don't wanna say stupid, but he makes it very easy to understand and he has some great ideas.

And yeah, I wanna share some ideas, some practical ideas too, that over the course I have used and worked for me. So basically, I don't know if it was Alex or if it was Professor Dr. Wolfgang Schoeller himself who said, actually differential learning is variability on steroids.

So. When we talk about differential learning, to break it really, really down in simple terms, it's nothing else than to create differences in 2 movements. This is not about shooting, but this is like one of my favorite clips I like to show coaches introducing when we talk about skill and about technique, because I don't know with you guys, but I had to do zigzag slides, 1 against 0.

This is the perfect technique. You know, you have to do this with your feet. Your feet shouldn't be crossing. You shouldn't be in the air, whatever the case may be. And I think this is a great example here how movement or skills emerge within a context.

So it's much more about players finding functional movement solutions for themselves rather than not explicitly and maybe even Using internal cues, explaining them what my ideal solution for him might be, and then practice it in an unrepresentative context. So in this case, one-on-one defense, it's all about staying in front of the ball handler.

He did it in a, in a very good way, and he did it not in a way which I saw coaches explain it to me when I was younger, and I still see it still today. They explain, okay, you are not allowed to cross your feet, you know, and he's doing some of the things that actually coach— coaches are still saying that you shouldn't be doing, but for him this is working, you know, and he's forcing very good player to take a bronze medal shot, as we would say, which is still contested and he's not

making it. So it's working for him, you know. So this is what it's all about when we talk about adaptability. When it comes to shooting, I think this is a great example of Kevin Durant just showing what he is able to do. The video here on the left was a game winner from last season, so he's adapting to several things here right now.

There are 2 defenders on him, first of all. Okay, he perceives the defender on the right side, which is coming and flying into. And he's also perceiving the defender in front of him, and he's adapting to this environment in a way that's functional for him, you know?

So instead of just getting through the motion now and taking his shot, he's pulling the shot to the left side. He releases the ball probably a bit, a little bit later, and he's very successful with it. And now you might say, okay, it's Kevin Durant.

He's very tall, talented, blah, blah, blah. But what's he doing before games, or what has he been doing before games? So instead of maybe thinking about, yeah, all the details that end in your head, you know, like all the basketball knowledge you have saved there, maybe it's about the more simplistic things, you know, that you can change and/or intentionally change, and that they have a huge impact.

For example, your language. With your athlete, I already talked about internal cues, external cues. This is why at transforming the breads are such a great way. This is already an external cue, which is amazing because it already forces them to shoot the ball in different way because then you know it's about the last third of the of the basket that they're aiming at, and it has an effect on their on their shooting arc.

Still, I wanted to show you this because it's from Gabriele Wolf. It's the first ever study that got published from the internal external cues. And the task was the internal, or the setup was like this, that they were standing on a, on a ski ergometer, which is not like the Hyrox thing where you have to pull your skis, but it's on with your feet.

And the internal group was told, try to put as much force as you can on the outside of your feet. And the external group was told, try to put as much force as you can on the outside of the plate. The control group was just said nothing, you know?

And as you can see, just the tiny words had a huge impact on the distances that were measured. This is from the Language of Coaching. It's over 160 studies now that have showed that external cues are more beneficial when it comes to the performance of movement.

And I don't know how many of you guys have already written, read the, the book from Alex, but at the, I think it is at the end of the book, there's a nice study as well where it was shown that when an athlete talks to himself, he can talk internally to himself, but right before the get-go or the task or the movement that he's doing, the last thought should be external.

You know, this is important. I want to show you like another thesis now, which is from a good friend of mine, from Niklas Giske. He was on the Transforming Podcast as well. He played all youth national teams, under 20, A2, was a 3x3 national player.

He played first Bundesliga here in Germany and is now playing in the second league. He's becoming a teacher and writing, was writing his master thesis after we talked. back and forth about what could be a nice topic for him. And I wanna share his results because I think even though it's just a master's thesis, it's a very good setting and a very good thesis.

These are basically on the left-hand side, the results. The DG group is the differential learning group. KG is the control group, and the TG group is the traditional group. They just did spot-up shooting. I'm gonna show you the setup in a second. And as you can see, there was a pretest, there was the intervention, the posttest, and then without an intervention, a retention test again.

And the results are speaking for themselves. And now the interesting part is about— I'm going to tell you.

I hope you enjoyed that presentation just as much as I did when I first watched it. For our next one, we're gonna shift to the UK, learning from Liam Jefferson. I had the pleasure of working with Liam last year where he was one of our fantastic coaches at the London Lions Academy.

We came up with so many unique ideas, and Liam has taken all these concepts to his new academy, Oakland's Basketball, where he's now running their boys program and applying the Transforming Basketball principles every single day. Liam is also one of our Transforming clinicians doing events with us, and I'm so grateful to have him as part of the Transforming family.

He will take you through program building concepts that he introduced when he first got the job at Oakland this summer.

Enjoy. Thank you everybody for logging on and joining this masterclass. My name is Liam Kefferson. Alex has lumbered me with 2 different topics, so I apologize if this presentation, because they're so different, is a little bit more traditional and a little less facilitated and more me talking at you and giving you some information.

But if there are any questions, please do feel free to jump in as we go along. I'm gonna try and spend around 20 minutes on each. topic so that then if there is any questions on either as I'm presenting, then you can feel free to jump in.

So give you a little bit of background on myself, who I am, why I came to, to be a member of Transforming Basketball. My name is William Jeffson. As I said, I'm the head of the men's program at the Oakland Wolves. So that's head coaching both our men's team and our academy team.

Alongside that, I work as a clinician. For Transforming Basketball. I was recently out in Norway delivering a clinic, Norway, the Norwegian Federation. And I previously spent time where I got to know Alex at London Lions with the academy at London Lions last season.

And we spent a whole year together there rolling out a conceptual style of play, utilizing the CLA and having a program from U12 all the way to U16 fully immersed. in the CLA and play the way that we play. Before that, I've also spent some time with the Great Britain Under-20 men's, and then before that, spent 12 years at Loughborough University as both an assistant coach and head coach.

And the last thing that I wanted to put on there, because I think it helps to frame some of why we're doing what we're doing at Openers, are my 5 values personally as a coach. So joy, growth, being present, Showing compassion, but also knowing that there is competition in everything we do are those 5 things that sit centrally to me and what I value as a coach.

And so when we get into some about the program that I'm leading, hopefully you can see how this links back to what I believe in and what our program believes in. So what was our roadmap towards building this out? The first thing, and this is where I think some people will have interest on how to bring this to life, was We need to get buy-in from senior staff.

So for me, that was our head of basketball and our head of sport. Now that buy-in process was during my interview for the role. For some of you, you may have been at an organization now, at a high school, at a college where actually you've been working there for 5, 6, 7 years and you already have an existing relationship with your AD to get buy-in on changing perhaps approach and utilizing the CLA.

But for me, that process was in my interview. So they hired me on the basis that we were gonna introduce a lot of this stuff that I'm presenting on now. The next step then is understanding and buy-in from all of our coaches, players, and parents.

And that comes back to the diagram that I put up from Simon Sinek before around, we had to explain to everybody, and we still are doing because we are only 3 months into our season. The purpose behind our entire program. Why do we exist?

Why do we behave the way that we do? How does that help everybody that has that touchpoint within our program? And then we also had to look at changing perception of the program externally as well. So how are we doing that at the moment and what does that look like?

So coaches for me were the most important group of people to be able to attack. And there's no surprise coming from a coach speaking to other coaches. That, that's where we wanted to start because they essentially are the people that have the most contact within our program with each of those players on a day-to-day basis.

So we've been very fortunate working with Alex to get all of our head coaches within our program. So each of those A3 teams on both the men's and the women's side access to the Transforming Basketball membership so that everybody has this membership that we're all engaged on and utilizing.

All of our head coaches have access to that. Then what we've scheduled are monthly coach development meetings. So these happen on a Thursday evening before we get on court with our senior men and senior women, for all of our coaches within our program to come along, bring either a topic, something that they're struggling with, something that they want to understand a little bit further, something that they want to share.

Or myself and then Lee Ryan, who's my equivalent on the women's side of the program. We'll set a specific task that we want those coaches to look at, something that we want them to explore. And we get together for an hour every month and delve into some of those topics to ensure that we are not operating within silos.

Each of our coaches in those meetings are using the same terminology. They're looking at exploring different coverage solutions to our triggers, and they're really, really useful ways for us to upskill our coaches. Ultimately, all of our coaches within our program, with the exception of myself, Lee, and our 2 assistant coaches, are volunteers.

So very similarly to other clubs across Europe, they are oftentimes parents. They're oftentimes youthful coaches that want to give back, or they're former players that have then transitioned into coaching and just want to have some touchpoint still with the game. So we can't expect them to be Spending 2, 3 hours every evening on their coach development in a way that perhaps myself or other coaches will do when we have a paid role and that's part of our job.

But we have that time that's set aside for all of them so that they are still developing, still learning as well. The next kind of group of stakeholders that we obviously had to get on board with rolling out this sort of approach to our program was naturally the players.

That's taken up Different ways and different functions to get them up to speed. So with our values and our kind of commitment, we looked at classroom sessions early on in preseason and have continued to do so. The other solution that we look at as well is a similar solution to how we play versus a switching defense in the pick and roll is the relay pass, or what some coaches call the Messi pass.

So again, we're looking at quick pitch ahead behind the pick, and then straight in again to the roller, either on the short roll or on a basket cut from that roll. And it's a quick dribble out and extra pass. The beauty with this is again, it'll open up opportunities for us to ghost cut, but depending on where the catch is, I'll play a 5, I'll pick her.

Sometimes it will engage X4. Or if we've done our job in engaging X2, as 1 uses the pick, X4 has to step up and we have a quick extra pass to the corner. Now on that corner, and what we work on with our bigs a lot is that they have to steal if they don't short roll.

So if they don't short roll, they are on the rim and they are burying and sealing X5. Now again, we don't have this relay pass we've created. A 2-on-1 situation on the weak side of the floor. Then the final coverage solution that we have when we're playing out of our side pick and roll is what we call a flash.

And this is one of our lives. So this is one of our builds that we add to our triggers. We may be in a situation where we call out side flash, or the point guard knows the next time down the floor, he's communicated, she's communicated with their teammate that next time down Hey, let's look at the flash when we, when we play outside.

And all it is, is the big has to roll all the way to the rim this time rather than a short roll. And as I was talking about before, bury and steal X5. This allows for 2 to flash behind and get that high post catch in the space that we're looking for.

Now on our shot chart matrix, can we score at the rim? Can we score catch and shoot 3, and then can we score from mid-range? This is one of the situations where we are okay with players taking the mid-range jump shot, but we do want them to look first at how well has 5 sealed on the basket.

Can they turn the corner and attack? Can they make an easy little dump-off pass to the big who's sealed on the smile? And can we get a finish there before they settle for a mid-range? Now the beauty with this slash is it also gives us an option to, if they are late On the flash, turn it into a flare 3.

Now on this flare, they would be flaring for 1, and we would look to change sides of the floor. They can again look to short roll or slip the flare to get a catch in the high post. So just 3 different coverage solutions that we've looked at introducing when we're playing out of the side pick and roll.

And both Alex and I spent some time last year when we were at London Lions, we had one practice that was a 2-hour practice, we went into it with no practice plan and we were like, hey, these are the concepts that we want to play with against the zone.

Let's come up with a load of different small-sided games and see what presents themselves and take different directions in practice. And so some of these small-sided games that I'm going to share now are ones that either I've adapted or that Alex and I came up with this time last year almost when we were in a London Lions practice looking at, we see so much zone at junior basketball, unfortunately.

How can we find ways to, to be able to break it down?

Fantastic stuff shared there by Liam, and I know his section of the Masterclass on conceptual offense against zone was much enjoyed by our members. We are now going to head to the suburbs of Chicago for our last Masterclass preview. With Adam DeGroot, the head coach of Joliet Catholic Academy.

Now, I first had the pleasure of meeting Adam just over 3 years ago when I did a tour all throughout the US running camps for various high schools and youth programs. At the time, Adam was first getting used to a conceptual offense. He enrolled in our conceptual offense course and was committed to applying a CLA throughout his program.

This was even more relevant as he was stepping up as the assistant coach on the varsity team to the head coach. And it's incredible how within 2 years he has transformed the program using Transforming Ideas. And I think Adam is such a great example of what's possible when you commit to applying the Transforming Basketball principles.

He just won a district championship, completely changing the fortunes of a team Whose record was completely different 2 years ago. In this masterclass, Adam takes you through how he is applying a CLA successfully throughout his high school program to get great results.

Enjoy.

My name is Adam DeGroote. Thank everyone for hopping on. I'm super excited for this. When Alex and Adam kind of a few months ago asked me to do this, I didn't know exactly what I was going to be talking about. You know, they're like, hey, are you interested in doing this?

And then after thinking about it, I said, you know what, maybe we can touch base a little about how we've been applying the CLA across our high school program the last few years and kind of touch base on each of those areas a little bit.

But just want to say thanks for the opportunity. I understand everyone here might not be a high school coach, but I think some of the things that we're going to talk about today are definitely applicable to everyone. So a little bit about my background.

I am currently a physical education and health teacher at the Troy School District, which is in Plainfield, Illinois. Pretty big district. I teach at a 5th and 6th grade building, which has close to 1,000 kids. So it's pretty large. Currently in the 3rd year of being the head boys coach over at Julia Catholic Academy in Illinois.

I've been on staff there for roughly, I think this is year 11, but a 3rd year in my, in the head position. I have a beautiful family. My wife is an athletic director in the district that I teach at. And I am the owner of Nightshade Training Sports Performance Center.

Talk a little bit about more about that. And then a content creator for A company called Train Your Brain, which again, we'll touch base with here kind of momentarily. And this number 3 right there is the idea of playing with structure and terrain and with purpose.

So I stole a lot of this stuff from Ryan Pannone. He's the Alabama assistant coach right now quite a bit and kind of took this idea of, this idea of connectors and targets. And I made the mistake for my first few years when we're running conceptual offense of giving them way too much freedom.

And the freedom led to us standing around indecisiveness and that type of stuff. So now kind of reverse engineering a little bit, it's how do we create advantage for our talent? We all have, you know, our top few players offensively. How are we creating advantage for those guys?

And then how do we teach our talent to make the right decisions and take the best shots, you know, within our team and shot selection, everything like that. We're trying to get up and down as much as we possibly can. And then this year we've actually played out of 2 different spacing templates.

What we call point, which is 5 out, and then a Nova spacing. And just really emphasizing that the defense is always wrong through the CLA, teaching the different coverages and coverage solutions has been absolutely massive. It's given us some flexibility on the defensive side of the floor as well, but kind of playing off that a little bit is pretty important for us.

This next slide here was a clip from a podcast I did over the summer actually with Will Love. Will Love has been on the Transforming Podcast before. You know, he's had Alex on there as well quite a bit, but Will has been an absolute huge resource for me.

I believe if I remember correctly, he was one of the stops on the original US tour that Alex came on as well for Conceptual Offense. And then another guy I want to give a shout out to is James Anderson. Same thing. I think he was on the stop with, with his team out when Alex came out here.

Those 2 dudes are incredible. They've been incredible resources for me. But this was a quick video of a podcast I did, and Will did a great job of splicing some video up from us over the summer as I'm kind of talking about this idea of connectors and targets.

And I thought that was beneficial for, for us to take a look at this. So just kind of, I thought I did a good job of explaining what we're trying to do with essentially the play after the play, or that, that random with purpose when we're truly trying to play conceptually.

Without just saying, hey, it's completely open. We have a little bit of structure ahead of time. These are what we call our offensive triggers rather than just screaming out a get or a ball screen, you know, that type of stuff. These are, this is the list that we've used.

These are kind of that sticky vocabulary that has helped our kids kind of progress through some things. And when we're talking about offensive stuff, I know I'm just flying through some things from defensive and offensive stuff. Does anyone have any questions? About some of the offensive and defensive stuff, principles of play, or anything basketball-specific, basketball-related before I dive into some of the player development stuff.

It starts with what we call a challenge scorecard. So we say, all right, take a minute to think back to your last game or practice. Rate yourself in the following areas. How was your effort? How was your coachability? How was your, you know, were you being a good teammate?

How are you handling adversity? And then after we do that, you know, we kind of prompt some discussion like, all right, if a teammate was filling that out for you. How would their scores be? Or a coach, you know what I mean? Why would, why would there be some discrepancies?

Why or why not? And really that self-reflection piece. And then we always try to include some sort of 2-minute video, 2, 3-minute video. A lot of times it's based upon, you know, a famous athlete talking about some things or, you know, these short videos that I feel are relevant to the topic.

I'm not sure if anyone has seen this video before. From Kara Lawson. She's the Duke women's coach about healing hard better. Uh, I'll just play a, a quick snippet of it. So we watched that video and then there's discussion questions based upon that.

Like, what makes playing sports hard in your opinion? You know, how does playing sports help you prepare for life? And I was blown away. The first year I started doing this, I would wait for volunteers to raise their hand. Now I just cold call on people.

Again, maybe that's just the teacher side of me. But having those conversations and them teammates listening to each other and having those, those interactions for, with one another has been absolutely massive for our program. And I think our overall development as athletes. And, you know, like I said, finding some way to do some of this stuff is absolutely massive in my opinion for people's programs and to really build the total athlete, which we kind of want to do.

So my view on the weight room is we're just trying to build better movers and be a little bit more resilient. So for us, that does mean that there is some traditional weightlifting going on, you know, and some of these dudes do have to put on a little bit of size and a little bit of mass to become a little bit more physical at the next level.

So you can see that we have some different isometrics here, but on our main lifts, I try to give them as much choice as possible. You can imagine that the 6'9 sophomore is not thrilled about getting under a barbell, you know, as compared to some of these dudes that are 5'9, 5'10, and are more comfortable doing that.

So it's about giving some choice and finding some different ways that we can really load them and find ways to progressively load them. So you can kind of see here, my 2 bigger guys doing some trap bar deadlifts with the plates elevated a little bit, some guys doing box squats.

So I really kind of give them some choice because I think that's really, really important. And then, you know, incorporating technology as much as we can. I'm fortunate enough because of the Nightshade training stuff where I have a plyo mat. So we're measuring vertical stuff, kind of readiness testing.

We use velocity-based training quite a bit to keep them in a specific range. Because I found with high school kids that don't have a pretty big experience with lifting, you tell them, hey, we're hitting this for a set of 8s. And they're like, oh, that doesn't translate to anything for them.

So now You know, using DBT, we can kind of keep things in a specific range. I've adapted the microdosing model, kind of stole that from Corey Schlesinger, where instead of these long sessions of twice a week, we're in the weight room for an hour, I'd rather be in there for 4 to 5 days a week for 15 minutes.

You know, get in, get out. Some days we practice from 5 to 7, so we lift beforehand. Some days we practice right after school, so we lift afterwards. But again, keeping these sessions fairly short, I found has been very, very beneficial. In terms of not only keeping the kids fresh, but that way they're not getting too sore or anything like that.

Moving on to some player development plan stuff. This is a player development plan for our guard right now, Jayden Armstrong. I'm sure a lot of you guys have utilized these player development plans. We kind of take an approach of 3 different angles. Obviously on-court stuff, leadership or social-emotional stuff, and then from a basketball IQ standpoint.

So there's strengths that they currently have. Areas for future growth. And then basically from an offensive and defensive standpoint, how are we developing these things within our principles of play? So every one of my varsity players has one of these. These are living documents that are kind of breathing as we're going along.

We have essentially one-on-one meetings with our guys 3 times over the course of the season. I should say one-on-one, but it's the player and our staff. And that gives us an opportunity to not only touch with some of this stuff on them, but kind of check in with them, really kind of emphasizing over that person, over the player to kind of see how life's going.

And those types of things. And typically what happens is the first meeting we have is a lot of coaches talking. And then the second one, it's more question-based stuff. We're trying to focus on them talking. But the third one, they're essentially kind of running the meeting.

And I teach my guys all the time, like life's about having learned how to have difficult conversations, you know? And sometimes the conversation is, you know, hey coach, what's going on with the playing time? Or sometimes it's like, hey, I'm really struggling with this thing in our system.

How can we help? But these PDPs basically kind of break down to, we assign a variety of different small groups and then we're just doing some small-sided game stuff that's specifically focusing on some areas of improvement in their PDPs. That's been beneficial to us where different coaches have access to some of those, but just wanted to kind of show you what it looks like from more of a basketball side of things.

Last thing I want to talk about right here is Diving into the social-emotional learning of athletes, which I think that we neglect sometimes, especially as high school coaches, because our time together is so limited. So for quick question to you all, does anyone have any feedback on how you guys are addressing the social and emotional needs of your athletes throughout the season, offseason, whatever it is?

You guys have a system in place for that? Are you utilizing any resources? So how are we kind of addressing the social-emotional needs of your athletes?

I hope you enjoy learning from Adam in this excellent masterclass. And that's it for today's episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast, a unique format, but we were certain you'd enjoy learning from 4 leading coaches. If you want to continue accessing resources like this, then Be sure to check out the Transforming Basketball membership community.

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