By Any Means Basketball with Coleman Ayers

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.

Within this podcast, Alex and his guests unpack how an ecological dynamics framework impacts our perspective of the game.

If you're ready to join us, please hit subscribe.

And if you're ready to join us, please hit subscribe.

Do you need help applying all the unique transforming ideas in your next practice? Our free youth basketball practice book provides you with 21 small-sided games, which are perfect for all levels of youth basketball. This book is a great resource for coaches and players alike.

Join thousands of coaches around the world coaching the transforming way and get your free copy by heading to the show notes. Welcome back to a transforming podcast. Really delighted today to be joined by Coleman Ayers, the founder of By Any Means Basketball, and hugely, hugely impressed.

And I've learned a lot watching all the stuff Coleman shared over the last few years, so. Long overdue having him on the podcast. So, Coleman, great to have you on.

Yes, sir. Appreciate you having me, man. It's definitely long overdue, so I'm excited.

Absolutely. So first question, Coleman, what was it that made you actually start thinking differently as a trainer? Because we see the space, we see the dominant approach, as I call it. It's very entrenched in skills training as an industry in North America. What was it that actually made you curious to completely go away from everything you'd seen previously on social media and elsewhere?

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say it was about 4 years ago when I started kind of shifting how I approached the game. And it was at a time where I moved to a new city here in Miami. Actually, this is a little bit longer, so probably 5 years ago.

So I was pretty recent to a new city, being in Miami. I didn't really know anyone. I never really grew up with any trainers or coaches who did player development as like their specialty. So I guess what I'm saying is like my journey to exploring this realm was very like independent.

And people ask me all the time like, yo, who are your mentors? And I would definitely say I have a broad range of mentors on maybe like life and business and even basketball too. But I never really had one mentor where I just kind of copied and pasted, which I think like I was hungry for that at first.

But I realize now that that was the best thing possible because to answer your question, I had to go and kind of search On my own for like, what is player development? How do we get players better? And it wasn't just, let me take these bunch of drills and put 'em together that people have been doing for years.

It was more so like, okay, I'm gonna watch basketball, I'm gonna reverse engineer it, and then I'm gonna read skill acquisition studies, books, talk to people who are smart in that. Because I figured if I'm a skills trainer, it's smart to talk about skill acquisition.

So that was a while ago. It didn't happen at first. Like, I was still doing some traditional stuff, as we all did at first.

We've all been there. Yep.

Oh yeah, it's just the nature of it. But eventually, I just started watching the game. I played a lot of basketball. I still do, just to kind of keep the feel for it while I'm still young. And I just realized, like, what I see on social media, what I did with coaches growing up, what I see a lot of my players do with coaches, it just doesn't seem to make sense.

So I guess reading a few really, like, Cornerstone books, diving head-on to the research for about a year and a half, and then just watching a lot of basketball and thinking about it in a way that I feel like most people don't. That kind of projected me into this new space of thinking where I was like, okay, we gotta do this a little bit differently.

I love that. So a lot of coaches, maybe they're first accessing some of the skill acquisition research that you mentioned, Colin. Like, was it a case of you were reading it and then just Practically being able to apply it straight away? And is there any advice you'd give to coaches or trainers as they navigate this for the first time, how they can actually read it?

Because it's not always easy with some of the language.

Absolutely. I would say if you are interested in diving into it as a coach, definitely read it. Don't feel the pressure to pick up every word because there's going to be stuff that you do not understand, and that's okay. We're not scientists. Like, we want to be able to leverage scientists to do our job better, but we're never going to be scientists.

However, it's really not as dense as I think some people think. Some people kind of approach it like it's this big, massive burden on them, which is again understandable. But I do think like if you go in, if you just glean a couple things here and there, and like you said, go try it, go apply it and experiment with it, whether that's on yourself with some players that you work with constantly and they're willing to kind of experiment and be a lab rat, that's to me the best combo.

And also just talking to other coaches about it. Like if you have 2 or 3 other coaches who are very, very curious and driven to learn, and you guys talk about concepts, whether you're in a group chat, whether you hop on phone calls.

That was one thing that I did, whether it's with Tyler.

We'll have had the episode with Tyler out by the time we air this one. So that's great.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So Tyler, we hopped on phone calls a lot. Martine, like a lot of these guys, my guy Gabe out in San Diego. just hop on phone calls and be like, okay, let's dissect this huge concept and then see how we can make it practical.

And again, I think if you take the research and then go apply it and honestly do more application than reading research, that's how you get your best results. And then for me, like, I shifted away from the research a few years ago. I still stay in tune with like new research that comes out, and I try to talk to people who are still like Very research heavy.

But for me, I've switched my focus over to just pure application because I felt like it's still a very early stage industry and field, basketball skill acquisition specifically, but even skill acquisition, you know, and motor learning, it's still pretty early. It's not like the medical field where there's like a new development each day.

So now I'm like, okay, with this base of knowledge that I have, how can I build on this, apply for 90% of what I do? And then 10% is kind of staying in touch with research or going back and finding new things. So I'll say once you get a good feel for it, apply it, try to, you know, make that as practical as possible, and then just kind of dip your feet back into that research here and there.

Completely see that. It's kind of what I had in Italy, where it was just the 3 years of practical, practical, try it out. Makes complete sense. So one question, Colin, I was looking forward to asking you is about forms of life and just We've got these social cultural constraints which impact how players play, and you're traveling the world extensively with By Any Means.

And I think, you know, you must be seeing really interesting things in these forms of life. What impact, you know, do you think it's important to coach, for coaches to actually have an awareness of some of these things? And does it maybe impact how they coach or train?

100%. I could, and I probably will at some point, write a whole book on this because it's It's incredible, truly incredible to see. Like, if you go to somewhere in the Caribbean, how they're not only like the courts that they have access to and the style of basketball that they watch, but also like music that they grow up to, like how they dance, how they play other sports, how they like interact with people, how they— the pace that they live life.

Like, all this stuff comes into play when you're working with an athlete from a certain place. So again, that could be the Caribbean, that could be when you go to Asia, like it's super disciplined in my experience. Certain countries in Asia, and then obviously, you know, about European basketball, that's probably the most well-known.

But even in Europe, which is something that a lot of Americans don't understand, is every country has its own flair to it.

That's it.

So me bouncing between Serbia one day and then Barcelona the next, and then the UK, it's 3 completely different styles of basketball. And this can go into, again, cultural things. So the values that they grow up on, which is a huge determinant of how they not only play, but how they learn too, which is why I think it's so important for coaches to understand where the person that they're training or coaching is coming from.

Because if I'm coaching a player from Serbia and then a player from Miami and then a player from South America who never really has had that much coaching, I'm going to coach those players completely different. And it's crazy to see how environmental constraints also shape the way players play.

Like if you got, for example, if you're in the Philippines, you grow up as a young Filipino hooper, you're outside playing barefoot on small courts with a lot of people, very physical basketball. So what emerges as an athlete is being able to play through physicality, being able to create physicality, being very shifty because you're typically lower to the ground.

Got to drop your center of mass if you're always playing barefoot, which is something I've seen. And the creativity that comes from playing on smaller courts and, you know, maybe with like crappier basketballs is insane. And then again, like you can go into this for every single place, which is just so cool.

But I think to answer your question on a broader scale, like I've realized that I wasn't getting to know the person and their background enough as well as I should have. about 2 years ago when I started really traveling. And now I'm like, okay, even if you're from the States, again, if you're from DC where I'm originally from versus California versus like a country town in the middle of the States, that this is going to change how you accept coaching, the relationships that you build with your teammates, and then learning how to gel all these

things together either in a coaching environment or in a skills training environment is massive.

I love that response, Connor. That's why there's no copy-paste that you can just plug in everywhere. So on that note, just watching your activities, they're very creative, and I feel like you're always coming up with new ones. And even like one small tweak can sometimes just lead to a completely new activity or a new skill.

And you touched upon it a little bit, but a lot of kind of coaches, trainers always ask for drills. You know, as we know, it's, it's not necessarily just give me drills, but it's about how and the why you're actually making them. So I thought that would be an interesting question just to dive into the real specifics of your inspiration and that process that you go through between thinking about an activity, cultivating it, and then actually trying it out and debriefing, reflecting upon it.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say there are a couple methods that I use to generate drills, I guess. Number one is just reverse engineering a skill that you want to work on, which is like— or decision, as you know, like If you see a player screwing up, like we're in San Diego watching our Adapt Academy team, which is like our club team, play in these like massive AAU tournaments with a lot of length, with a lot of athleticism, with a lot of chaos.

It's very just up and down basketball. It's a different style of basketball for better or for worse, usually for worse, but for better or for worse. And I'm thinking like, all right, our guys are smaller, craftier, but they're not used to playing with Longer or against longer defenders, particularly when they have speed coming up the court and they're seeing like kind of a half trap come at them.

For me, it's like, all right, how do I reverse engineer that? Go on Amazon. I ordered those, like, you know, I call them the Wimby arms, whatever you want to call them, blocking pads. Ordered like 8 of those. They were there the next day.

And then we put together a 2v2 with a little bit of a disadvantage. Both defenders have those Wimby arms. And now they're playing against increase length, and they're making that decision. So that one's the easiest to me, just kind of reverse engineering a decision that you see players like screw up a lot.

And that's why I think coaching like a team and skills training should be more synergistic or ingrained more, because you can literally see the decisions and the situations very specifically through which your athletes are struggling or they're killing it, and you need to continue to sharpen that.

Number 2 is kind of what Martine said. on your podcast, which is like just watching a bunch of other different sports. I mean, not just sports, but everything. Came up with a warmup drill the other day that was— I can't remember where I saw it from.

Ah, I saw 2 kids playing on the playground. This is, I promise you, this is a real story. Saw 2 kids playing on the playground. They're playing soccer and I was in the UK. I was on a Europe tour and they score a goal.

They run up to each other. They do like a little shoulder bump. And they both land in a crazy position. And I see that, I'm like, that's a drill. That's a drill. So literally, 2 days later, we're in Germany. I'm like, all right, warm-up drill.

We're going to work on landing a bit. Got the guys to go up to each other, bump each other as hard as they can, and they got to land as soft as they can. So I'm always gaining inspiration from other things outside of basketball.

It's not even other sports, but just things outside of basketball. And you'd be surprised at just when you open your mind to the world, how many little ideas can come about. And then I would say the last thing is thinking about qualities that you can train within a skill.

So I kind of break it down to like, okay, you have a big skill. That skill could be pull-up jumpers, say, you know, or 3-pointers off the dribble moving laterally. Say that, that's the big skill. Now, if you train that in an isolated environment, because this is mainly for like individual sessions, if you train that in an isolated environment with no defense, you're not going to be able to train the full skill.

Sufficiently most times, unless it's a beginner or they have something very distinct that they need to work on. So breaking down the puzzle pieces of that and identifying the qualities behind those, that's where I can make it easier and more digestible for me to come up with drills.

So I could say, okay, what's something that they need to work on if they struggle moving a little bit laterally into 3-pointer? All right, well, probably body control moving laterally. Now I can come up with a drill that targets that. I could say like, okay, quick pop off of the ground with that second foot.

Like as soon as their second foot hits the ground, they quickly pop off the ground. It helps them elevate into the air a little bit more. Now I can come up with like a very distinct, but also like challenging drill that works on that.

So I think being able to kind of like break down these skills into smaller pieces, not smaller pieces, because I'm not somebody who ever wants to train like the whole part versus whole thing.

Sure.

I'm very whole-based. Yeah, but I think there's a distinction between like also being able to train qualities in individual sessions, or when athletes are by themselves, that then allows you to actually challenge these things rather than just repping them out with no defense, which as we all know will never really be what we see in a game.

Back by popular demand, we have just re-released our first course. The Youth Conceptual Offense. This is the ultimate guide for you to install a conceptual offense with your team or across an entire program. The course contains 25 unique modules containing everything from transition to dominoes to triggers and much more.

You'll be able to access over 200 small-sided games to develop the offense step by step. Head to www.conceptualoffense.com to learn more. Agree. I think that's where differential learning can be really useful too. And I love how you are using that. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about Adapt Academy, Coleman, because I've seen glimpses on Instagram and for me it just I think if that was the norm in the US, international teams, FIBA, would never be able to compete with the USA national team.

And it was the first year I just spent actually living extensively and working in the US. And it was pretty shocking just seeing the youth basketball scenes when I was seeing AAU and just no principles of play. Like you said, no integration between team development and player development.

It's very siloed.

Right.

And to actually be having, I guess it's like AAU, but doing it the right way where you're training with SKLAK research and you're actually using principles of play, it could change the game, right? So I'd love just to hear more about that project because I think the US coaches listening would be fascinated by that.

So I guess our inspiration, well, there are a few different reasonings behind our inspiration, but number one, like, so in Europe, in my experience, everyone looks to America as something that's like Or at least kids, where it's almost unattainable. It's like, how do I get that level of skill, that athleticism?

And it's true. The individual skill level that we have here is crazy. And it's probably something to strive for to some extent. In America, everyone's the European style, the IQ, the feel for the game. So there's always like, the grass isn't always greener.

It's like, even Americans, like, oh, the way they develop players is so much better. And then I go over and I see still a lot of traditional training.

Absolutely. Yep.

But there are certain things that we can take and reverse engineer from the European basketball culture. And I think that's where our inspiration came in. And that's a whole podcast for another time, just the differences between the 2 development systems. But we wanted to take something, we wanted to take AAU basketball, not do something outside of it, do something kind of with, in the corner of AAU basketball where it's still in that space.

But it's different. And what that looks like is a club where players can come in basically 7 days a week and develop. They're playing 1, most months, tournaments, maybe 2. Most of our gameplay is going to be scrimmages. So at the end of the week, we'll get with another team, we'll train for an hour or 2 with that other team, and then we will play.

But in a way where we can coach it up, we can stop the game, we can break it down a little bit. So now you have gameplay, which all these players need, as we know, but you're getting active coaching through that gameplay. Another big focus and something that I didn't even realize was so limited in America was just teaching players how to play the right way with principles of play, with conceptual offenses.

And it's been crazy how much these players Not only how much different it is at first for them, but also how well they pick it up. And I think we underestimate how well players can and how quickly they can start to pick up these principles.

But that requires them to be in an environment where they're bought into it, where there's a culture, there's a strong culture. And that's our last one, where we want to build something that's truly a family culture. Most AAU programs have players coming in every other week to play with them, and they're You know, their best player will leave and they'll come back months later.

Whereas we're— our goal is to lock in players for 6 months at least and ensure that they can stick around with us, can actually see results, buy into the culture. And every step along the way, we want to ensure that there is truly a family culture being built where it's not just basketball, where we can check in with them about their schoolwork.

We do, where they can come in and We can go to the beach and have a beach workout and everybody will show up, have fun, and then we go to the court, have a really intense session. So between those 3 things, I mean, it's only 2 months in and we've started to see some really, really big results just in like even players who were kind of falling off with basketball.

Now they're like, my spark is back. I actually love this. It's, they're coming off a season with a really, I don't wanna say poor coach, but a coach that may have discouraged them. And now they're back and they're playing better than ever. And I always say, like, look, we're not trying to go on EYBL or the Under Armour Association.

Those players are going to be good regardless, right? And if a top 50 player, whatever, ever comes to us and is like, yo, I want to buy into this culture, great, I'll accept them. But I'm focused on taking players potentially like myself when I was younger, where I'm not the best player, but I just want somewhere where I can develop, have a family, have an HQ to go develop.

truly pour everything we have into them, everything we've learned over the last, you know, 5, 6 years, and do something a little bit different. And obviously still just the beginning, but I think we're in for a good run.

I love the cultural side of it, Coleman, because I think it gets so lost in all the skill act talk a lot of the time. And really, a lot of coaches now are studying that, which is great, but then for me, it makes no sense to do that if you're not a transformational coach.

And obviously, I think it's synonymous, using the CLA world, Because it naturally goes with this. But yeah, I love that cultural side that you've spoken of. What was also interesting was that you mentioned conceptual offense. And also in player development, I'd say the siloed approach is so prevalent that often we wouldn't see trainers necessarily not only do it but have an awareness of it.

And I think it really impacts it because knowing triggers, coverage solutions, how to play with an advantage, I mean, that is player development. So Are you guys really incorporating all of that stuff into workouts as opposed to this traditional approach where it's all team stuff, then player development?

But no, it's all one, like you said.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And like you said, it's synergistic. I guess the best way to put it is in our team practices, we are focusing more on how to create an advantage together. Love it. And yeah, how to work as a team, create an advantage defensively, how to stifle an advantage, how to space, how to shoot the right shot.

The— or in our skills workouts, we work a little bit more with an advantage.

Sure.

To allow players to execute those situations. And then sometimes how to create an advantage individually, because if we can have players who can create an advantage, just like being really good ball handlers or being very smart players, and then we teach them how to not do that most of the time by relying on teammates, by relying on concepts and triggers, that's ideal.

So I'd say that's where it differentiates between the two. And we've had parents who are like, yo, your practices and your skill sessions look so similar. Like, what's up with that? Well, it's because you're sitting there on your phone and you look up and you see them playing with defense and you see them working off of a get action, or you see them working off of a flare.

And we still will do, you know, 10 minutes of ball handling at the beginning where it's 1v1 stuff, where it's maybe some reactive ball handling, where it's maybe some differential learning. Same thing with shooting, same thing with finishing. We'll still do like our on-air stuff.

But it'll all be with Skill Act principles in there. But a lot of it will circle back to— and this is in our skill sessions— will circle back to team play, but again, in a way that allows them to execute on advantages and to create their own advantages in a lot of ways.

So I'll say that's where the two kind of separate from each other between the practices and the training. But like you said, the two are so synergistic that separating them just wouldn't make sense to me.

I love that. So, Collin, my last question is, I've got your book Deep Skill on my reading list. I'm going to get it read over the summer. It's been on my list for a while. Could you talk a little bit just about the premise behind that and I guess why we actually do need to reframe skill within the basketball world?

Yes, absolutely. So what we traditionally think of as skill is number one, very limited to What we do with the ball, whether it's how we place the finish, whether it's how we shoot the ball and put it into the rim, whether it's how we handle the ball.

And that absolutely is skill, just like it's part of skill. What I talk about in the book is there are probably 3 additions to skill that I would like to make. Number one is how we move. So even without the basketball, if you can move fluidly, if you can move effectively, if you can move efficiently, That's a skill.

It's not just with the basketball. It's, it's how we move our bodies. Number 2, can you execute these skills in environments where it's chaotic, where you have to obviously include perception and action, the entire cycle, and in situations that you may have not seen before?

Is that transferable to situations where you may have not seen before? So yes, you can make a certain type of jumper. But can you also take that same concept in a situation where, you know, maybe they throw a new defensive coverage at you, maybe you're fading in a way that you've never really faded before or worked on, and can you still execute that skill because it's able to be transferred to other situations?

And then 3, which I saved for future content down the line, potentially another book, whatever it may be, is can you make the game easier on yourself and on your team? Without the ball even in your hands? Can you find space? Can you manipulate the offense to create the most advantages for yourself and for your team?

It's the whole, like, I always give the example of Sasha Vazinkov, obviously EuroLeague MVP a couple years ago. Most Americans especially would look at him and be like, guy's not skilled, he's just a shooter. He's just your standard shooter. And there's some crazy stats about him, but the dude scored like 250 points on 26 dribbles or something.

And to me, that's also Skill. That's a large part of skill. Can you see the game so well and understand patterns so well that you can attack and manipulate these to make the game easier for yourself, whether that's scoring, whether that's playmaking, whether that's rebounding, whether that's defense?

So I think this book is— Deep Skill is kind of an alarm in a way to kind of show people like, okay, skill isn't exactly what we think it to be. And then it expands a little bit on How you build that in a very conceptual, broad sense, dumbed-down science, and then also very specific tools that we can use, whether it's differential learning, whether it's fatigue, whether it's visualization, just different tools that you can kind of use as like spices in your practice to boost this.

So yeah, man, I think we definitely gotta kind of reframe how we see skill, and I think it's coming along, but hopefully people who have read the book have gotten something from it.

Amazing. That made me more excited to get into it. So thanks so much, Coleman. I really enjoyed this episode. So big thanks for taking the time and looking forward to continuing to consume all the amazing content you're putting out. So thank you.

Absolutely, man. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, head to transformingbball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

You can also connect with us on Instagram, X, or YouTube with any questions that you have from the episode. See you next time on the Transforming Basketball Podcast.