Winning a State Title with James Anderson

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Welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. On today's show, we have James Anderson. James, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. I'm just thrilled to be here. It's been an incredible journey learning new coaching techniques, and Transforming has been a big part of that. So excited to be on the show.

We were just talking before we started. One of the things was, you know, the way you got introduced to Alex Transforming Basketball. He went to and did a camp at your high school years ago, 2022. Can you just share with us and our listeners some key takeaways from that experience?

Absolutely. Yeah. So one thing we've tried to do, there's another coach up here, Will Love. So, you know, that probably adds a little bit of light and we've tried to bring in some different people and just look at some different things. And Just one thing as a coach, man, I'm just constantly trying to grow.

So when we had the opportunity to bring in Alex, I didn't know a lot about Alex. I'd seen a couple of his clinics during COVID and I'm like, okay, yeah, this will be interesting. This will be different. I don't think I'll take anything away from this guy, but it'll be interesting to see a new twist.

Maybe I'll take a nugget or two and let's do it. And then, you know, we brought Alex up here and we, we went up and we started right away and the energy in the gym, I'm going to tell you, like, I've done this a long time, 20 years, unlike anything I experienced.

Yeah.

And the race to reps and the way that things were presented and almost the goofiness, the laughs, the noise. It was so much different than how I experienced basketball growing up. And things I thought about a lot as a coach, but just hadn't been

crazy enough to try yet. And it was super, super interesting and super cool and just really got the mind churning. And I would say of all my basketball experiences, that probably was the most significant in saying, okay, I think there's a different way I want to do this.

Yeah, I think witnessing the power of using the CLA firsthand is a really powerful experience. We had NBA coach JD Dubois. He went to the first Transforming Camp, and that was what he— I was like, what stood out to you most? And he was like, just the speed and how specific you can be when trying to teach something new, you know, is kind of like the USP, if you want to call it that.

I'm curious, How did that experience help you not only with player development, but also with your conceptual offense? What did you learn there that you're using today with your team?

Oh, for sure. And I would say this goes really, really deep for me because we were kind of a drive-in-space team is what you'd call us. And so we kind of played out of drive-in-space concepts. We're semi-conceptual, but there's still a lot of, this person goes here, you go there.

And when I saw what Alex was doing, it had a lot of the drive-in-space concepts around it, but it used more concepts That started, that, that kind of fascinated me, right? Obviously Alex used a lot of the get game, and so we started toying with that.

Then we turned that into pistol action. We fell in love with the wide action, which, so we just started finding all these concepts that we like. Okay, how can we play these concepts, play it free, keep our drive and space concepts, keep the spacing right?

And does this do something different for us than what we're doing? And what I found, this is the part that I think is really, really cool, 'cause we're really big on culture here.

Yeah.

Culture's a huge thing for us.

And we'll touch on that.

Yeah. And we will touch more on that, I'm sure. But going to a conceptual offense where the kids are in charge of the concepts, where they're dictating the concepts, where they're in charge of the reads, the affordances, the solutions, so many of the things that put our culture on steroids.

It was crazy how our culture took off because it really empowered our players in ways that we had not felt or seen before. And it really turned us into a player-led program when we started playing conceptually. And I was not expecting the impact it would have on our culture.

I think a large part of our culture, which I would compare to anybody in the country, is how we play on both offense. And now we, we kind of have a conceptual defensive framework we built up that has just really empowered our players and super, super cool.

How long did that take you? Because I know the camp was, you know, going on 4 years now. Was that like a straightaway thing? First season after that, you're like, all right, we're great. It's just now that you're seeing success in form of state championships, or is it, you know, it does take time to find out what works and find out what you're comfortable with as a coach, what fits the team?

Like, can you summarize all that?

So, and this is kind of an interesting one because I would say there's kind of 2 parts of this for me because I would say playing conceptual, you can put in a conceptual offense, Faster than any other offense out there. I really believe that.

Like, a T— and, and Alex did that for us. Like, man, all of a sudden we were playing super, super different, and it was not hard, and it was fast. And I could bring— I have a lot of youth teams. I could bring a 6th grade group of kids in here, 10 of them that I've never seen before, and I could put a relatively decent running offense in one night, right?

The concepts of neutral advantage triggers— these are 2 triggers.

Yeah.

We're going to learn how to use these triggers, get the advantage, finish the dominoes, how we move around it. I could do that in a night. It's not going to be great, but you can put this in faster than any— like Drive in Space took me 2 and a half years for our team to be like, whoa, we can play.

But this was like, okay, this is fast. There's a second part to that though. Every year, and we've seen this, and this is year 3 with the boys since we started doing this. And every year in January, we hit a lull where we look really bad.

Yeah.

And it's like, man, we need something else on offense. And you start to hear the rumblings and a little bit of the parents and maybe an email here or there. Like, what are we doing? And I'm telling you, the separator on this is sticking it out and going back and simplifying it.

Because when you get to the end of the year and you play in a state tournament and teams know— we played one team 6 times this year. Teams know us inside and out by the end.

Yeah.

So The separator is pushing through, understanding how to play out a concept and the coverage solutions of all the different things you're going to see and being able to convert those, man. We played a couple teams down in the state tournament. It's just set play, set play, set play.

We learned all those and that helped us.

Exactly.

And we don't have many of those. So we're just hooping and it gets super chaotic. And this is, you just excel in chaos when you play this way. And so the more people trap, the more chaotic it gets, the more we excel. And it's awesome.

And the higher up the level goes, the more chaotic it becomes. Like, you know, your semifinals, then your finals.

Oh, for sure.

Like, yeah, super chaos. You mentioned going back to simplify some things. I think it's super important because I think you can start with maybe, you know, a principle of play, an extensive list of your micro principles, I call them. But then you go, all right, we're not going to be able to get through this this season.

It's not so important for us. So then you simplify. I really like that, what you said. But I'm curious, how did you simplify? And I want to take this from that camp, that first season after the camp until this past season. How did you simplify your practice design over that course of time?

Yeah. So I used to be the guy, like, I used to look for these new practice drills and I'm like, man, this drill's going to be awesome. And it's going to take me 6 minutes to explain. And we're going to do it the first day.

And it's probably going to be really bad the first day, but maybe by the second or third day, we'll get it. We'll be good. And I'll just keep explaining it. And we've gone totally away from that. I mean, we're to the point, like our practice plan, the more I put it together, we really play out of maybe the same 10 drills.

And then we just use the constraints out of the drills. So we get into stuff fast. And so that really simplifies things when you're playing out of the same structures, but adding the constraints to form what you want to see. That's huge. And that's a huge simplification.

And a lot of the simplification for us is, okay, what triggers really fit us and where on the court and what times are we seeing these and just simplifying some of the trigger actions that are most beneficial and maybe losing. We have a tendency to put in too many triggers, probably, if I'm being honest.

So it's always like towards the end of the year, we narrow that down to like, these are the, you know, when you're here, this is the trigger. Like, we're really good at this. Let's focus on the coverage solution.

And it could be as simple as like a pick and roll. Get action, maybe just one-on-one. It could be as simple as that, right?

For sure. I mean, I would say we've stacked a lot of triggers, what we call it, where we'll run a ghost screen into flare screen and we'll run pistol actions, which is a get into flares and multiple options and maybe even a pick and roll out of it.

And those things are all great, but our most impactful action when it comes down to it and when the games are on the line and it's close, it's the get action because we've run a lot of it. Our kids are comfortable with it.

It takes away a lot of the coverage solutions for the defense, or coverages for the defense, I should say.

Yep.

You know, it's, you can't really blitz again because then you're just going to keep it, right? So it takes, like, people don't practice against it still. And I think if you set them up in the right place, like we put our top foot hips parallel the rim, top foot on the 3-point line, get real wide, it creates an over-under conundrum.

And I mean, if we just hit One, get maybe 2, maybe 3 quick in the process of our dominoes. Man, it's just really our most efficient trigger. And a lot of times what we end up going to a lot of at the end of the year.

I want to pivot a little bit and go talk about something that we mentioned briefly, the culture piece of your program. When I was watching the— you sent me, you shared with me some highlights of your team and I was watching you guys at home and that home arena is insane.

So before I even ask you about the entire culture and what you do there, I'm just curious, how do you mimic practice, the environment of the game at practice? Because that gym is crazy. It's super crowded. And I can imagine practice is empty, right?

It's an empty gym.

Because we play out a concept and we do it a lot and we do it in our open gyms and it's all year long and it's who we are, our players can play off of each other without being able to hear each other.

And we don't need a lot of play calls and we don't need a lot of signals. And so That simplifies that a little bit. We do practice in a lot of chaos, and that chaos includes we practice with loud music. You know, that avoids the temptation of me talking too long or one of my assistant coaches talking too long.

So we got a lot of music going on pretty loud, and there's not a lot of places like Lake City. We do have a crazy home crowd, but we the more chaotic it is when you are a CLA conceptual team, the more chaotic it is, the better it benefits you versus somebody who's not.

So we embrace that and. Our practices, our speed of action is, you know, one thing we talk about. We never stop. We're going action to action by action and may potentially trigger.

Okay.

If we neutralize, we're trigger, like no lag time. Like we are flowing and we do that every— I mean, that's just what we are. And so in those scenarios, it just plays into our hands.

And you guys, you play hard, right? How do you think If you had to give advice on how you would help other coaches get their teams to play hard, what would be the one piece of advice? And I also, I want to bias your answer a little bit because I know you guys, you invited firefighters to come into your practice.

There was a terrible shooting that happened in the region there. And then you invited those same first responders to come in and come in and speak to the team and then also be honored at one of the games. I think the game was, you can correct me here, is the fighting for your fish game?

It's called Fight for the Fish between the 2 schools and the community. It's just a chaotic mess. But yes.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you brought them in, you know, I think things like that are so important to bring perspective and develop culture within an organization. But then as far as the culture piece and getting your players to play hard, how do you think that all fits?

You know, how does that all fit there?

Yeah, good question. We always say that our objective is to win, but I feel like your purpose has to be much higher. If you're not a religious school, we're a public high school, so we can't bring in a lot of the religion piece.

So we have to kind of be a little bit creative on finding what's that higher purpose that we are playing for. So we regularly try to find higher purposes. And June 29th last summer, yeah, we had a horrific thing in our community where A young man set a fire intentional up on the mountain, and some firefighters responded to the fire.

He hid up in a tree and shot 'em down. Unbelievable tragedy for our community. And we wanted to do whatever we could to honor our first responders and the things that they do. And so we put a patch on our warmup, you know, that was step one.

And then we invited him in to talk to us one night. And, you know, a lot of that talk, it was super emotional. It really gravitated our kids to—

Yeah.

How special those people are, and it really helped us find that higher purpose of playing and honoring them. But they also talked about how many chaotic situations that they are in in life on their regular day-to-day job and how they handle those. And we are able to parallel that with how we play in chaos.

You know, during the state championship game, we reminded them that two or three times in timeouts. Remember the firefighters playing through chaos? Be a rise above. Be poised. Poised is a word we use a lot. Be super poised in the chaos. And so that helped.

And then when you experience things like that together with the firefighters and bringing them in and you do some other— so we did some other stuff that was pretty cool and we do a lot of walk and talks with our kids. I think the reason we play so hard is because we love each other so much.

When you're playing for the person next to you and you don't want to let them down, Yeah. You can play at a whole nother level than if you're playing for yourself. And I think that's a large part of why our people say our kids play so hard.

Like at the State Tournament, I got emails at the end of the state tournament saying, I've never seen a team come down and play this hard. They just didn't want to let each other down. They wanted to win and they wanted to win for each other.

And, you know, our number one principle of play is make the right basketball play every single time, no matter what.

Yeah.

And, you know, that might mean that you score 4 points. It might mean you score 22. I don't know what that is, but you better be willing, like number one here, non-negotiable. You better be willing to make the right basketball play no matter what here.

Credit to you, James, I think for having the consideration to invite the men for practice that gives the players some perspective, not only on basketball, but on life. I heard a, I think it was Luke Gars that mentioned the story, but it was like the Celtics preseason game that they do.

Like a, like, I think it's like a one-on-one full court game. And it's 15 minutes straight, everyone's participating. And Joe plays like army gunshots. It's like you're in the trenches. So you're going for 15 minutes straight nonstop, but it's just, it adds to the perspective.

And I think doing things like that for your culture is just some of the simple things. I say simple, but again, credit to you because I don't think many people do it because it's like lack of time we have to put in this.

This activity, this drill, this principle. So, you know, credit to you there.

Thank you. I appreciate that. We do work hard on our culture, and I have other things I'm certainly happy to share. You know, that's a bigger one, and I think people struggle to find just small things to increase their culture. But man, that is an important aspect to all this.

And what else do you guys do that you can share with us?

I think a couple things I would say about culture. Number one, It's got to feel natural. If it's overly intentional, players will see right through it. So you got to find the right balance of— we are super intentional with our culture, but we try to not come off as like corny about it.

Right. That would be one. And then just in looking at some of my notes of things that I jotted down, thinking about some of the things we might talk about, I think there's 2 parts of culture that are highly misunderstood. Okay. Number one is going to be your style of play.

And we already touched on this a little bit, so I won't go deep into it, but our style of play. Separated our culture because it is a player-empowered offense and defense. It's a player-empowered program. Even our banquets are 100% run by our players.

They do all the speaking. Amazing. So style of play, conceptual offense, huge.

And matches the culture that they have at the school, you know, in the community.

For sure. And then I think another misunderstood thing about culture, your best way to connect with players is to Show them you can make them better basketball players. Like, you have to be really good at what you're doing for them to believe in you.

And your best connection tool is your basketball knowledge. It really is. And then you can really build from there. But some things we do, they're simple, right? We have a rule. You cannot celebrate yourself on the floor. Okay? Your teammates can celebrate you all you want, but you can't celebrate yourself.

You make a 3 and you celebrate yourself, you're coming out. But if a teammate makes a 3, you can celebrate all you can. Look like a fool out there if it's for a teammate, but it makes a huge difference, right? When we shoot a 3 in the game, every player on the bench has to stand automatic.

If we see on film that everybody didn't stand on a 3, we're talking about it.

Okay. Oh, I love that. That's an awesome one. Yeah.

There's just simple things, right? Like, I think when I listen to podcasts, I want simple takeaways. Like, oh yeah, we could add that in. That would be— do something for us, right? We don't meet. after games. We got rid of that 3 years ago.

And I think that, like, the kids, I think it's so nice because they're like, man, we lost a tough game. They don't want me to come in and be like, you guys didn't do this. You didn't— no, we'll talk about it tomorrow. Just go, go be kids.

Okay. We do a lot of walk and talks, like give them some vulnerable questions, send them on a 10-minute walk outside. So powerful for building relationships one-on-one. We go to school plays together. We go to school concerts. Because I think that builds that higher purpose of playing for the school name on the front of our chest.

When we travel, we stay in Airbnbs or VRBOs instead of hotels. We had 2 games this year. We did not go in at halftime. We did a teacher appreciation night. We had kids write a very meaningful quote or appreciative phrase about teachers, and we printed that on a poster with an action photo of each kid.

And we invited 12 teachers from our school to come in, and we had those read at halftime. We never went in. during halftime to replan or what's going on in the second half. That's super unusual, but it went so far with our teachers.

Now, when I walk around the school, I see posters of our kids with very meaningful quotes on them about the teachers. You know, our kids, they went and played cornhole at the vet home. You know, I think there's a lot of stuff that you can do.

We do a Hard Hat Award, a lot of stuff that other people do, but I'll kind of leave it at that.

And that's fantastic, man. I think, Even if you take, if coaches take one or two of those things and apply it, they'll see immediate results because like you said, they're really practical and you can implement them straight away and they're powerful, powerful tools.

I particularly like the one, the one that I'd highlight is 10-minute walk outside with a vulnerable question. And it's also a 10-minute time to just be with somebody else and have a conversation with them that you may not get a chance to speak.

I remember at certain practices, certain players don't get a chance to speak to each other. So as coaches, just giving them an opportunity to spend time with each other where they're not just playing, but they can learn how to communicate in different ways.

That's super powerful. I really like that.

Well, walk and talks are awesome. I mean, the Seattle Seahawks who won the Super Bowl here, I mean, that's a big part of what they talk about. They do a lot of walk and talks too.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, what are your coaching non-negotiables? You know, we talk about values, we talk about culture. How does that tie into what you believe This is a non-negotiable with this program or just as a coach in general?

Man, I would say for me, we talk about a couple of things. Number one, I would say these are almost more core values than non-negotiables, but they kind of fall all into the same category. But show love in the world that's super, super negative.

When your teammates hit the floor, when your teammates make great plays, show love. Coaches, show love. Like it just creates a better environment. There's just so much negativity around us. I just love when kids are awesome about showing love to their teammates and doing that.

How hard you play is really important. Like, you know, if you have a dog in you, we say, you know, show intensity. Super, super important for us. And then the biggest thing for me, and I read a really interesting article on this this morning out of The Athletic too, is are other players on the floor better because you're out there?

Like, how are you impacting other players on the team? That's a separator for us. But yeah, I mean, we're, we're always talking about like, you're going to make the right basketball play no matter what here. And if you're not okay with that, if you're about yourself, then this isn't going to work.

You better be willing to play as hard as you can. You better be willing to make the right basketball decision under every circumstance and trust your teammates because that's what we think gives us the power.

You know, it's nice hearing you, you say all that because it's a lot more about life than it is about the actual, you know, game values. You know, be there for other people, have the dog. Like, to me, that's Always treat every moment with intensity.

There's a great story about Damian Lillard, and maybe as a trainer, maybe somebody, assistant coach, years and years and years ago, but like how hard that guy goes in the reps of almost meaningless drills is crazy. And, you know, we talk about like, if you're a separator, you're not letting one rep go by without going as hard as you can go, because that's how you slowly separate yourself from everybody else.

Yeah, I agree. Going into next season, how do you decide as a coach what principles of play you're going to keep, which ones you're going to think about reinventing? Of course, you know, we didn't really mention, but you just won state championship. You know, if you want to, if you want to touch a little bit more about on that journey, but how do you decide on after such a successful year?

You know, what are you going to, we're going to keep this regardless, or is it just, I don't know, like what's your process for it?

Yeah. I mean, that's a really good question. It's a little bit of a discovery for me. We had 9 seniors that left us. We had an incredible journey to the state title. We were not as gifted as an offensive team as the year before, but we were a much better defensive team.

We worked really hard and practiced, like we used more defensive constraints than offensive constraints in our practices this year.

Yeah.

We leaned all in on becoming the best defensive team in the state of Iowa. We really did. And, you know, our principles of play, nobody catches where they shoot it. Nobody drives with their right hand. You know, how we handle collisions at 10 feet is really, really important to us.

And so on and so forth on some of our defensive stuff.

And there's another podcast where I talk about that in depth, but I heard it actually. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. You know, for us, we had such a different team this year than the year before. I think we probably played a little bit slower. We put more emphasis on shot selection as a principle of play. Like, I think your shot selection defines your culture, really.

I get a pretty good view into a team's culture when I see their shot selection and how they play and how much the ball moves. And So, I mean, we'll feel our way into it. Some of our things are always going to be the same.

We want to play as fast as we can, but that doesn't trump our shot selection value.

Yeah.

We want to play at pace. We want to play at space. We want to use triggers, change a little bit. We were big this year. We had 2 big guys. So we really played with 2 connectors in our triggers that really initiated our offense instead of one.

And next year might only be one. I don't know at this point. So we'll feel into that a little bit. We're not set on our principles of play for year to year. We'll definitely be flexible around like, what do we see this spring?

Once we start getting our guys together, how's this going to fit? What's going to be our purpose and how we play and kind of lay those out.

And I guess the more important thing is just your culture, right? Those are things that don't change regardless of who's there.

Oh, for sure. And that's been the really cool thing is we put a lot of work into the culture. We took over the boys program 3 years ago. We were on the girls' side before that. And the year Alex came was my, right before my last year with the girls, then we switched.

And so we were taking over a whole new program and we put so much intentional work into that first year onboarding program, one-on-ones, walk and talks, and creating core values. And we don't have to do much of that anymore. It's pretty much instilled in the kids and they hold each other accountable to the standards.

Yeah.

So we don't have to do a lot with culture from year to year. Other than what are the unique things we're going to do to help us find higher purpose?

Absolutely. You know, a fellow coach that's on— that was on the podcast, Liam Jefferson, he always say your values are what you choose to allow. So I've always, you know, oh, you can think something is like that, but if you're constantly reinforcing it and the players are reinforcing with each other, then you know that's there to stay and that's part of who you are.

It's part of your identity. And your standard. No, fantastic coach. I could just, you know, I could really get into the specifics of like conceptual offense and defense. We, you know, decided to cover more about the culture piece. I think just watching your highlights, you can really see the conceptual offense you guys play, but the effort that your players played with.

And I think that really stood out to me when I saw it, that in like the home crowd and just the whole atmosphere, the entire culture of it. So again, kudos to you.

Thank you.

Before I let you go, I have one more question I want to ask you. We ask all our guests this, and it's our transformative tip question. If you could give coaches one piece of advice that would instantly improve their practice environment, what would it be?

I would say dare to be a little bit different and be willing to try a little bit of stuff that's a little bit out there and, you know, be willing to sculpt and mold that a little bit and Be willing to go and find new things and be open to that.

One of our biggest things that we did, I'll just put this out here right here. Like, I went to the University of Illinois in October and watched a practice.

Oh yeah.

And I was not expecting what I saw. They are out and they just went to the Final Four. And there is a reason for that. And I know you guys have highlighted some of the stuff and I had no idea how much CLA and conceptual their practices were going to be.

I kind of saw Brad underwhelmed. I'm like, this might be a little bit old school. And I was just blown away with Illinois's practice. And we took a couple things from them that I would've never found and probably our most impactful drill this year.

So everybody's seen the FIBA 3-on-3 game with the 12-second shot clock and it's great.

Yes.

Well, Illinois does it every day, but they do it 5-on-5 and it is chaos. And we started doing that and there's not a lot of space and you gotta hit and you gotta match up quick and you gotta have your conceptual defensive stuff in place.

And as soon as they clear the 3-point line, I don't have shot clocks everywhere and manage it like Illinois, but as soon as they clear the 3-point line, I just start a 10-second countdown. And we play, you know, about a 7-minute game, 5-on-5, half court, FIBA 5-on-5.

It is crazy. And stuff like that, when you find stuff like that, it separates your team. It's really, really good. And we have some other stuff that we found that's been really, really good. We play 5-on-5, no dribble inside the 3-point arc. One of our coaches came up with that.

I thought it was going to be so dumb. I'm like, this is going to be like one of those drills we put in. It's going to be, wow, this isn't good. And then it was like, man, we are actually learning how to read screens because 5-on-5 inside the 3-point line with no dribble, like you have to be able to slip, read, hit angles on screens.

I didn't even have to teach all that stuff. They figured it out themselves. Right. We just created the ecological dynamics and like, that was Genius. And then add one dribble into it and it gets more interesting. And so you just find these little niches from experimenting and searching and they pay off.

I completely agree. I think to your point, you said, oh, this is going to be a dumb drill, but then it turned out to be a great one. So I do think just experimenting and even going with things that are, this is not going to work because you might be surprised.

And I think your overall message, just try it and see how it goes.

It's not very game representative to play 5-on-5 inside the 3-point arc with no dribble, but yeah, it did end up being game representative in the sense that when we moved those screens to 22 feet, we started reading them much quicker and much better.

Yeah, absolutely.

James, once again, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for hopping on and having a chat with me.

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