(Rental)-Getting The Most Out Of Your Team

Getting the Most Out of Your Team

There is much more than just winning games when it comes to coaching basketball. University of Oklahoma women’s head coach Sherri Coale has won nearly 500 games, 10 Big 12 championships, and took her 2009 and ’10 teams to the Final Four. In this video, Coach Coale talks about what’s going on in her program and how she has changed her approach to coaching to allow her players and the team become more successful.

Match Your Coaching Philosophy with Your Team

As a coach, getting the most out of your team, you have to understand what your players do well. Coach Coale stresses meshing your philosophy as a coach with your team’s strengths. Using the secondary fast break as an example, Coale explains what she means.

• Determine what players do best and build around those traits.
• Improve coach and player development by focusing on the coaching staff’s statement-to-question ratio.
• Teach players to recognize the optimal threshold to shoot or drive.

Decision Making

In practices, Coach Coale puts players in positions where they are forced to make decisions. Players need to know why they are doing something instead of just being told what to do. Coale and her coaches always try to ask questions in such a way that players end up teaching themselves.

Coale uses the pick and roll as an example here. By breaking down the pick and roll options in the secondary break, Coale demonstrates how to get players to focus on an attack-first mentality. By teaching them the “why,” players make better decisions with the basketball.

Practice Like You Play

While Coale does structure some traditional 5-on-5 practice time, she also makes 1-on-1 and 3-on-3 drills more game-like. In 5-on-5 situations, players are limited in the number of touches they get which decreases their ability to improve certain basketball skills. Coale then likes to turn all of her drills into a game, if possible.

Look at Yourself

Teams will play like they practice and practices will only get better if you improve as a coach. Coach Coale encourages watchers of this video to examine themselves and what they do. Look at teams that are successful and find out what it is that makes them good. Coale goes on to explain what she feels is valuable and how important it is to understand players’ perspectives as well.

This is an intense, engaging video from one of the most successful coaches in college basketball. Coaches at all levels will find several valuable insights into coaching, practice design and much more. Rent this getting the most out of your team for basketball DVD today.