Kids are not mini-adults
“Get the rebound!”
I clap my clipboard with my hand, and it shatters into pieces and falls to the floor.
I call a timeout.
Embarrassed by my actions, I frantically pick up the pieces of my shattered clipboard.
My sixth-grade girls basketball team walks toward me with their heads down.
It’s my first season as a head coach, and only the second quarter of the first game, and I have already broken a clipboard out of frustration.
I take a deep breath, trying to exhale the embarrassment I feel.
“Girls, I am so sorry.”
“Why do you keep yelling at me?” asks Halie.
“I’m not yelling at you, I am trying to get all of you to box out and get the rebound.” I pause for a response. I get nothing but blank stares. The girls look back at me and say nothing.
“Okay, a fresh start. No more yelling,” I say. "Let’s just have some fun out there. Randy, get a break, and let’s get back to the game.”
The girls say a team break, and I can feel they have lost confidence in their coach. I try to win back their trust for the rest of the game, but I can tell I have a lot of work to do.
We lost the game.
To add insult to injury, we have the three tallest girls in the league, and we were out-rebounded the entire game.
The year before, the team went 0-10 under a different coach. It looks like I might be headed in the same direction. I kept the post-game talk to about ten seconds, then released them to get on the bus.
A friend of mine came to watch me in my first game as a girl’s basketball coach. On the ride home, it is silent for a few blocks, then she turns the radio down and breaks the silence.
“Why were you so upset?”
“I know, I am so embarrassed.”
“But what did you want them to do?”
“Just get a rebound!” I explain. "I don’t know why it is so hard. They are the tallest girls in the league, and…”
“I know,” she interrupts. “What did you say during the time out?
“I told them to box out and get the rebound!”
“Do they know what a rebound is?”
“Of course they do!” What a silly question, I think to myself.
“So, what kind of rebound drills have you done at practice?"
I fall silent. She was right.
In three weeks of practice, not once had I taught the girls to rebound, much less “box out” to make it easier to get a rebound. I made the common mistake of believing my girls would just inherently know how to use their height as an advantage. The fundamentals are never too basic to teach. I think of Coach Lombardi when he would start every football season as an NFL coach with a simple sentence as he held up a football: “Gentlemen, this is a football.”
Thanks to youtube, I found some great drills on teaching rebounding. I apologized to the team for my behavior and asked for their forgiveness. They accepted my apology, and with hard work and determination, we ended up winning every game that season until the championship game, where the girls competed valiantly but lost in triple overtime.
Every season, no matter the level of the sport, a different team shows up. Though the athlete could be coming from the same school as the year before, every season has its own culture and feeling. 6th graders are now 7th graders, juniors are now seniors, and so on and so forth. A lot changes in a young athlete’s life between seasons, and as coaches, we should not assume fundamentals are as sharp as they were the year before or that the athletes are coming with prior knowledge.
As adults, w need to be reminded more than taught, which is also true for our athletes. Repetition breeds mastery, and as coaches, we must not forget the importance of the seemingly mundane tasks of practicing the fundamentals. The lesson I learned was to focus on the basics and make it easy to unleash my athletes to reach their highest potential. The next time I coached at that level, I took a different approach from the beginning.
Start your season with a clean slate, and make sure every athlete understands the expectations you have for them and the knowledge to live up to those expectations.
