Basketball season has begun! It’s an exciting time for everyone in our communities as we hope to see the same brand of exciting basketball that took the girls’ team to the state tournament last year.
How do players get to be so good? What makes a team a state contender?
The answer begins at the elementary level of any sport. All sports begin a feeder program at a young age to teach kids the basics and encourage a love of that sport.
I’ve had the privilege to be a coach in our elementary basketball program for my daughter’s team, now starting my third year.
I coached junior high basketball for 13 years and had a lot of knowledge about the game from my years playing. However, moving from 8th grade to 3rd grade was a stark awakening.
The variety of skill sets is enormous; some kids have never picked up a basketball before, while others have been dribbling and shooting for some time. The goal of an elementary coach is to teach the basics while encouraging those that already have some of those skills to keep getting better and find ways to expand their abilities.
Some kids make tremendous progress, usually due to developing a love of the sport and wanting to play it as much as they can. Others decide that a particular sport is not for them, another vital function of an elementary program.
Most programs are a little more relaxed at an elementary level, but the expectations ramp up once the players reach junior high. It’s better to find out that a specific sport is not for you before that point in time.
I’ve helped oversee coaches for our youth baseball program for many years, but I didn’t fully appreciate how much these coaches did as volunteers until I started as a volunteer coach myself.
Some people always forget is that these coaches are volunteers; they don’t get paid and they put in plenty of hours. Many don’t have formal training in coaching, but do the best they can so the players can get better.
The best payment for a volunteer coach is to see improvement from beginning to end. I give the coaches of my daughter’s volleyball team a lot of credit this year.
They took a large group of girls who could barely get the ball over the net or do anything close to receiving a serve and really moved them along. By the last game of their tournament, they showed some good signs of actual volleyball being played.
Over the years, I’ve fielded plenty of phone calls from parents complaining about various things in our baseball program, including problems with coaches. Part of my conversation tends to lead back to asking these people why they didn’t volunteer since they have all the answers.
While there are certainly situations where a coach has done something wrong, like mistreating a player, most often the complaints revolve around playing time or chances to play a certain position.
My questions to these complaints? Has the player been at every practice? Has the player worked hard at every practice? Just being part of a team does not give you an automatic right to equal playing time or equal opportunities.
If a player shows up only when it’s convenient and/or spends practice time messing around, they should not get the same chances as those who are always there and working hard.
Not everyone is cut out to be a coach. I’m not perfect by any means.
All I ever ask is to be patient and look at the big picture instead of reacting quickly to an isolated incident. Sometimes the best thing to do is go home, sleep on it, wake up, and realize it wasn’t that big a deal after all.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is pell-mell, which means things are in tangled confusion, as in, “The young basketball players ran pell-mell down the court, and the coach wondered if they even remembered the play.”