Good coaches emphasize team over players

Published 8:47 am Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Sit down with any buddy who played sports in school and usually they can tell you what separated the good coaches from the bad.

I was in just such a conversation on Saturday at the Elbow Room.

In junior high, the teacher who worked as our basketball coach let me and one other player ride the pines for most of the games. Many times, the two of us wouldn’t play at all. It was hard to be on that team. What was humbling was the team lost a lot, too.

Email newsletter signup

No matter how well I did in practice, nothing changed the teacher’s view of me as an athlete. The guy yelled a lot, too, and though he taught some fundamentals, there was no team strategy.

But in the off-season, parents and volunteers took us boys to tournaments and leagues. The volunteer who served as coach played all of us. We had fun.

And we won.

What was the difference? We were motivated. And we were a team.

This isn’t one of those everybody-gets-a-ribbon articles on coaching. I respect coaching decisions that seek to win. This is one of those bad-coaches-let-prejudices-cloud-judgment articles. Teams win when they live up the team concept.

On the teacher’s team, no matter how bad the starters did, they played. Why? The guy made his judgment about who was good at the outset of the season. He probably took one look at my skinny, lightweight, slow-to-develop body and counted me out. The other player who sat on a bench was actually pretty good, and we never understood what the coach was thinking.

On the volunteer’s team, when someone made a bad decision, he rotated them out, and he seemed to understand that players coming off the bench are motivated to perform well. Also, he knew players coming off the bench can do well only if they are used to being on the court during games. It can be intimidating to play so rarely that when you do get in you are super nervous. On the team, I was relaxed as a player because I felt part of the team.

It’s easy to guess which team had its picture in the paper for success. In that picture, us boys are all smiling.

I use my junior high basketball experience because it was such a great contrast. But the same sort of problems existed in other sports in junior and senior high school in various ways. In some sports, the coach picked his horses before the season even began.

The buddy I sat with at the Elbow Room on Saturday described how in some sports the varsity coaches ask the JV coaches to play the top players so they develop for the varsity level. He said it’s astounding how early coaches make decisions on talent and ability. It puts JV coaches in the difficult spot of whether to comply or whether to develop all the players.

To me, it’s a no-brainer. What if you develop only your top-five players on a JV basketball team, and it turns out one of your kids is a late bloomer, like Michael Jordan was? Developing all the players at junior-varsity level prepares a team for the varsity level. And making all your players better makes the top players have to work hard to stay the top players.

Forming a team makes a huge difference. Here’s another contrast example:

In my senior year, we had a new football coach. He spent a lot of practice time blabbing about his good-old days. No matter how well I did in practice, he hardly used me. I’d catch fantastic passes, and it didn’t matter. I’d tackle or intercept, it was dismissed as a fluke. We had a challenge where if anyone blocked a kick, the player would get a six pack of pop. I was the only player who succeeded. I got the pop but no promotion in playing time.

There was rampant cheating in practice too, such as holding and punching, and he overlooked that, too. We did drills and taught basics, often via teammate ridicule.

This lack of discipline transferred to other places. Bullying happened in the locker room. Players screwed around on the bus to away games, and there was alcohol, loud music and pornographic magazines on the bus, too. Needless to say, we lost all of our games our senior year. We had a take-no-risks offense, so we rarely scored.

(In junior high, a different coach, with the same boys and also against nearby schools, employed a lot of trick plays, encouraged teamwork and played everyone. It was fun. We won all but one game.)

High school basketball was completely different than high school football. The coach had built the team into a powerhouse, winning conference titles and going to state a lot.

The Pomeroy Cyclones had a proud boys’ basketball team. We wore suits on the bus to games. We policed ourselves. The locker room was safe for younger players. When we performed below expectations, we ran quarter courts. All coach had to say was “baseline.” We also watched video. We planned strategies in a classroom. We exercised our brains, too.

Indeed the best players played the most, but all the players knew that if they did well, the coach would move them up and move others down. He lived up to his words. It kept the top players working hard to remain starters.

Sometimes, walking down the bench, looking for a player, he would look you in the eye. He was trying to make a decision on who wants to perform now, not on whose body fits a preconception (or on whose dad was on the school board). He once put me in a game because I screamed from the bench that they needed to follow the offense. We were four points away from 100 and had become loosey-goosey.

Coach made a point at the start of the season that everyone was even. He often told us that no matter our height or speed, we could all work hard and be as good as any other player. He emphasized the importance of lower squads in pushing the top squad to its limit. Coach wanted scrimmages to be much closer than games, practices much harder than games.

That was a team!

I sure filled out in the Army (I gained 16 pounds in the first four months), and suddenly I was better at athletics. I was super skinny in school, a late bloomer. But that high school basketball coach had told me I was a smart player and had great fundamentals. This encouraged me to be a leader.

I had learned a key lesson: Playing sure is fun, but feeling part of a team is a better feeling, especially for kids.

So here’s the rub: Look at the successful sports programs in our area. Why are the good teams always coached to act like a team? It wasn’t success that made the kids act like a team. It was acting like a team that made them successful. Everyone counts.

Good job, Albert Lea wrestling team.

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.