We're We Good Coaches?

Kristi and I were at the NCAA basketball elite eight game last week, watching Butler advance to the Final Four. Kristi was preoccupied by the fact that the Bulter coach looked so young. Not knowing much about him, she assumed he was 'our age', meaning early 30's.

This lead her to ask if I thought our friend Chad was a good coach. This was an obvious comparison, as Chad is also in his early 30's and trying to make it in the world of high school and college coaching. He's hit some rough patches along the way, and is currently in rural Kentucky running the high school varsity team.

The reason she asked me, and the reason I might have some insight to answer was that while he was here in SLC for a few years he and I coached what was essentially a junior varsity recreation team.

My first response to her question was that I didn't know. This is the crux of this whole story. Chad was a disciplinarian, and he had played DIII college ball. I didn't have the experience, but also had a disciplinarian attitude. The problem was that that attitude didn't fly with these kids. We treated them as if they'd just made the varsity squad after rigorous tryouts. The reality was that these kids liked basketball, but there were reasons (skill or attitude) that they didn't make the high school team. We were glorified babysitters.

We tried to break those kids down, drilling them in the finer points of fundamental basketball, thinking they'd soak it all up and allow us to build them back up into solid players.

The answer to the question is now obvious: our approach would probably work at higher levels, but give what we had it was the absolute wrong approach, and we all suffered for it. We as coached got frustrated, I think the kids only really enjoyed the actual games and dreaded practices, and we hardly ever won, if at all.

Chad is proving that it works though, having rebuilt a Wisconsin varsity program before doing the same at his current position. But looking back at it, a much softer hand was required.