You may or may not be surprised to hear that the sport of basketball has taken up a good amount of space in the Rust household the last year or two. Whether it is the mini-hoop hanging in the living room, my husband yelling “STOP DRIBBLING THAT WHILE YOU ARE TALKING TO US AND SIT DOWN AT THE TABLE WHILE WE EAT,” Z begging for a round of “family basketball” in the driveway, or the sound of basketball shoes squeaking on courts emanating out of youtube shorts . . . it has become so familiar that I can almost tune it out.
The game is thrilling to watch, even to a complete non-athlete, non-fan like me. But it’s so fast paced that I barely can keep up with what’s going on. What does that whistle blow mean? How do they know where to set up as a team? How come some people get two foul shots and others just get one? What does that motion the ref made mean? And why is Timmer yelling out words like “FIST!” and “UTAH!” as if they are meaningful?
I’ve got questions, so it’s a good thing our coaches have got answers. In the past four years, we’ve dedicated a host of blogs to celebrating the expertise of our coaches and the amazing work that happens in the gym and ARC at all hours of the day and night. (See “Fitness: More Than Just Dodgeball” (2024), “Meeting Each Athlete Where They Are: The Coaching/Teaching Connection” (2023) or Hollie Marjanovic’s (2021) “The Athletics-Academics Connection, and Why Preparing for Finals is a Lot Like Practicing for the Big Game.”) This month, in the spirit of our theme of “checking for understanding” I decided to meet with our fearless bball coaches (left to right, below): Russell Marsalis, Michael Timmer, Sarah Spann, and Burney King to uncover the craft of coaching the sport of basketball. What they shared, though, had fascinating applications for prompting understanding beyond the game, for all of us investing in teaching, learning, and coaching.
Here are fifteen lessons I learned from that conversation for my own teaching practice:
- Age, developmental readiness, and inherent skill matters: Before creating an appropriate growth plan in any area we have to step back and consider all of the above in each of our students.
- Burney: “It’s important we understand delineation due to age. Middle school may be a little more focused on [fundamentals], what we just brush up on when we get them or expect them to know. Just like academics. Think of him as 7th-8th grade math and us as Algebra 2 and Trigonometry and all of that.”
- Timmer: “One thing that really differentiates us from [academic teachers]l is [students get academically] tested so we get the best of the best, but we [in athletics] get whatever we get. We could have a kid that doesn’t even know the ball is round and bounces or we could get a future All American.”
- For struggling students, try DR. C: Discipline plus Repetition = Confidence (Burney King)
- Marsalis: “I think it’s kind of what you do when you have struggling students in the classroom, you have to set up either before practice or after practice or maybe on the weekends, to give extra help. You can’t just stop a class and individually spend a ton of time with each student individually during the class but if they are willing to work and ask for extra help then we are willing to give it.”
- Leverage the benefits of being in a small community: we often already know what is coming up in a particular class from watching the youth in other contexts.
- For our coaches, tryouts aren’t a big piece of figuring out where kids are. We know most of the kids. It’s not that much of a surprise. We’ve watched them play in 5th-6th intramurals and on up.
- Create just-right game-time opportunities where students can feel success.
- Just like we shouldn’t be giving students huge assessments they aren’t ready for, athletes do best when they are matched with other athletes of similar skill and preparation. Of course you can’t always ensure this, but constantly being out-matched can be demoralizing and create a negative sense of momentum.
- Recognize that our work with students/athletes is naturally filled with emotional highs and lows. Still, tone matters in giving feedback, and sometimes it’s helpful to have a colleague beside you to keep you in check. (Because we all CARE SO DEEPLY!)
- Sarah: “Tone does matter and at what point is the tone appropriate? In practice we stay pretty calm with our tone but they have to also know that our tone is going to change based on what is occurring on their performance. Burney has always said too ‘don’t listen to the tone hear the message; it’s nothing personal or it’s nothing to hurt your feelings but it’s to get your attention. Sometime saying ‘Rebound, Rebound’ [quietly] is not going to get their attention and you have to change your tone, but it doesn’t stay that way. The tone is not high the entire time.
- Burney: “My kids have always had a problem trying to decide whether I’m being negative or being a realist. I’m all about realism; and that’s hard for them to get because we know truth is hard to hear. They get it I guess but [Sarah] helps me with this and sometimes I have to tell her, ‘well Sarah, grab my belt loop and tell me to sit down.’ I go into every game saying ‘calm’ but for some reason that doesn’t happen. . . Sarah will call a sub so she can go talk to them.”
- We can’t do it all by ourselves! Utilize the strengths of your colleagues whenever you can (teachers collaborating with teacher assistants, or simply collaborating with other folks in your grade level team or department).
- Marsalis: “With basketball being so fast paced that’s where having good assistants comes into play. I can’t be as focused as a head coach with guys come off the court to give them much feedback because the play on the court is still going on and that’s what I rely on them for. In JV I like kind of floating around . . . I enjoy that aspect because that’s how I started out. [In a past coaching job] I would have an assistant coach that didn’t know as much and I felt like I had to do everything but not here at SA because I’m blessed with great assistants.”
- For people who need more information like me: The head coach in each game focuses on the plays, strategies, and whether the team as a whole is playing like they should together, with intention. The assistant coach has the bandwidth to watch individual players and give them tips. He’s doing the correcting.
- Burney: “Especially with girls we deal with, Sarah is taking a lot off of my plate. In that regard, I think they’re a little more comfortable coming to a female, which I like,. I also like that she keeps me up to date.”
- Marsalis: “With basketball being so fast paced that’s where having good assistants comes into play. I can’t be as focused as a head coach with guys come off the court to give them much feedback because the play on the court is still going on and that’s what I rely on them for. In JV I like kind of floating around . . . I enjoy that aspect because that’s how I started out. [In a past coaching job] I would have an assistant coach that didn’t know as much and I felt like I had to do everything but not here at SA because I’m blessed with great assistants.”
- When a student is struggling, pull them aside to give them a break, a reset, and provide direct feedback. Or you may want to give them a minute to observe how they respond to the setback.
- Oftentimes, the coaching strategy is to pull a player from a game when they make a mistake to provide feedback.
- Burney: “Sometimes we have kids who will make a mistake and they know they made that mistake and we will leave them out there to see how they respond to it. If they don’t respond to it the second time, then they have lost that chance. That’s much less negative than it looks from the bleachers.”
- Try the Whole/Part/Whole method: Teach the whole concept to give students a sense of where you are headed, break it down into pieces, and then, when everyone is ready, put it all together.
- Burney: “I think we all use a whole part, whole method, show the whole thing, yes, and we break it down in parts, yes, bring it back together. But we’ll also drill. For example, if we’re going to work on a flex cut, okay, we’ll just break down to some section of the offense that’s a flex cut. [the oldest cut of the game]. . it’s a continuity offense.”
- You hope when you bring it back to the whole you are at least jogging; ultimately you want to sprint it.
- Teach the skill “on the court” (doing the THING in the context of where it matters.); makes me think of grammar instruction embedded in writing
- When teaching a new play, students aren’t in a classroom or looking at diagrams. They are walking through the movements on the court.
- Timmer: “I will literally say, Zander, you’re my shadow. I’m gonna walk through it. And this is what it could look like.”
- Don’t forget to review at the start of each new year.
- Kids need to brush up on plays and skills with a review at the start of the year; don’t assume they come in knowing what they knew at the end of last season.
- Provide various strategies to get to the outcome: For example, man-to-man defense versus zone.
- Burney: “We start teaching them in the 7th grade; they need to understand the concept of midline and ballside/helpside. We build from that.”
- Timmer: “There are a lot of options to go off one play, like FIST . . five different options.. . It’s not just one thing. There’s a lot going on, and that is one of the simplest, most basic plays we run.”
- The goal is to get kids to combine-integrate-fluidly work in the skills we teach them into situations rather than discretely work with them in isolation.
- Burney: “Sarah may run zone . . . the idea with man-to-man is that you are so good at it that when you choose to run a zone in high school there are points when your man-to-man principles come in even though it’s a zone defense.”
- Sarah: “There are different options so you don’t just get stuck (like in math equations).”
- Burney: “I’m such a fundamentalist and Sarah has helped me with scrimmages.”
- Russell: “I feel like, sometimes I’m like, I need to get these guys in the flow more, because a game is more of a flow. I’m bad about staying half court and teaching so much, and then before, you know, we’ve not run up and down the court.”
- Don’t overwhelm kids with too much information at once. This can result in analysis paralysis and disable their ability to utilize their instincts and go with the flow. The content you share should be purposeful, timely, and useful in the immediate future.
- Burney: “We see a lot of what I call analysis paralysis, yes, and I think it’s because we have standardized thinking.”
- Russell: “[They are] overthinking, and basketball is so fast-paced you don’t have time; it has to be a lot more reactionary.”
- Burney: “Sometimes the less information we give athletes, the better they do.”
- Russell: “They aren’t bogged down that way!”
- The more experienced the team is, the more info you can give them and they can handle.
- Hold tight to established routines in your classroom, but always make room for a few outliers and teach youth to respond appropriately to the environment around them or the audience they are performing for.
- There is pretty much always a play going on in a game, unless someone gets a steal or rebound and takes a fast break for a layup.
- Teach kids to respond to the environment around them; there are different plays for different defenses.
- Use the competitive element in your students to push them to greatness; peak at the right time of the school year.
- Timmer: “Oh, one thing I will say about the girls team, about their coaching, they do a really good job. Most people don’t see this. If somebody beats them by 20 or 30 in the first game, they’re gonna beat them the second time. Or if they lose, it’s really cool. It’s by one. That’s one thing I’ve noticed about Barney. I’ve been watching them for well, how do you do that 12 years now? Or maybe even more, he is, they are really Emma, Sarah, really good about taking a team that just got their ass whooped, yeah, and just like, motivating them enough to go beat that same team that beat them by 30, they did it this year.”
- Burney: “One, we try to peak in mid-January. We might not do some things early in the year that we know we’re going to need to do.”
There’s a mythology about a divide between those of us that teach academics and those that coach at St. Andrew’s. Worse, there’s sometimes an assumption that we as teachers might have nothing to learn from the folks in the fancy offices in the ARC and vice versa. But if time spent with youth counts for anything, coaches who work with our students three, four, up to five years in a row have a leg up on most of us.
When I shared this blog draft with the coaches, I got an email reply from Burney that is really pretty wise, and a pretty apt way to end this:
“You have captured the essence of ‘Coaching.’ We are all teachers that use a silly game to teach young people silly skills, to put a silly ball in a silly hoop but at our core we want to excel as teachers. This is the best way to prepare them for life!!!”
In other words, we, teachers and coaches alike, are on the same team with the same end goal: preparing these youth for life. Go Saints!