• Work your ass off to establish a great relationship with your athletic director.
• You need to have a mutual understanding with your athletic director.
• The athletic director is key when looking for your first or next head coaching job.
It’s hard to sustain a program when you are constantly trying to figure out how you are going to play:
• Take a job where you can recruit the kind of athletes you need to play your style.
• Recruit athletes who fit the way you want to play.
• Create a brand of play, it helps you recruit.
If I was to return to coaching I would:
• Press more.
• Shoot the three more.
• I would play more up and down.
• I would play a style that kids want to play.
Recruit Shooters:
• They will win games.
• Get your best players on the floor.
• Play small.
• If you can put four shooters around one low post scorer, they are unselfish, move the ball, and move themselves, you will be successful.
The four-man is the most important piece of the recruiting puzzle:
• Coaches are now recruiting four-men that can shoot the basketball.
Ball screen defense:
• If I was coaching today, I would become more of a zone coach.
• Zone allows you to avoid guarding all of the ball screens in today’s offenses.
• When in doubt switch on the ball screen.
• IF they have the best player coming off the ball screen, trap and force someone else to beat you.
• Switch up the way you defend ball screens.
• Consider playing more man to zone defense and vice versa.
• Who has better zone plays than man plays for a last second shot? So why not play zone defense in this situation?
Situations:
• Simulate late game situations because so many game sin college basketball have a five points or less differential with five minutes left in the game.
• The success of your team in a season depends on how well you did in close ball games.
• Last part of every practice, Dean Smith would work on overtime situations.
• If you want to win close games, spend more time on end of game situations.
• In fifteen years, I never saw Dean Smith write a play on a clipboard during a timeout: It was all talked about or worked on in practice. He expected is players to remember their responsibilities.
• Talk to your players and practice how to utilize timeouts late in games. When to use them and how to use then.
