HAWKS USE "VITAMINS" TO BE SUCCESSFUL

Coach Don Meyer would always talk about the importance of terminology and word pictures in helping teach and motivate your team.  I think he'd like what the Atlanta Hawks are doing with the concept of "vitamins."  Here is an excerpt on an article that ran in the New York Times written by  Scott Cacciola.  It's a great article and you can read it in it's entirety here.

 

“It’s as important as anything we do,” Coach Mike Budenholzer said of the team’s emphasis on player development.

 

Spend some time around the Hawks, and one word continues to surface: vitamins. It is a metaphor for their philosophy, and it helps explain their 50-14 record. They take their vitamins when they hit the cold tub for treatment. They take their vitamins when they lift weights. They take their vitamins when they study film and watch their diets. Above all, they take their vitamins when they head to the gym for individualized skill sessions with Budenholzer’s assistants.

 

“It’s that daily nourishment that your body needs,” said Budenholzer, 45, who was hired before the start of last season after spending 19 seasons with the San Antonio Spurs, the last 17 as an assistant under Coach Gregg Popovich.

 

Budenholzer, who acknowledged appropriating the vitamin concept from one of his fellow assistants with the Spurs, seeks consistent improvement. In Atlanta, he has his players spend as much time working one-on-one with members of his staff as they do in traditional team practice settings. He wants opportunities for Paul Millsap to hone his outside shooting touch and for Jeff Teague to identify passing angles and for Kyle Korver to add a floater to his repertoire.

 

Before the Hawks faced the visiting Sacramento Kings on Monday night, the public-address announcer revved up the crowd by shouting, “Some still do not believe! Do you believe?” What followed was another clinic in a season full of them. All five starters reached double figures in scoring early in the third quarter. The Hawks assisted on 42 of 53 field goals. They set a franchise record by making 20 3-pointers. And they won by 25.

 

The win was only minutes old when Budenholzer began thinking about the work that still needed to be done. His staff soon joined him in a theater room at the arena. Budenholzer really likes meetings. He meets with his coaches before practices and after games, when they remove their ties and make plans for the next day.

 

“They’re probably up there right now, deciding whether we should have vitamins or not,” small forward DeMarre Carroll said after Monday’s game. “There will be some coaches fighting for us to get rest, and there will be some coaches fighting for vitamins. So they go in their little room and sort it out.”

 

Once the coaches decide on the schedule — they try to form a consensus, although Budenholzer has veto power — they debrief Wally Blase, the head athletic trainer, who sends late-night text messages to the players with the various times they are expected to report to the arena. Blase also lets the players know which coaches have been assigned to work with them for their vitamin sessions. Typically, no two players have the same schedule, so communication is vital.

 

“We do everything but send smoke signals over their houses just to make sure they know what’s going on,” Atkinson said.

 

In addition, each assistant receives a sheet that details his day: his allotment of vitamin sessions, along with the material that the coaches have agreed to cover. The message is uniform, and the coaches try not to overload the players with information.

 

“It’s not like we say, ‘Here’s 10 things for you to work on,’ ” Atkinson said. “No, here’s one or two.”

 

For Kent Bazemore, most of his vitamin sessions have centered on his reconfigured shooting stroke. Not long after Bazemore signed with the Hawks last year, he began working with the assistant coach Ben Sullivan, who picked apart Bazemore’s mechanics. Bazemore had an elongated motion, and the ball tended to come off his ring finger and pinkie.

 

NOBODY WATCHED PRACTICE VIDEO RIGHT AFTER

I recently finished reading a book titled "The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks" by Bruce Feldman.  It was a fascinating read about what goes into a good quarterback these days through the eyes of development "coaches" that work individually with the athletes.  But the chapter "Manningland" was worth the cost of the book alone, taking a look at some of the things that makes Peyton Manning great.  Over the next few days I'm going to share a few outstanding passages from Feldman's book on Manning.  You can read the first part here. The second deals with Peyton's work ethic including watching practice video immediately after workouts:

Florida offensive coordinator Kurt Roper was a young assistant coach at Tennessee when Peyton was the Vols’ quarterback. Roper, himself the son of a coach, said the college kid taught him more about preparation that anyone he’d ever been around. “When I played at Rice, nobody watched practice right after and took notes like he did.”

“His work ethic, and his ability to be singularly focused on winning from week to week and controlling his mind and preparing for his moment was amazing. Nobody I’ve ever been around, coaches included, have the drive that he has to prepare. He is just different than anybody else.”

OUR VIEW OF FAILURE CAN LEAD TO SUCCESS

As I like to do, I took time to read my timely passage from "The Maxwell Daily Reader" written by John Maxwell.  Each calendar day there is a message and it is always amazing how it fits in with something going on in my life. Today's, March 11, spoke about how we view failure and how our thought process in this regard goes a long way towards success.  To make his point, Maxwell used one of my favorites, Tony Gwynn as example:

On August 6, 1999, a major-league baseball player stepped up to home plate in Montreal and made another out -- the 5,113th of his professional career.  That's a lot of trips to the batter's box without a hit!  If a player made all of those outs consecutively, and he average four at bats per game, he would play eight seasons (1,278 game straight) without ever reaching first base!

Was the player discourage that night? No.  You see, earlier in the same game, in his first plate appearance, that player had reached a milestone that only twenty-one other people in the history of baseball have every achieved.  He had made his 3,000th hit.  That player was Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres.

During that game, Tony got on base with hits four times in five tries.  But that's not the norm for him.  Usually he fails to get a hit two times out of every three attempts.  Those results may not sound very encouraging, but if you know baseball, you recognize that Tony's ability to succeed consistently only one time in three tries has made him the great hitter of his generation.  And Tony recognized that to get his hits, he has to make a lot of outs.

One of the greatest problems people have with failure is that they are too quick to judge isolated situations in their lives and label them as failures.  Instead, they have need to keep the bigger picture in mind.  Someone like Tony Gwynn doesn't look at an out that he makes and think of failure.  He sees it within the context of the bigger picture.  His perspective leads to perseverance. His perseverance brings longevity.  And his longevity gives him opportunity for success.

HOW THE GOOD GET BETTER: WORK

The follow came from a report on Comcast that speak of the type of commitment needed to excel:

Following the Warriors' 102-93 win over the Bucks on Wednesday night, Klay Thompson wasn't ready to go home.

The 2015 All-Star returned to the Oracle Arena floor well after the final horn to work on his jump shot.

Thompson scored 17 points against Milwaukee on 5-for-16 shooting (3-for-8 3's).

The game prior, the 25-year old shooting guard suffered one of his worst shooting nights of the year -- 3-for-17, including 1-for-9 from the 3-point line in Brooklyn.

The night before that, he went 9-23 from the floor (2-10 3's) against Boston.

Despite his recent struggles, Thompson is shooting 43 percent from the deep on the season, good for fourth in the NBA.

His 178 treys trail only Stephen Curry's 193.

LOMBARDI ON LOVE: IT'S NOT JUST THE GOOD THINGS

A great thought on LOVE from Coach Vince Lombardi -- so good it is our team's motivational passout for today.

DEEP PRACTICE

Going over some old clinic notes and came across some great practice concepts from Del Harris:

Targeted, mistake-focused practice is essential to increased learning efficiency.  Daniel Coyle, in his book "The Talent Code" refers to this as "deep practice."

#1 The key is that when a mistake is made in execution of an action that you start from the positions everyone was in and show the correct action from the beginning point and complete the actions as opposed to starting all over again.

#2 It is important to isolate the error and do the correct movement.  Doing the correction is worth multiple times more than any demonstration or verbal correction.  "One real encounter is worth several hundred observations" is the mantra.  Important to understand that video is not the total package in correcting.

#3 Slow it down -- learning to do it over and over slowly allows perfection and the body and brain to correlate the activity.  Seeing oneself in slow motion also speeds up execution which is where video can play an important role.

#4 Repetitions -- must be attentive repetitions.  Fire the impulse, fix errors and hone the circuit.

#5 It is only repetition from "deep practice" that matters.  Work ethic is overrated because it always involves a time equation when one speaks of it.

#6 Spending more time is effective only when you are in the "sweet spot" of your effort, attentively honing your circuits.  Practice that is focused, passionate, even desperate is the ultimate state.  Keep it interesting and helpful.

PEYTON MANNING'S ORANGE FOLDER

I recently finished reading a book titled "The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks" by Bruce Feldman.  It was a fascinating read about what goes into a good quarterback these days through the eyes of development "coaches" that work individually with the athletes.  But the chapter "Manningland" was worth the cost of the book alone, taking a look at some of the things that makes Peyton Manning great.  Over the next few days I'm going to share a few outstanding passages from Feldman's book on Manning.  The first deals with Peyton's amazing grasp of details along with his desire to always do more than was originally required of him:

An hour before the eighteenth annual Manning Passing Academy began, ninety minutes north at LSU, Tommy Moffitt, with his barrel chest and Paris Island voice, was getting nostalgic. Asked about Peyton Manning, the Tigers strength coach took a big gulp of air before reaching into his desk and pulling out a bright orange folder with the name MANNING scribbled across the front. Moffitt, the strength coach at Tennessee when Manning was the Vols star QB in the mid-90’s, had shown all Tiger freshman when they reported to school this frayed old folder that contained pages of the workouts he’s prescribed for the quarterback during the summer going into his senior season. Inside, the printed sheets of paper were covered with notes Manning had jotted down, showing the player’s attention to detail and indefatigable level of preparation. There were some crossed-out poundages of prescribed workout routines where Manning pushed himself to do five or ten pounds more than Moffitt had anticipated. Everything was accounted for and documented with check marks and pluses along with margin notes such as “threw good on the outside 1 on 1… 7x Hills Threw… Agilities/Sand.”

Moffitt told all his newcomers at LSU that he had never-in twenty-five years-seen anybody as meticulous in their preparation as Peyton Manning. The weathered orange folder was Exhibit A, an artifact worthy of its place in Canton once Manning took his place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“I tell them all, ‘Right now, you’re a better athlete than Peyton manning ever was or Peyton Manning ever will be,” Moffitt said. “But this-THIS!-is what makes him so special. His preparation and his attention to detail and the things he does that nobody else told him, that, ‘This is what you have to do to be great.’”

Moffitt’s favorite highlights of Manning’s career didn’t take place in Neyland Stadium. They happened around the Vols’ football complex at odd hours, when almost no one else was around. Such as the time Moffitt heard a tap on the window to his office. Manning was outside. He needed help. Said he had a bunch of VHS tapes in his SUV that needed to go upstairs. Moffitt came outside to Manning’s old black Oldsmobile Bravada and did a triple take when the senior quarterback opened the trunk.

It was jammed with tapes of every practice, every game, every opponent. Tight copies. Wide copies. End zone copies. Four years of film study. The ingredients to Manning’s secret sauce. They ended up with two full shopping carts and kept unloading and filling.

Or the time Moffitt watched from his office window a nineteen-year-old Peyton tying a surgical cord to a goalpost and the other end around his waist so he could work on his drops from center. Back and forth. Back and forth. For what seemed like hours. Moffitt had never seen any other quarterback dothat, and certainly not doing it on his own, without any coaches or teammates around.

“Nobody here told him to do that,” Moffitt said.

 

GREAT THOUGHTS ON "TEAMWORK" FROM COACH PAT SUMMITT

Here are three amazing quotes about teamwork that I have not read before from Coach Pat Summitt.  They come from Coach Greg Brown who has wrote a book about Coach Summitt and Coach Don Meyer, whom he both worked for.  These are but just a small sampling of some great notes that Greg took while being in staff meetings or listening to Coach Summitt talk to her team:

"Teamwork is not a matter of persuading yourself and your colleagues to set aside personal ambitions for the greater good. It's a matter of recognizing that your personal ambitions and the ambitions of the team are one and the same.  That's the incentive."

"Teamwork is not created by like-mindedness.  It's an emotional cohesion that develops from mutual respect and reciprocity and from coping with good times and adversity."

"To me, the greatest reward for being a team player, far outweighing any personal gain, is that it means you will never be alone.  Think about that.  Life has enough lonely times in store for all of us.  The wonderful thing about partnership is that it halves your sorrow and compounds your joys.  When you are pressure, your teammates will only multiply it.  The amount of success you are capable of enjoying and the pleasure you are capable of feeling, is equal to the number of people you are willing to share it with."

The name of Greg Brown's book is "The Best Things I've Seen In Coaching."  It's an outstanding book and you can order a copy HERE.

BUDENHOLZER USES FILM ROOM TO IMPRESS POPOVICH

As one of those coaches who enjoy watching video, I obviously enjoyed this article on the Atlanta Hawks Mike Budenholzer.  The story is written by Shaun Powell for NBA.com and tells the tale of Budenholzer's connection to Gregg Popovich and how it started in a film room:

In the summer of 1992, Popovich returned to California to join Don Nelson's staff with the Golden State Warriors. Budenholzer's time at Pomona came and went, and after a short stint playing professionally in Denmark, he returned to Arizona, jobless and anxious. Call Pop, said Vince. It couldn't hurt.

So Budenholzer dialed a man he'd never really met or knew and made a pitch. And Popovich was like: What does this kid want from me?

"He said he didn't have anything to do and that if I ever wanted help, he'd be available," said Popovich. "I figured he was someone else I'd have to bring in my office and talk to a bit and then get rid of him. I didn't have time for this stuff, but he did go to Pomona. So he comes in and I immediately liked him. Engaging young man. I talked to him and then said I had work to do and wished him good luck. Tried to get him out of my office. But he wouldn't leave. He said he'd do anything."

Popovich took Budenholzer to the Warriors film room and had him break down film and explain what he saw. Budenholzer, leaning on lessons from his father, surprised Popovich with his savvy for players and schemes. So Pop gave instructions: Come here every day, hand me film, don't say anything to me, don't ask me for tickets and definitely don't ask me for money.

And Budenholzer did exactly that.

"The whole time," said Popovich, "I don't think Nellie ever saw him, didn't know who he was or that he even worked for us."

During the next offseason, back in Arizona, Vince Budenholzer's phone rang. Popovich on the line.

"Where's Mike?" said Pop.

"I think he's out, but he'll be back soon."

"Well, if you can get ahold of him, I might just hire his ass."

Pop was on the move again, this time back to San Antonio in 1994 to be the Spurs' executive vice president of basketball operations/general manager and soon begin the tremendous run as coach that will someday put him in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

"When I left the Warriors," said Popovich, "I took only two people with me: R.C. Buford (now the Spurs' GM) to do scouting and Mike to do film work."

This is a lengthy column by Powell that also speaks to the role that Budenholzer's father played.  It's well worth the read and you can see it in it's entirety here.

PRATICE AND PLAYING TIME THOUGHTS

A couple of article recently on practice and playing time for collegiate basketball players spoke to the different philosophy between minutes at practice and minutes at games.  In an article by Chris Carson, it mentioned that some people had criticized Syracuse's Jim Boeheim for the big minutes some of his starters have been playing. Duke's Mike Krzyzewski came to his defense:

Faced with three players dealing with ankle injuries and a fourth recovering from shoulder and rib issues, Krzyzewski was asked if he worried about the minutes piling up on his players.

"Not minutes, it's injuries," Krzyzewski said. "Kids don't get tired from playing minutes. They get tired from over-practice. There's no kid in the world who gets tired from playing. You've got to be kidding me. You get tired if you play long minutes and then you practice long. None of those kids want to come out. That doesn't tire them out. It's how you practice."

Like Syracuse, Duke has just eight healthy scholarship players. But despite having more quality depth than the Orange, Krzyzewski paid little heed to the concept of a "freshman wall."

Krzyzewski played freshman Justise Winslow for 40 minutes against the Orange on Saturday and freshman point guard Tyus Jones for 38. Duke guard Quinn Cook is among the top five in minutes played in the ACC this year.

"Our practice is amazingly short and no contact," Krzyzewski said. "They've been interesting, let's put it that way. We don't tire them out. You worry about being in shape and how you run without contact or change surfaces and stuff like that. They all want to play 40 minutes."

In another article, by Mike Waters, he details Notre Dame's Mike Brey as to how he controls practice time while also allowing big minutes for key starters:

"The older guys know how to play 40 minutes,'' Brey said of his veterans. "They can fight through the fatigue mentally way better than a younger player. If it's younger guys, you can have an issue in game and length of season. Connaughton and Grant? They're men.''

Brey said he prefers to play with a shorter bench, giving more minutes to his top-line guys.

"I think it can help you,'' Brey said of a short rotation. "I think it helps your offensive efficiency. Guys know they're going to play. They'll move the ball. They're patient. When you play a lot of different guys, you get a lot of different guys playing together and they're more apt to turn the ball over. Also, nobody's looking over at the bench expecting to get the hook.''

Brey said he prepares his players to play more minutes from the time practice starts in the fall.

"In our practices, we get to 5-on-5 quick,'' Brey said. "We're 5-on-5 in that October to November stretch. They're getting their playing legs because we're playing in practice early in the season.

"You also have to start shortening your practices earlier than you'd think,'' the Notre Dame coach added. "You have to understand the value of rest days in November and December.''

By this time of year, Notre Dame's practices are practically walk-throughs compared to other schools.
"I haven't been on the floor more than an hour and 15 minutes since January 1,'' Brey said.

On Thursday, the day after Notre Dame's win over Duke, Brey said his team would not have a regular practice.

"These are what we call recovery days,'' Brey said. "We'll watch a little film of us, a little film of Pittsburgh, we'll let them stretch, they'll get a lift in, but no practice.''

Notre Dame's players also get massages regularly and have a chiropractor available as well.