The following comes from Ernie Woods via Creighton Burns:"Be sure to teach players to listen. Demand and get eye contact of all players prior to speaking. It is imperative that any time a coach talks everyone listens (including assistant coaches). Also, make sure that the entire coaching staff is well coordinated and uses the same offensive and defensive terminology. Do not over coach and keep instructions simple. Talk to players’ level. Whenever possible, use short descriptive terms. Clarify rather than confuse. Tell players what you are going to teach them, teach them, and tell them what you taught them."
I'm not sure we can emphasize this more. Sure, you want to teach players to defend, feed the post, blockout and take good shots. But ALL of this is preceded by their ability to listen. There can be no mistake that the better a player listens, the better player they will become. Some keys that we do at LSU to help in this manner include:
1. Demand eye contact
This means everyone when you the coach is speaking but it is just as important that everyone has great eye contact when a player is speaking.
2. Keep terminology simply and consistent
Don't have one coach say "box out" and the other say "blockout." Make sure your entire staff and team are on the same page. During my time with Dale Brown we always had a "basketball glossary" in our team notebooks and we are going to start that back with our Lady Tiger team this fall.
3. Test the process
Speak to the team and then stop and ask someone to repeat what they heard. Bob Knight used to have a mock timeout and then pass out index cards to his team so they can write down what they heard.
4. Never assume
Don't believe because it was said that is was heard. Skip Bertman, the utlra-successful baseball coach at LSU would always say "repetition is good." Don Meyer would talk about "check, check and re-check."
