UCF: PERIMETER WORKOUT (1ST DAY)

Player Development Workout for Perimeter Players today at UCF will look as follows:

EMPHASIS OF THE DAY: Sprint to Screen

BALL HANDLING
2 Ball Stationary Dribbling: stay in stance (back straight & head up), echo yells off leader
2/0 2 Ball Passing (w/Hvy Trainer & Tennis Ball): stay in stance, call out name of receiver

CUTTING
2/0 V-Cuts: walk the arc, plant, straight line cuts, show your hands to the ball, low ball transfer on reception (show top sweeps), see the post
2/0 Back Cuts: show hands to the ball to set up cut, plant, straight cut to rim - finish!

SCREENING
1/0 Down Screen into 2nd Cut: "Screener is the 2nd Cutter," hold screen for 2 count, 2nd cut based off 1st cut (all about spacing)

CUTTING & SCREENING (Post/Perimeter Together)
2/1 Screening w/out Ball (we take the ball out for a great concentration level on cutting and screening)
.....Cuts off DS: curl, straight, flair, back
.....Make screener execute 2nd cut

SHOOTING (Perimeter Only)
1/0 Shots off DS (call cuts off coach's signal)
2 Ball Drift Shooting (off V-Cut)

ENJOY THE RIDE

One of the things I enjoy outside of coaching is music.  In fact, you can usually here some sort of music coming from office the entire today -- often some great jazz.  On the early morning ride into my office this morning I was actually listening to the Zac Brown Band in my Jeep and their song "Quiet Your Mind" which is a song about man's challenge to defeat time and I thought about how much it related to coaching.

"They say that it's gone before you know it."

There is not guarantee certainly on the amount of days we have on this earth -- not is their on the amount of time we get to teach and coach.

"Soak it all in:
it's a game you can't win,
enjoy the ride."

Time will run out on all of us...and in the coaching profession we will one day look up and our tenure will be over.  No matter how hard we work, we can't coach forever...so "soak it all in" and "enjoy the ride."

THOUGHTS ON ROLE DEVELOPMENT

One of the absolute joys I am having as an assistant coach at UCF is to be able to daily discuss basketball with our Associate Head Coach Greg Brown.  As I've mentioned before, Greg has a great mind and certainly a great pedigree having worked for Don Meyer and Pat Summitt.

One of the things that we were discussing today were the roles of our players. And has been the case, we were able to branch off and discuss philosophy.  

Some of our thoughts were that it was impossible for your team to perform at their maximum ability unless you define those roles to each player.  I believe it is imperative that you sit players down individually and discuss their roles with them on more than one occasion during the season.  Don't just tell them what their role entails -- tell them why that is their role and, more importantly, explain why it will help your team succeed.  If they are interested in an expanded role, talk to them about the means they must take to grow their game so that they can have a bigger role.  Give them a game plan so that they can do more, but make sure they understand that they must put in the work and demonstrate on a consistent basis in practice.

And the other thing that it very important is that ALL players have roles.  Media or coaches that call a player "a role player" can make that sound somewhat demeaning.  Every player on your team has a role.  Each role is important to the success of your team.  All roles overlap each other and are reliant on each other if a "team" is to perform at their highest level.

A shooter has a role just as a screener or a passer.  The role of the shooter is to work hard to get open...run the floor and spot up...execute cuts off of a screen...hands ready to shoot.  If player's role is to shoot and you pass up a good shot, a player is failing as a role player just the screener who doesn't feel like screening.

Another important thing for a coach to do is add value to each role and make sure each player knows why that role is important.  I keep coming back to "why."  It's an important part of coaching today.  Along these lines I believe it is not only important that each player know their own role but those of their teammates.

And finally, role development is a daily job.  It requires maintenance in practice, in the film room and in team meetings.  You must never allow a player to veer from what her role is defined.

COACH MEYER WITH TWO SIMPLE YET STRONG DEFENSIVE THOUGHTS

A simple concept in regard to defense from Coach Don Meyer:

You can do every phase perfectly on defense but it is wasted without:

SHOT PRESSURE

BLOCKOUT

You can do everything wrong on defense and still succeed with:

SHOT PRESSURE

BLOCKOUT

What two things to you think you need to be stressing on defense each day?



BRIAN TRACY'S CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT FORMULA

Another great post by Brian Tracy.  There is some great information in this post to help you push forward in parts of your career.  For more great stuff, check out: www.BrianTracy.com

Put Your Career on the Fast Track
There are many things you can do to put your career onto the fast track. You can set clear, specific goals for each area of your life and then make plans to accomplish them. You can plan your work and work your plan.

Ask For Greater Responsibility
You can accept 100% responsibility for everything you are and everything you become. You can refuse to make excuses or to blame others. You can tell your boss that you want greater responsibilities and then when you get them, put your whole heart into doing an excellent job.

Utilize Your Inborn Talents
In the parable of the talents in the New Testament, Jesus says, "Oh good and faithful servant, you have been faithful over small things. I will make you master over large things."

If you too will carry out every assignment to the very best of your ability, you will be given larger and more important things to do and you'll be paid more as a result.

Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Improvement
The key to long term success is for you to dedicate yourself to continuous improvement. If you become one tenth of one percent more productive each day, that amounts to 1/1000th improvement per working day. Is that possible? Of course it is!

Improve A Little At A Time
If you become one tenth of one percent more productive each day, that amounts to one half of one percent more productive each week. One half of one percent more productive each week amounts to two percent more productive each month and 26% more productive each year.

The cumulative effect if becoming a tiny bit better at your field and more productive amounts to a tremendous increase in your value and your output over time.

How to Double Your Productivity
Twenty-six percent more productive each year, with compounding, amounts to doubling your overall productivity and performance every 2.7 years. If you become 26% more productive each year, with compounding, times 10 years, you will be 1004% more productive over the next decade. That is an increase of ten times over ten years.

The Reason For All Great Successes
This is called the Law of Accumulation, or the Principle of Incremental Improvement. It is the primary reason for all great success stories. By the yard, it's hard. But inch by inch, anything's a cinch!

Become A 1000% Person
Make a decision, right now, to be a 1000% person. Commit yourself to continuous personal and professional development. Read, listen to audio programs and take additional courses. This process will completely transform your life.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to put these ideas into action immediately.

First, make a plan to become a little bit better every single day. Learn and apply one new idea each day to help you to become more productive and effective at your work. The incremental effect will amaze you.

Second, be patient. Don't expect overnight changes or instant results. Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare. Become a little bit better each day and your future will take care of itself.

30 DAYS TO A CHAMPIONSHIP: IMPORTANT FUTURE MEETING ALONG WITH AN EYE ON THE PAST

Jim Boone: Today we will spend entirely on campus.  It is the first day of classes for our student-athletes and we want to make sure we are on hand to trouble shoot in problems they may have with classes.  I also have some follow up meetings with the players on an individual basis to continue to get to know them and to allow them to get to know me as well.

I will spend a big part of my day (and evening) working on the details of our first team meeting tomorrow.  Not that all team meetings aren't important but the first one sets the tempo for the rest of the season.  It has long been a priority for me and I have been working on it for days.  Perfection is impossible to expect but I want to be as close as I can in the messages that I am delivering to my team.

I would like to take a moment and go back to our press conference that introduced me as the new head coach at West Virginia Wesleyan.  I can't begin to speak of the thrill I had to see Wesleyan's legendary coach Hank Ellis in the room.  His contributions to Bobcat athletics are endless as both a basketball coach and a baseball coach.  The baseball field is actually named after him.  He has won conference championships in both sports and continues to have a great passion for our future.  The day of the press conference was actually his 90th birthday!  What an honor to have him there to welcome me to the West Virginia Wesleyan family.

I realize there are several schools of thought in regard to how you handle the past when you take a new job.  I know of some coaches who ignore it or pretend their school had no past.  That has never been my philosophy.  It will be a big part of my staff to not only embrace the past but to reach out to all of our alumni and do everything we can to make them understand that they will always be a part of Bobcat Basketball! 

30 DAYS TO A CHAMPIONS: WELCOMING PLAYERS AND FAMILIES AND SEARCHING FOR QUALITY ASSISTANT COACHES

Jim Boone: It's been a great and hectic weekend!  We had the opportunity to meet and greet our players and their families as they arrived to our campus for the fall semester.  Obviously, there were a lot of things to do but they all hit the back burner when a new family arrived.  Many probably think it is important for me to make myself available to welcome the players and their families since this is my first year as their coach and therefore my first chance to have a face-to-face with them.  However, this has always been an annual tradition for our staff.  We will always be here with open arms each fall -- it's part of extending our family!

Another great sign is that on their first day on campus -- on a Saturday night -- they decided to play pick up in the gym.  It's a strong indicator that this team wants to excel.  Another good sign is that our 6' 7" post player shattered a backboard dunking over a teammate in transition!

Today, among other things, I will continue to work on my staff.  There can be very few things more important than putting together an excellent staff. I will work just as hard in choosing and then developing my staff as I will in any other phase of our program because the staff will affect every other phase of our program.  Please note that I said "develop."  It is not enough to pick good people to be on our staff, it is up to me to help guide them in areas to make sure that we have a shared vision of where we want to go and how we want to get there.

Here are a few things that I always look for in a staff:

1. Loyalty -- To me this is the most important of all traits.  As Alan Stein says, "We must have each other's back."  They must believe in what we doing as program, how we go about our work,and believe in West Virginia Wesleyan as an institution and our team!

2. Work Ethic -- We are a "Hard Work Basketball Program." This blue-collar approach has been a major part of our longevity and success -- thus we need assistant coaches that reflect this important tenant of our program. If you want your dreams to come true, don't sleep.

3. Ability to Teach -- We are a teaching program, therefore we must have coaches that can teach. I love to hire guys that are high school teachers or that I have seen them teach in their own practice or in our camps.  The ability to effectively teach is one of utmost importance.

4. Passion -- I want to hire coaches who have a passion for the game, for teaching, and the ambition to become head coaches.

5. Interpersonal Skills -- Our assistant coaches must be able to relate to our players, to our recruits and their families, and on our campus with our administration, staff and faculty. I find it very important to have people skills.

6. Appearance & Professionalism -- These traits our very important as our coaches represent West Virginia Wesleyan, our program and myself as the head coach 24-7.

On with the search!!!

DOES YOUR TEAM HAVE A SHARED VISION? IF SO, WHAT IS IT? IF NOT, WHY NOT?

I love this passage...it speaks to a very simple yet strong principle -- is your entire organization on the same page?...do you have a shared vision?

You hear coaches talk about...about "we have really come together."  Players speak about it too..."we are on a mission."  But if you asked them separately to write down what that mission is, would they all give the same answer?

As a coach, how often do you talk to your team about what you want your program to stand for?  We're not talking about wins and losses here -- I would hope.  The culture of your program and what it means long term should be more process related.

Stephen Covey talks about this in his book, "First Things First:"

If you want to have an interesting experience sometime, ask people you work with if they know what "true north" is for your organization -- what is its essential purpose for being? Say to the members of your family, "Just tell me in one sentence -- what is the purpose of our family?" Ask your spouse, "What is the purpose of our marriage? What is its essential reason for being?" When you go to work, take out your clipboard and ask the first ten people you meet, "Could you help me? I'm doing a little survey.  One question: What is the purpose of this work group?" "What is the purpose of this board of trustees?"  "What is the purpose of this executive committee?"

We've done this with the executive cabinets of many companies including some of the Fortune 100 -- big companies, sophisticated organizations.  And in many cases, the top executives are absolutely surprised, chagrined, embarrassed.  They cannot believe the different descriptions that are being given as to purpose and vision.  This event happens sometimes when there's a mission statement hanging on the wall -- a statement that came down through the organization from the executive offices.  There's no sense of shared vision.  There's no passion, no deep burning "Yes!" in the organization.

From "First Things First" by Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill, Rebecca Merrill

MACK BROWN ON HOW HE PROMOTES TEXAS FOOTBALL

The following comes from University of Texas football coach Mack Brown:

Let me say that when I talk about promotion, I am not talking about gimmicks and giveaways. I am talking about building relationships because that is where true promotion begins. I will talk about 3what I will call the I’s of Texas, and you can make them fit your own program.

Make a Good Impression: The first I is impress.

Want people to believe in you and your program, set out to impress them

Most of all, however, you need to show them who you really are and what you are going to stand for in your program.

Obviously, the most important group when it comes to the impression you make will be your players. First, you work with the players you have at your school.

The impression you make bridges into every one of the many publics you touch as a coach—the faculty, fans, parents, alumni, media, and so on.

People want their head coach to be visible, and you should accept that responsibility.

Dare to Imagine: The second I is imagine.

From the time you become a coach, imagine what you want your program to look like and then, when your opportunity comes, use every asset you have to make it happen.

Everything we did in the building touched one of three areas—recruits, players, and the Texas tradition. When you enter the elevator, you hear “Texas Taps,” our fight song, on the way up and “The Eyes of Texas,” our alma mater, on the way down. We wanted to be sure that recruits and everyone else always knew that they were at Texas.

We follow the same idea with every publication and printed item whether it is a card we send out or a poster we give out.

The newest and largest opportunity today in promotion is the Internet.

Imagine the relationship you want to have with high school coached and then put a plan in place to achieve that.

Each season we begin with a different theme for the team. The first year we felt we needed to reemphasize that fact that winning didn’t come easy, so we took a theme of “Practice winning every day.”

The following year we wanted to stress a commitment to winning, so we used WIT—“Whatever it takes.”

In the season of 2001 many people were talking about winning the national championship before the season. We talked a lot about taking each game at a time, but every kid who ever plays the game dreams of winning it all. Our slogan became “Live your dream,” so we tried to make the high expectations a positive and put it out there. We gave each player a dream catcher, an old Indian charm made of feathers and webbing. The idea is that the dream catcher traps the bad dreams and lets the good dreams come through.

Strive to Involve: That’s where our third I come in—involve.

You can’t do it by yourself. Involving others—from the student body, to your staff, to the fan base—is where the heart of promoting a program lies.

So we developed a system in which an assistant coach would combine a recruiting trip with a speaking engagement.

I have found it important to identify a small circle of your university’s top supporters to use as a sounding board for advice.

From "The Football Coaching Bible"

JIM BOONE: 30 DAYS TWEET LOG #3

Besides blogging in his "30 Days To A Championship," new West Virginia Wesleyan head coach Jim Boone will also be tweeting as he goes through the process of laying the foundation for a new program. We will copy and paste some of these tweets here every few days in case you missed or are not on twitter.

To follow Jim on twitter simply go to:

www.twitter.com/Coach_Jim_Boone

Jim will be utilizing the hashtag #30DC to donate all tweets in this process.

@Coach_Jim_Boone : Summer is officially over - cannot wait to get this Team on the court - start the countdown - 6 Days! #30DC

@Coach_Jim_Boone : Here we go - Orientation Process begins at 8:30 am - we are in the office to help with the transition and meet families of our team. #30DC

@Coach_Jim_Boone : Ray moved into dorm tonite - as good a player as Ray is, a better person -'looking forward to coaching - a born leader! #30DC

@Coach_Jim_Boone : Wow, kids officially move in tomorrow, but campus is LIVE tonight - this is a REAL College Campus - Awesome Community Environment! #30DC

@Coach_Jim_Boone : We are immediately working to earn the TRUST & RESPECT of our Bobcat Team, as we meet our guys moving into their rooms this weekend! #30DC

@Coach_Jim_Boone : They are arriving - great to meet our new team in person - I am very excited, this is proving to be an outstanding group of young men! #30DC