COLORADO SPRINGS – USA Under-19 Coach Billy Donovan said Monday afternoon that he wanted to take a team to Prague that “can really pressure people all over the court, defensively.”

When USA Basketball announced the final 12-player roster Monday night after seven practices over four days, the University of Florida’s coach’s wishes appeared granted.

Five of those selections – guards Marcus Smart (Oklahoma State) and Rasheed Sulaimon (Duke), as well as frontcourt players Jarnell Stokes (Tennessee), Jerami Grant (Syracuse) and Montrezl Harrell (Louisville) – played for Donovan during the USA Under-18 squad run to gold during the 2012 FIBA Championships last June in Brazil.

Joined by seven new teammates, they’ll try to make it back-to-back gold when FIBA19-Under Championships get underway on June 27 in the capital city of the Czech Republic.
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Ohio State president Gordon Gee has announced his retirement, effective next month.

The timing couldn’t have been any better.

Gee is a gaffe-prone 69-year-old relic who has inflicted more than enough damage to this prestigious Big Ten university with his outrageous, derogatory comments last December to the athletic council that mocked Notre Dame and Roman Catholics in general and trashed the academic integrity of neighboring Louisville, Cincinnati and Kentucky and the Southeastern Conference in general. Gee said that the decision by football coach Brett Bielema to leave Wisconsin for Arkansas was a blessing, suggesting Bielema’s AD Barry Alvarez felt Bielema was “a thug” who was one step ahead of the posse.

It’s time to mute the sound for good.
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As a summer club/AAU coach you are under more scrutiny than ever before in the business of grassroots basketball. Some say it is unfair and you are misjudged. unfortunately there have been too many cases of club coaches ruining the reputation of club coaches for the rest. You are under a microscope every step of the way regardless of how you run your programs.

Before I get too far into the blog I want you to remember one thing, basketball like life is a circle. As good as your club is now, you can be irrelevant in this game 5 years from now. I’ve seen countless clubs with big name players fade into nothing within a few years time. It is important for you to know this as how you treat people while you are up will be a big factor in how you get treated on the way down.
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In any profession in which you work developing value should be your number one goal. There are too many people on this planet that just want to be part of the pack never wanting to better themselves to add value to their profession. Long term thinking must be something that must be a daily routine.

As an assistant coach in college, you must bring value to your head coach and making their job easier. First off there are very few paid positions in basketball and you should feel grateful for being there and never take that for granted. Being a college assistant is one thing, being one that can make your head coach’s job easier is a completely different level.

Players are the lifeblood of any level of basketball. You can be Popovich, Jackson, Auerbach, Pitino, and Calipari put together as a coach, but if you don’t have talent sustaining a winning program is impossible. Recruiting new talent into your program must be something that you take seriously and do with a purpose. Don’t just follow the rest of the people in your business and keep the same standard, be different and do something that sets you a part from the rest.
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You want to advance in your career? You must pursue it! You must attack it! You must have an action plan! Everyone wants to advance in their career, so you must set yourself apart. How can you do that properly?

Securing an interview can be difficult. In the business of basketball today, in order to advance in your career the individual must learn to successfully navigate the game of networking, social media, and technology. You must learn how to professionally package yourself so that you can be multi-dimensional. You must be able to promote yourself without being a “Self-promoter”.

First and foremost an interview is a two-way street. The candidate is being interviewed by the employer at the same time the employer is being interviewed by the candidate. As the candidate you should have a series of questions (10-12) that you are prepared to ask of the employer.
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In our game today, we hear “me” and lot more than “we” even though we play and coach a team sport. As coaches we spend a tremendous amount of time recruiting future players, watching film of our current team, developing skill of our current team, but do we spend enough time building our current team’s chemistry and forcing team communication? How does your team chemistry reveal itself during the game? When a team is down by eight points with five minutes to play and a turnover occurs a teammate will lose trust and point a finger or he will encourage his teammate to get a stop and make the next play. All games have adversity and the culture, chemistry, and trust between coaches and players will be revealed during those times. All coaches and players have the disease of competition, but at what point do we lose our belief and trust as a unit because of our lack of competitive discipline?
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As a high school coach for 4 years, a college coach for 8 years, and a small (basketball-related) business owner for 3 years, I’ve had a chance to observe college coaches closely. I’ve also had the opportunity to listen to a large cross-section of knowledgeable basketball people share their observations and experiences dealing with college coaches. Over the years, a consensus has developed regarding areas where college coaches in general have a need for improvement.

A couple of points before getting started: one, this guest column speaks in generalities, and by no means applies to all college coaches. Also, it is meant to be constructive criticism, with the hope that at least one college coach who reads this will benefit from it. It is not meant to offend any individual person, and it’s certainly not meant to denigrate a profession that I love. Furthermore, when I coached in college, I was guilty at times of nearly every topic covered below, so I’m not trying to get on a soapbox and pretend that I’m holier than thou. I’m not. Finally, I wrote this primarily with NCAA Division I coaches in mind, and some of these criticisms are less applicable to coaches outside of D1, at least that’s been my experiences (largely confirmed by my conversations with experienced people in the basketball industry).
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