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Coaching Youth Hoops (Youth Basketball Coach): Daily Summaries Delivered
by Teachhoops.com
Check us out at www.coachingingyouthhoops.com Are you a new or experienced youth basketball coach looking to cut through the noise and have someone just tell you what works? It’s easy to waste time and money learning how to coach Kindergarten through 8th-grade basketball on your own. Join seasoned youth basketball coaches Bill and Steve as they give you the blueprint you need to succeed on and off the court. In each episode, you'll discover easy-to-implement tips and techniques that you can apply to your next practice. Will Launch Weekly on Tuesday Mornings
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- Today14 min
Ep 372 What Is a Parent Actually Supposed to Do During Tryouts?
Parents' Role in Tryouts Links mentioned in this episode TeachHoops.com CoachingYouthHoops.com — print and go practice plans built from years of coaching, not ChatGPT NukeHydration.com — clean sports drink for kids and coaches, started by a couple out of Mississippi. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order What Is a Parent Actually Supposed to Do During Tryouts? Shoes, snacks, and getting out of the way. Fall basketball season is kicking off, tryouts are here, and Coach Bill wants to talk about the person nobody writes a rubric for: the parent. Two sides to it. What coaches should be teaching parents to expect, and how parents can actually support their kid through a stressful week. Coach Collins goes first, and his list is unglamorous on purpose. We are dealing with kids, not young adults who can drive themselves. So the number one parent responsibility is logistics: shoes that fit, a ball in the bag, properly hydrated, everything they need, and there on time. That is most of the job. Tryouts can be genuinely stressful for a family, especially when nobody knows whether the kid makes a team at all, or which team. Coach Collins' advice is to drop both the coach hat and the parent evaluator hat and just be the supportive person in the front seat. When they get in the car, ask how it went. Ask what was fun today. Not "how'd you do" and not "were any of the other kids good." That one shift is what makes a kid want to come back next year. Coach Bill's biggest coaching side point: share your tryout rubric with parents before tryouts. How are teams being picked? If there is an A and a B team, what actually separates them? If there are cuts, why would a kid get cut? Say it plainly and say it early, and you avoid most of the fallout after the list goes up. He also names the thing everyone has seen: the leagues where the three dad coaches end up with the top three kids, automatically, because of how the structure works. Coach Collins frames it as a triangle. Parent to kid, parent to coach, coach to kid. When one leg of that breaks down, what the kid heard and what the parent tells the kid stop matching what the coach actually said, and that is where the problems come from. Ten spots, here is what we are looking for, here is what competitive means. Say it out loud to all three points of the triangle. Coach Bill lays out two scenarios worth walking through with your kid ahead of time. Your kid makes it and their best friend does not. One kid is thrilled, the other is crushed. Teach yours how to handle that, because the bragging happens more often than you would think. Your kid does not make the team you both expected. Talk through what it actually means, which is not much. A career is not over in fifth grade because someone did not make the A team. Coach Collins agrees and adds the frame: life is about disappointment, and you learn more from failure than success. But he pushes it one step further. His favorite parenting lesson from this episode. Before tryouts, have your athlete go ask the coach what they are looking for. After tryouts, have them ask what to work on for next year. The story behind it: his son Drew, in fourth or fifth grade, got in the car furious about a book report. Coach Collins pulled over about three hundred yards from the school and told him to go back in and talk to his teacher, who was still there. The teacher had a great conversation with him. Coach Collins believes that single moment taught Drew more than the rest of that school year, and that it made him an advocate for himself through his entire education. Coach Bill's addition is that this is really about teaching a kid how to speak respectfully to an adult in authority, which outlasts basketball by decades. And it is the kid who should do the asking, not the parent. Both agree a fourth grader is old enough. Coach Bill says he would love it if one of his fourth grade girls walked up and asked him to explain. As Coach Collins puts it, your job is to get them ready to leave the nest, not to stay in it. Nobody wants their thirty five year old kid still hanging around the house. Coaches: publish the rubric before tryouts, not after. Parents: handle the logistics, ask what was fun instead of how they did, and send your kid to talk to the coach themselves. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com TitleSubtitleShow NotesStart with the boring stuffThen take off the coach hatThe communication triangleRehearse the hard conversations before they happenTeach the kid to advocate for themselvesCoach's takeaway Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
- 5 days ago20 min
Ep 371 How Do You Run a Tryout That Actually Gets You the Right Team?
https://teachhoops.com/ Tryout season is here, and Coach Collins frames the stakes right away: the two most important days for a high school coach are the day you pick your staff and the day you pick your team. At the youth level, the day you pick your team is just as big. Tryouts matter. Youth basketball has several flavors and you do not always get to choose. Sometimes you are assigned players by area. Sometimes it is a snake draft. Sometimes it is a club tryout where you evaluate and then pick. And sometimes you are the one running the tryout, sometimes you are only evaluating, and sometimes you are stuck doing both. Coach Collins has done all three and says the variables change your approach every time. There are also league quirks worth knowing. In Little League, Coach Collins' son Drew was slotted at a certain round and Coach Collins forfeited that round's pick to keep him. His own father worked the same system a generation earlier, drafting the other best player in each of his sons' classes as an assistant coach, and won the city three or four years running. Coach Bill had a similar situation with a set of very good twins that cost him two picks. Will the kid actually show up? This is Coach Bill's first filter, and he has been burned. He once used a first round pick on a soccer player who was the best athlete on the floor and made maybe one game all season. Lose that pick and your number one is effectively the tenth best player. He now asks parents directly what other sports the kid is playing in season, and which one is the priority. Some boards he has served on added it to the registration questions. Coach Collins adds the nuance: showing up because a parent is busy is a different problem than showing up because soccer is at the same time. And there is more variability with younger kids. A nine year old might want to be at basketball practice, but if the parents already committed to soccer, that kid is going to soccer. By seventeen, the player gets more say. Effort, focus, and attention to detail. Coach Collins tells the Drake Baldwin story. Baldwin, now the starting catcher for the Braves, did not have a great tryout at nine years old and slid to the second or third round. Coach Collins picked him because he saw love for the game and effort where other coaches saw the miss. He was Baldwin's first Little League coach, and Baldwin's mom still has that first over the fence home run ball. The point: effort is hard to define but you know it when you see it, and it looks different in a seven year old than a thirteen year old. As Coach Collins puts it, Caitlin Clark was probably pretty focused at four. Personalities do not change that much. The parent factor. Coach Bill is blunt that plenty of coaches draft for the parents. If you know a parent is going to be difficult all season, that is a real consideration when you are volunteering your time. It has nothing to do with the kid, and it is still a factor. Fit with your style. Go in knowing what you value. If you love ball handlers, look for ball handlers. If you are defensive minded, find kids who play that way. The free rubric on the site lets you check boxes and weight what matters most to you, which keeps you organized instead of reacting to whoever scored last. Keep everybody moving. Same rule as practice. In a ninety minute to two hour window, there should always be something happening. Chunk the group. Coach Bill sometimes has a couple hundred kids in one gym. Start everyone together, then split into rough A, B, and C groups so kids are competing against similar ability. Then move kids between courts to test them: try this one up on court one and see how it looks. A little gamesmanship. Coach Collins will sometimes put the obvious top one or two players down on the B or C floor, because he already knows they are on the team and he needs his eyes on the ten kids he is unsure about. He never does it to a single kid, always three or four, so nobody reads too much into it. Coach Bill's warning: watch the parents' reaction. Numbers and pins. Number every kid on the way in. Use running bibs or pinned numbers like a cross country meet, and be warned, getting them pinned on and keeping them on is one of the hardest logistical parts of the day. Run two sets of numbers so one group is getting pinned while the group on the floor is already running. And make absolutely sure the roster matches the numbers, so number ten on the floor is the kid every coach thinks it is. Mix ups happen. Get volunteers. The more helping hands on the logistics, the better the whole day goes. Bring in independent evaluators. This is the piece both coaches feel strongest about. Use someone with no kid in that grade: a parent from an older grade, a high school player, anyone with experience and no stake. Their job is to rank the players one through X, and their ranking is the final word. Coaches do their own ranking alongside, which gives them their draft board, but the
- 1 weeks ago16 min
Ep 370 Should Saturday's Result Change Monday's Practice Plan?
nukehydration.com, or follow along on Instagram @nukehydration. Use Youthhoops15 for 15% off TeachHoops.com CoachingYouthHoops.com — practice plans, season resources, and the free tryout structure guide under the Free Resources menu HeySami.com — new text based youth sports organization tool (Sami with an i) The Hey Sami Podcast — available on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you listen Questions for Hey Sami: hey@heysami.com Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook Group — search "Coaching Youth Hoops" on Facebook Show Notes The guys open by marveling that they are somewhere in the mid three hundreds on episode count, nearly four years of talking about youth basketball, and the Facebook group still produces questions nobody has asked before. Today's is one of those: do you adjust your practice plan based on how the last game went? You won big Saturday, or you got run out of the gym. Does Monday look different? That question assumes two things, as Coach Bill points out. One, that you have a practice plan at all. Two, that your plans are organized and follow a progression across the season. If either is missing, you know where to go. Thirty plus years at the high school level and Coach Collins is always adjusting, but not off the scoreboard. He adjusts off what the team did well and did not do well. In January it might be that they are not shooting, not getting to the help line, not hedging screens. Wins and losses do not drive that. Performance does. The mechanic is simple reallocation. If something is going well it earns less time, and those minutes move somewhere else. Take ten minutes off out of bounds work and move it to offensive floor balance. He compares it directly to teaching: if the class has quadratics down in one area but not another, you stop running examples on the part they own and spend the time on the part they do not. He also plants a warning flag. Go too far down this road and you are the dog chasing its tail. If every week is a reaction to the last thing that went wrong, you spend the season zigzagging and you are not going to like where you end up. Coach Bill's biggest change in the last two months was not triggered by a result. He realized he was holding his players back. He had decided a fifth grader should be able to do X and was capping them there, when what he was really capping was their basketball IQ. So he sped practice up significantly and started teaching advanced skills they genuinely struggle with. Pushing through the barrier instead of playing it safe. His week to week adjustments are smaller and follow the same "what did we do well" logic. After a recent tournament the problem was not ball handling, it was organization: kids clumping, not getting into the right spots in their sets against zone. So this week is more time on sets and more controlled five on five, less on ball handling. He is also asking a lot of them right now, running full court zone pressure out of a one two two and falling back into a three two, sometimes man. That kind of work requires a different type of practice than normal skills training. The start of practice does not move. Coach Bill's new fourth grade girls team does the same opening every single time: ball handling, then their layup drill. He showed up late to the gym recently and they had run the first ten minutes themselves. When he walked in they told him they had their fifty layups in and were ready to go. Fourth graders. That routine is worth protecting. The original question asked whether the adjustment should be more reps and volume or deliberate, slowed down instruction. The answer is that it depends on what you are fixing, and the real skill is pacing. Coach Bill's kids hate when he slows things down, because slowing down means more talking from him, whiteboard visuals, and a lot of questions. Other days he speeds practice up on purpose to put them under pressure. Practice is not one tempo, and knowing when to speed up, when to slow down, when to pile on reps, and when to pull back is a nuance you learn over time. Coach Collins goes in structured every time. He also estimates that roughly half the time the structure gets thrown out in the first five minutes, because Johnny had a bad day at school and Susie has something going on. Forty years and he never walked into a classroom without an idea, but he was always ready to pivot on a dime. You need the outline. You are allowed to deviate from it. That is exactly why having more planned than you can use matters, and how Coaching Youth Hoops started in the first place: Coach Bill had years of elaborate practice plans, other coaches laughed at how detailed they were, and Coach Collins told him to package them up so other youth coaches could use them. Pull a piece from practice three, a piece from practice seven, a piece from practice nine, and build what today's team actually needs. The guys added a future episode to the list: practice plan structur
- 1 weeks ago36 min
Ep 369 What If Player Evaluations Took Fifteen Seconds Instead of a Whole Weekend? ( Part 2)
TeachHoops.com UPLVL.com — the player evaluation app Joni and Mike built (Coach Bill also references it as "Get UpLvl" on the show) CoachingYouthHoops.com Show Notes Coach Bill welcomes the first married couple in podcast history to the show: Joni and Mike Kazantzis, founders of UpLvl, an app that turns a fifteen second voice note into a full player evaluation. They met at an advertising agency in 2008, started a secret office romance in 2009, and UpLvl is now their second company together. Joni runs account management, operations, and strategy. Mike went to art school and handles creative and brand. They each coach one of their two daughters, on separate lacrosse teams. Evaluations in youth sports happen twice: at tryouts, and at the end of the season. Then silence in between. And by the time you sit down in April to write them, you are working off the last three weeks because that is how memory works. The stuff from October is gone. Meanwhile, a parent catches you after practice with the universal opener, "Hey coach, can I talk to you for a second?" You are picking up cones, thinking about dinner and backpacks, kids are running for the playground, and the honest answer you can give is "keep the stick in her hands, find a wall." Joni's point is that these parents are not being nosy. They want to be part of the development, and a mom who has never held a lacrosse stick needs something specific enough to actually use that night. Mike frames the goal simply: every kid should leave practice knowing the one thing to work on next. He has twenty four girls on his team. He cannot go home and write twenty four evaluations every night. The athlete needs one specific thing to hold onto. Not "play better." In lacrosse terms: get lower on your ground balls, bend your knees, have the stick down before you get into it. The parent needs to see progress over time, and needs enough detail to help even if they never played the sport. UpLvl surfaces simple at home drills for that reason. The coach needs it to be effortless. The alternative is what happens now: the kid gets in the car, mom asks what the coach said, and the kid says "I don't know, it was good." Repeat that for two weeks across twenty families and now every parent is asking the coach what is going on at practice. Coach Bill calls this category "invisible tech" and says he has already written about it on LinkedIn. His long standing advice to clubs who want to stand out is to send one weekly email about what the team is working on. UpLvl is that idea, more often and with almost no coach effort. Joni cites a George Washington University study that asked 142 kids what actually makes sports fun. Winning was not the answer. Positive coaching, trying hard, learning, and improving were. She points out what every coach has seen: tell a kid their throwing looks stronger and they stand a little taller. Most of these kids will not play their sport forever. What carries forward is confidence, resilience, and a safe place to make mistakes and correct them. Push record, talk for fifteen seconds about one player, save, and it advances to the next player. A twenty player roster takes about five minutes. Behind that, the app writes a constructive session note from what you said, adjusts skill ratings based on your sentiment, and generates a parent report. Say a player's shooting was some of the best you have seen all season and her passing is getting solid, and shooting ticks up more than passing. Skills are grouped as technical, tactical, mental, and physical. Baselines come from the governing bodies of each sport, and for basketball that means dribbling, passing, footwork, game IQ, plus coachability and mindset. Every drill in the library carries a mindset rep, because the mental side rarely gets practice time. Progress scales by milestone, foundational up to advanced. Younger players move in quarter point increments, older and higher level players in tenths, so growth gets appropriately harder. The app will never automatically lower a player's score. Only the coach can do that. Parents click a link. No app to download, no signup, no payment. The profile lives with the coach and follows the player season after season, so a family can see career growth, not just this year's snapshot. The fifteen second cap was deliberate. Early versions let coaches talk as long as they wanted, and Mike found that unnecessary. Fifteen seconds is enough. Does it sugarcoat feedback? Coach Bill plays devil's advocate with the coach everyone has seen at tournaments, the yeller. What if he records something brutal? Mike says the app only produces constructive output. It will translate harsh input into development focused language. A coach can type anything they want manually, but the app will not generate it for them. Conversations about whether a kid should try a different sport belong face to face anyway. Joni backs it with the research: when a kid is screamed at, the brain
- 2 weeks ago37 min
Ep 368 What If Player Evaluations Took Fifteen Seconds Instead of a Whole Weekend? ( Part 1)
TeachHoops.com UPLVL.com — the player evaluation app Joni and Mike built (Coach Bill also references it as "Get UpLvl" on the show) CoachingYouthHoops.com Show Notes Coach Bill welcomes the first married couple in podcast history to the show: Joni and Mike Kazantzis, founders of UpLvl, an app that turns a fifteen second voice note into a full player evaluation. They met at an advertising agency in 2008, started a secret office romance in 2009, and UpLvl is now their second company together. Joni runs account management, operations, and strategy. Mike went to art school and handles creative and brand. They each coach one of their two daughters, on separate lacrosse teams. Evaluations in youth sports happen twice: at tryouts, and at the end of the season. Then silence in between. And by the time you sit down in April to write them, you are working off the last three weeks because that is how memory works. The stuff from October is gone. Meanwhile, a parent catches you after practice with the universal opener, "Hey coach, can I talk to you for a second?" You are picking up cones, thinking about dinner and backpacks, kids are running for the playground, and the honest answer you can give is "keep the stick in her hands, find a wall." Joni's point is that these parents are not being nosy. They want to be part of the development, and a mom who has never held a lacrosse stick needs something specific enough to actually use that night. Mike frames the goal simply: every kid should leave practice knowing the one thing to work on next. He has twenty four girls on his team. He cannot go home and write twenty four evaluations every night. The athlete needs one specific thing to hold onto. Not "play better." In lacrosse terms: get lower on your ground balls, bend your knees, have the stick down before you get into it. The parent needs to see progress over time, and needs enough detail to help even if they never played the sport. UpLvl surfaces simple at home drills for that reason. The coach needs it to be effortless. The alternative is what happens now: the kid gets in the car, mom asks what the coach said, and the kid says "I don't know, it was good." Repeat that for two weeks across twenty families and now every parent is asking the coach what is going on at practice. Coach Bill calls this category "invisible tech" and says he has already written about it on LinkedIn. His long standing advice to clubs who want to stand out is to send one weekly email about what the team is working on. UpLvl is that idea, more often and with almost no coach effort. Joni cites a George Washington University study that asked 142 kids what actually makes sports fun. Winning was not the answer. Positive coaching, trying hard, learning, and improving were. She points out what every coach has seen: tell a kid their throwing looks stronger and they stand a little taller. Most of these kids will not play their sport forever. What carries forward is confidence, resilience, and a safe place to make mistakes and correct them. Push record, talk for fifteen seconds about one player, save, and it advances to the next player. A twenty player roster takes about five minutes. Behind that, the app writes a constructive session note from what you said, adjusts skill ratings based on your sentiment, and generates a parent report. Say a player's shooting was some of the best you have seen all season and her passing is getting solid, and shooting ticks up more than passing. Skills are grouped as technical, tactical, mental, and physical. Baselines come from the governing bodies of each sport, and for basketball that means dribbling, passing, footwork, game IQ, plus coachability and mindset. Every drill in the library carries a mindset rep, because the mental side rarely gets practice time. Progress scales by milestone, foundational up to advanced. Younger players move in quarter point increments, older and higher level players in tenths, so growth gets appropriately harder. The app will never automatically lower a player's score. Only the coach can do that. Parents click a link. No app to download, no signup, no payment. The profile lives with the coach and follows the player season after season, so a family can see career growth, not just this year's snapshot. The fifteen second cap was deliberate. Early versions let coaches talk as long as they wanted, and Mike found that unnecessary. Fifteen seconds is enough. Does it sugarcoat feedback? Coach Bill plays devil's advocate with the coach everyone has seen at tournaments, the yeller. What if he records something brutal? Mike says the app only produces constructive output. It will translate harsh input into development focused language. A coach can type anything they want manually, but the app will not generate it for them. Conversations about whether a kid should try a different sport belong face to face anyway. Joni backs it with the research: when a kid is screamed at, the brain
- 2 weeks ago18 min
Ep 367 When the Other Team Goes on a Run, Do You Burn a Timeout?
nukehydration.com, or follow along on Instagram @nukehydration. Use Youthhoops15 for 15% off TeachHoops.com CoachingYouthHoops.com — practice plans, season resources, and the free tryout structure guide under the Free Resources menu HeySami.com — new text based youth sports organization tool (Sami with an i) The Hey Sami Podcast — available on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you listen Questions for Hey Sami: hey@heysami.com Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook Group — search "Coaching Youth Hoops" on Facebook Show Notes Another question pulled from the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group, and it is one every coach faces about four times a weekend: the other team rips off a run, the gym gets loud, your kids' shoulders drop. Do you call timeout? Before the topic, the guys catch up. Coach Bill and Coach Collins have only met face to face three times in three years, most recently in Calistoga for what they are calling Coach Collins' launch party into full time entrepreneurial life rather than a retirement party. Nobody is going to find him in a rocking chair on the front stoop. Youth basketball is not high school or college. Depending on the tournament you might have one, two, or four timeouts for an entire game. In a typical four timeout tournament you get two per half, they do not carry over, and if you sit on the first two they are simply gone. Use them or lose them. Tournaments are built to keep games moving, especially with twenty minute running halves, which means every timeout you spend is a real decision. The golden rule both coaches keep circling back to is roughly six points. That is the point where most coaches feel the pull to stop and regroup. But the real answer is that it depends on your team, and Coach Bill's advice is to decide that number before the game, not during it. Ask yourself honestly: can this group come back from twelve down? If the answer is yes, you have room to let things breathe. If you are down twenty seven, a timeout is not saving anything. Coach Bill scouted an opponent from the bleachers before tipoff. Bigger than his team, but he liked his ball handling, speed, and aggressiveness. He felt good. Then his team went down six to nothing in under two minutes on shots that had no business going in, and he admits he started to panic. What saved him was an assistant coach, one of the dads he respects, sitting next to him saying "we've got this, let's not panic yet." He never called the timeout. The other coach did. Coach Bill used that stoppage to deliver one calm, stern message: turn up the defense, you are falling back, we are better than this. That team scored eight points the rest of the game. Coach Collins raises the nuance that changes everything: how you use timeouts depends on where you think the game is headed. A sixty forty game gets one approach. A ninety ten game where you are overmatched gets another, because now the timeout is not tactical, it is about rebuilding confidence. At the youth level you often do not know the team you are facing, which makes that read harder and the pregame scout more valuable. This is the best practical idea in the episode. Instead of calling a hard timeout to stop the bleeding, Coach Bill works the substitutions. He pulls two or three struggling players, gives them instructions on the sideline, and sends some of them right back in within thirty seconds. To the player, that is a timeout. To the coach, it costs nothing. He calls it giving the player a timeout instead of giving the team one. The other version of this is running clock management. Coach Bill's girls literally practice working the clock. When they have the lead late, shoelaces mysteriously come untied, particularly on the player taking the ball out of bounds. They also have stall modes ready. All of it slows momentum without spending a stoppage. Coach Bill's firm rule: in a close game, save a timeout for the final two minutes. Always. He would rather never use it than need it and not have it. In a tournament earlier this season he called one with thirty seconds left to walk his team through exactly what to do to close out the win, and it mattered. Two other notes on that rule. If the game is not close, he rarely uses timeouts at all. And if he is down to five or six available players and they are gassed, he will spend one to get them air. Does calling a late timeout also help the other coach draw something up? Both agree they do not worry much about it. If you can teach more in that huddle than they can, the timeout is an advantage for you. Coach Collins mentions the late game situation document he built during his high school years, a sheet his assistants treated as gospel on the sideline, though it had to be translated for AAU tournaments where the timeout counts are different. Know how many timeouts you actually have. Decide before tipoff what size run forces your hand. Use substitutions, shoelaces, and stall sets to slow momentum for free.
- 3 weeks ago14 min
Ep 366 Why Won't Your Players Listen, and What Can You Actually Do About It?
nukehydration.com, or follow along on Instagram @nukehydration. Use Youthhoops15 for 15% off TeachHoops.com CoachingYouthHoops.com — practice plans, season resources, and the free tryout structure guide under the Free Resources menu HeySami.com — new text based youth sports organization tool (Sami with an i) The Hey Sami Podcast — available on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you listen Questions for Hey Sami: hey@heysami.com Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook Group — search "Coaching Youth Hoops" on Facebook Show Notes This one came straight out of the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group, and it lit the group up: how do you get kids to focus and concentrate during practice? Coach Bill opens with what he calls the worst coaching experience of his twenty year career. He took over a CYO boys team that had no coach, a roster loaded with talent, and an attention span somewhere around zero. They could have won everything. Instead, he spent the season pulling his hair out. Coming right out of COVID, he felt the boys had been hit harder than the girls, and the lack of discipline was something no drill was going to fix on its own. What made it worse is that his best lever was gone. In a CYO league with equal playing time, a kid could skip practice or goof off all week and still had to play. Take that away and, as Coach Bill puts it, the bench is a great teacher. Without it, he tried everything in the toolkit, including having one player run for an entire practice. Coach Collins pushes the conversation toward the thing most coaches can control: the practice plan itself. Idle minds make idle players. If a kid stands still for more than thirty seconds, he is tugging a jersey, poking a teammate, or starting something. The fix is not more yelling, it is no dead time. Eliminate the standing around. Keep everyone moving, everyone active, all the time. Most focus problems at the youth level are really pacing problems. Give the hyper kids a job. Coach Collins always grabbed his most hyper players to be demonstrators. Coach Bill compares it to a classroom teacher making the disruptive kid the monitor. The naughty one goes right up front. Teach in TikTok sized pieces. If you cannot get it across in thirty seconds, do not do it. Coach Bill draws one small piece of the offense on the whiteboard, sends them to go do it, then pauses and comes back for step two. When a high IQ kid asks what comes next, the answer is "let's just work on step one." Attach consequences to the small stuff. Dribbling while you are talking gets one warning to hold the ball. After that, there are push ups. Kids learn quickly that their actions have a cost. Use the pause and the repeat back. In a huddle, when eyes drift left and right and nobody is making contact, Coach Bill stops talking and looks at the player. If that does not land, he asks the kid to repeat what was just said. Teach the cues, do not assume them. Coach Collins makes the point that a lot of these kids do not naturally read verbal and nonverbal cues. Teaching that is part of the job, not something to hand back to the parents. Over plan every time. If you have ninety minutes, walk in with three hours ready. Something is going to blow up, something is going to land flat, and you never want fifteen minutes left with nothing to run. You are not a full time third grade teacher who sees these kids from eight to three every day. You are showing up from work, twice a week, for an hour and a half, with a group of kids who are partly there because their parents needed the energy burned off before bedtime. Both coaches admit it: the parents of the kids who could not settle down were the ones you never saw in the gym. Expectations also shift by age. What an eighth grader can hold onto is not what a third grader can, and you can stretch the teaching window longer when the group is genuinely focused. The tight structure is for the team that needs it. Structure buys you focus. Consequences reinforce it. Teach in small pieces and never let the gym go quiet. Have a question like this one? Bring it to the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group. That is where this episode came from. Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com What the coaches actually doThe honest reality checkCoach's takeaway Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
- 3 weeks ago34 min
Ep 365 How Do You Run a 5,400 Player Club and Still Put the Kid First? (Part 2)
MustangSoccer.com: Fred Wilson's club in the East Bay. Founded 1972, roughly 5,400 players across Mustang and the Mt. Diablo Mustang affiliate. Fred's email is fred.wilson@mustangsoccer.com and he means it when he says he will take the meeting. Mustang Soccer Data and Analytics: The club's public page on what they measure and why. BeyondPulse.com: Heart rate and workload monitoring worn on a belt, no vest to plug in. Matt Pell is the CEO. All 445 competitive players at Mustang are on it. Bepro.ai: Game analytics AI that tags 74 match moments per player with a video clip attached to every one. FIFA approved and used at the professional level. Pixellot.com: Mustang's main camera supplier for automated game filming. WinningLeader.com: Jeremy Boone's leadership program. Mustang ran their leadership group and then their coaches through it from August to December. CoachingYouthHoops.com: The one stop shop for youth coaches. Practice plans, season planning, and the resources behind this show. HeySai.com: Text based assistant that takes the administrative pain out of youth sports. Get on the wait list, launching this fall. (Say it "Hey Sammy," spelled H E Y S A I.) Coach Bill sits down with Fred Wilson, a Bay Area youth soccer legend who started as a volunteer rec coach at Mustang Soccer in 1989 and now oversees one of the largest and most respected clubs in the country. Along the way he helped launch the San Jose Earthquakes Academy and spent eight years there. The conversation opens with the hard question. Mustang measures heart rate, workload, game analytics, and eventually psychological profiles. So at what point does helping a kid improve turn into watching a kid too closely? Fred's answer is the thread that runs through the whole hour: the data is only ever a starting point, because you cannot measure head and heart, and none of it works without the relationship. From there it goes into the tech stack, the culture work Mustang did with Winning Leader, how a volunteer board evolved into a collaborative governance structure, why kids should play multiple sports, and a rapid fire round that every club director should sit with. Episode SummaryTimestampsTimeTopic00:00Good for kids first, good for soccer second00:46When does helping a child improve become monitoring too closely?01:00You cannot measure head and heart02:44The four pillars: technical, tactical, physical, mental03:251989, and how a volunteer rec coach ended up here04:02Launching the San Jose Earthquakes Academy, 2010 to 201805:21Coaching the third generation of the same families06:01The Mustang track record: 200 plus college players, 20 pros, 70 titles06:40The tech philosophy and why he even cares07:49"You'll need a data scientist and it will be overwhelming"09:1219 algorithms, 900 games, and the 94 percent stat10:03What happens when you cross biodata with game analytics10:31Building the app, and giving players actionable items11:52Could every player have a chat bot that knows them?12:32Using data to take the emotion out of hard conversations13:36Which ages are on it: U13 and up, all 445 players14:18Why the "why" behind a vendor matters more than the what14:58Why the belt beats the vest at 445 players15:44What is Bepro, and what is a match moment17:10How many players in the whole program18:04Three lessons from 1989 to today18:44Five minutes to make a seven year old love it or hate it19:42The car ride test: "I can't wait to go back tomorrow"21:18Leave everything at the gate22:39Taking your coach to show and tell23:27Why invest so much in culture25:22The promised land, the true north, and the common language28:12Holding the club accountable, and holding parents accountable too31:10How it changed the way they interview coaches32:38A child has succeeded at Mustang if...34:26The wedding story36:16What a small club can copy, and what it should not39:43The board: how governance actually evolved45:38Specialization, and why kids should play everything48:01Muscle imbalance, injury, and functional movement50:02The hour and a half drive that burns kids out51:54Rapid fire56:03Parting words, and an open book Connect With Us Fred meant the open book line. Reach him at fred.wilson@mustangsoccer.com or MustangSoccer.com. For everything on the basketball side, head to CoachingYouthHoops.com and bring your questions to the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group. And get on the wait list at HeySai.com before the fall launch. See you next week. A few items the transcript garbles that are worth a second look before this goes live: Fred credits the development of Beyond Pulse to a "Mark Wilson" and separately names Matt Pell as CEO. Matt Pell as CEO checks out publicly. The developer name does not, so confirm it or cut it. Bepro's founder is called both "Louise Kang" and "Louis King" in the transcript. I left the name out of the notes rather than guess. Worth confirming the spelling if you want to credit him. Fred mentions testing a comp
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