Basketball Coaching-Developing a Team Attitude

(AP Photo/The Express-Times, Bill Adams)

By Jeff Haefner
BreakthroughBasketball.com

May 29, 2008

Basketball is a team game. One of the challenges of coaching is trying to get 12 players (or however many you have on your roster) to assume the same values, have the same goals and to play as one. Well, if everyone knows it is a team game why is it so difficult to get all of your players on the same page? Why is it so hard to develop a team attitude?

Consider the Factors

Your team does not exist in a vacuum. When they leave your gym, they become people other than players. There are many factors that affect their lives and you have to consider what they are:

• Egos – Everyone has an ego and you have to recognize that and get your players to put it aside.
• Background – Everyone has different experiences in their lives that have shaped their value systems. Understand that a different value system, as long as it is positive, is not necessarily destructive to your team. But, your values should be added, not replace the aspects of the player’s system.
• Parents – Parents and home lives put different demands and expectations on each player. Try to be aware of what those pressures are and try to use them to benefit the player.
• Social Pressures – Athletes are very susceptible to peer pressure. Your team atmosphere must be somewhere where your players feel safe and can translate that into their outside life.

What Doesn’t Work

I have tried many methods in my attempts to build a team attitude. It is a challenge reading your team. Some things will work with some teams; other things will work with other teams. There are things that I am sure I will never do again. Many of them seem to be sound ideas, especially when sitting in the office. However, they didn’t work so well when put into practice.

• Making teammates responsible to one another – We used to penalize the team if one player missed class. The whole team would run if one player was late. The object was to get players thinking more about their teammates first and to get some positive peer pressure going.
• Team penalties for punishment – If we had a sub-par effort or a bad practice, everyone got on the endline. The object was that individual success was tied to team effort.
• Severe penalties for losing teams – You win as a team, you lose as a team. The more you lost or the more points you lost by, the tougher the penalty.

None of these worked. All they did was build animosity between players themselves and between the players and the coaches. It had no effect on the players outside of the team attitude and removed incentive from players who already believed in the team.