Taking Notes

I feel I've done very well taking notes on basketball in the past. I took notes on absolutely EVERYTHING: my practices, games I was watching in person and on TV, basketball videos, and any random thoughts I was having. But today I realized that I'd gotten away from taking good notes as of late. When I talk with a coach about basketball I still take notes, but I don't do it nearly as much as I should otherwise. Note taking is something I am going to make the commitment to again. I'm returning to keeping a little pocket notebook with me at all times so anything I see, hear, or think of can be written down.

I would encourage all coaches to take as many notes as they possibly can, whenever they can. I think it's a great way to remember little tidbits that can be very important to your success down the road. What do you take notes on?? Anything and everything. From something as big as an offense you see on TV that you like from something as small as a different way to teach screening that you thought of. You can record notes on your team as well.

I find that it's very beneficial to have my notes organized. Then when I need to look something up I can find it! I have a small notebook that I write all of my personal thoughts in. I have a mini library of those notebooks - each notebook is dated from when the first note was taken to the last day I wrote in it. I also have a big notebook that I write all of my conversations with coaches in as well as notes on videos and games that I watch. When I write something in the big notebook, I take out the notes and organize them by coach. Each coach I talk to or watch has their own folder where all the notes from them go. I used to organize all my notes by category (offense, defense, drills, etc), but I found that most times when I talk with other coaches I get notes on a wide variety of topics and that made it hard to group them by topic. I also watched a tape by Northern State's coach Don Meyer where he says to keep notes by coach so that you have the coaches PHILSOPHY. I think that's a great point and now I organize my notes as such.