Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Making Weaknesses Into Strengths

Most people that know me know that I am an offensive minded coach. I love my four out motion stuff and enjoy working on offensive fundamentals. Defense is something that while I am comfortable with it and can teach, it's definitely not my strong suit.

In light of those well known facts, I've decided to spend my summer learning as much as I can about the defense we are going to run this year. Another thing I am doing is making the commitment to work on our defense in practice more than our offense, because deep down I know that defense wins championships and all successful teams are good at defense.

This is nothing earth shattering or new (as nothing on here is), but again I think it's something that is important to do. I think that all coaches should challenge themselves to work on their weaknesses, and aspects of the game they do not focus on, or maybe don't enjoy. There are some coaches that are great at Xs and Os, but not as much in the player development aspect. They will have great stuff, but many times will not have developed the players to run what they want. Other coaches love player development, but are not as focused on the Xs and Os portion of the game and thus while they may have some skilled players are not as good at putting them in the right spots to be successful. And there is always that guy who runs such a great offense, team scores 70, 80, 90 points a game but the defense is giving up 100 points. Or the guy who's defense holds opponents to 40 points, but the team can only score 30. Now everyone is not at these extremes I've outlined, but if you take an honest look at what you do, there are strengths and weaknesses to your coaching style and I would encourage you to take the time this summer to study up on and work on the less refined parts. No one is great/perfect at everything in coaching, we are all going to be stronger in some facet of the game, but if you really do commit yourself to getting better at your weak points it's going to pay off.

No comments: