Shooting With Style: 3 Tips For Utilizing Online Coaching References While Keeping Your Team Identity

If you are new to the world of coaching, you may need some tips and suggestions for ways to get your basketball team playing their best. Even if you are familiar with the game of basketball, coaching can be intimidating because it also involves assessing your team, building a strategy, helping your team bond, and creating a team identity.

While coaching websites can give you plenty of suggestions for drills, activities, and training schedules, it is important to adapt the resources so they fit your specific team. If you fail to take your team's general attitude and approach to the game into consideration, team members may resent the way you run practices. Below are a few things you need to keep in mind when using general resources to make sure you keep your team's identity.  

Assess Your Team 

Before you begin looking for ways to improve your team, you need to honestly assess your team and team members. You should look for technical skills as well as teamwork, attitude, and overall fitness. This assessment will let you know what specific areas you need to concentrate on. 

After you assess your team, it is important to select drills and activities at appropriate levels for your team. Additionally, you should work on improving all areas, not only the areas your team is weak in. Working on skills that your team excels at improves their game while building their confidence. 

Be Specific With Your Searches 

With the many resources available online, it is easy to get lost in research. As opposed to browsing basketball coaching sites for general tips, you should try to search for specific drills and coaching techniques based on your team assessment. Consider trying to find one or two specific techniques to implement each week instead of trying to fix all of your problems at once. 

Get Your Team Involved 

If your team is interested, you should give them a bit of autonomy over their training. You can assign one or two team members to perform a team assessment each week and find drills that will work on the areas they think the team needs the most practice in. This can increase your team members' investment in their training. 

While online resources can be a helpful tool for coaching, it is important to take your team's style into consideration and adapt online tips to fit your own style as opposed to implementing them without adjustment.