Intro
This is going to be a dynasty of my experiences as a travel basketball coach for a 9 year old boys travel team. I completed, over the spring/summer, a dynasty detailing my days as a little league baseball coach. I found it helpful for me as a coach, and several people said that they enjoyed reading it. Due to my schedule I anticipate that this will be shorter than that, but once I start writing, I write, so who knows.

Finding a position
As I mentioned a couple of times in my Little League write-ups I am, at heart, a basketball coach. Well really, at heart, I’m a guy who enjoys working with youth. But when it comes to sports I am a basketball guy. I realized that I had been having too much fun coaching little league and so it was time to step up and try and find a basketball coaching position. I had done some coaching in a semi-competitive high school intramural league. Practices were once a week and games were once a week. Depending on how you look at it, I either do so well, or so poorly, that last year I was co-commissioner of the league. While I was well received as a co-commissioner, and will likely be getting a phone call in a month offering me the position again, I really I missed coaching and decided that I needed to coach a basketball team again.

I knew, from the start, two things, well I guess really three things. First I didn’t want to coach a house league team. I really believe in the idea of personal growth and development that you see in a house league. However, I wanted the more serious atmosphere of a travel team. I have a standing offer from a couple different teams in the league that I could be a coach for them if I wanted, but this sort of somewhat relaxed atmosphere wasn’t really wasn’t what I was looking for. This dovetailed nicely with my second point, which is that I wished to be paid. Baseball is a lot of hours, and I’m happy to give it, but I felt I needed some kind of compensation if I was going to do basketball, which has a longer season. My third thing was that I did not wish to get a position for the Park District in the city where I live. I basically want to keep the baseball and basketball coaching parts of me separate. In baseball I’m a volunteer. In basketball I am a paid coach. This decision, which actually came first, also dictated the travel part, to a large extent, as my city is the only one nearby, that I could find, which pays coaches in its house league.

So knowing I wanted a paid coaching job, I started searching out positions. I looked at middle schools and park districts, primarily. There are several other basketball organizations in the area, but without an “in” there I was unlikely to get a position for one of them. After a lot of thinking I decided to only apply for one job. I figured I would either get the job, and be happy, or not get the job, and spend the time on my teaching/relaxation and coach a team in the league that I had been a part of for a few years.

I applied for a job in a neighboring suburb. This suburb is smaller than the one I live in, but I also taught in the district for a year and have a good grasp of the community. I thought it would be a good fit that way, and also has the advantage that the gym they use to practice is nearly as close as the gym in my own suburb.

The Interview
A couple weeks after sending in my resume I got a call for an interview. It was shortly after the position had closed. With my background, I’d have been surprised if I didn’t get at least an interview. I setup the interview. I thought the interview went well, though afterwards I regretted that I didn’t show enough of my basketball knowledge. The one question where I think I could have shown that, “Describe to me a practice”, I ended up talking more about how you have to be flexible with the talent you work with, varying up the practice so you’re not doing the same thing for too long (and also so you reinforce skills in a different way than you might initially teach them so you give kids multiple opportunities to understand the concept), and doing drills which either allow full participation of having kids “shadow” the ones participating so that there isn’t a lot of sitting. I think it was a solid answer, but I later regretted having taken that approach rather than really showing my basketball knowledge. But I felt like besides not really showing my basketball knowledge, the interview went well. It also helped, I felt, that I supplied a couple of references of parents of kids I had coached.

At the interview, the coordinator indicated that they expected an answer by late in the week of August 28 or early this week. When I hadn’t heard from them yesterday I had pretty much decided I hadn’t gotten the position. It was something I really had coveted and I was, I admit, disappointed. However, with so much going on with the start of school, I didn’t let my disappointment bother me too much and focused my energies elsewhere.

So when I got a phone call today right as school was ended, after having been nervous every time my phone range on Thursday, Friday, and Tuesday, I figured it was my mom and sent it right to voice mail as I was in the middle of doing something. Of course it turned out to be the Park District Person offering me the job.

Tryouts
I have to admit the whole tryout thing is what has me more nervous than anything. Not only is it immediate, tryouts are next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but I have never conducted tryouts before. I have been told to expect between 12 and 18 kids with the goal of selecting a team of between 10 and 12. 18 kids is a pretty small number, considering I teach a class of 21, so that part is good. I am reading up on tryouts and have begun to put a plan together, though it’s rather rough at this point.

Basically with 9 year olds this will be the first serious basketball they will have played. As such selecting good athletes seems to be important. However, I philosophically believe that too often teams look for athletes rather than basketball players. This could come out of my own experiences as a youth, where I was not an athlete but I had basketball talent, not the least of which was pure size, which was never really cultivated as only the athletes made the travel team. But again at 9, as I know from teaching 4th grade which is what grade most of my kids will be in, there is only so much basketball talent. So a majority of the kids I take will likely be athletes who I am hoping I can shape into basketball players. I admit that I will have a definite bias for soccer players, as I believe footwork and movement is an essential part of basketball, and while this is covered in young soccer leagues, it is often ignored with young basketball players. With only 18, or less, players I can do more basketball drills than I could with 25 kids as there will be less standing around waiting since there are fewer kids who’d need to take a turn.

Besides the athletics, I will say that attitude is a huge deal. As a teacher I know I’ve helped kids mature and grow. However, the kids really deserve the credit since they had reached a point where they were ready for what I had to offer and might have grown and matured just as much with another teacher. In other words, unlike many a woman in a relationship, I am not foolish enough to believe I can change these kids through my miraculous coaching. If a kid doesn’t pay attention, and doesn’t seem to have a willingness to try new things, he best be the 9 year old Michael Jordan, if he’s going to make the team. The willingness to try new things is important. At 9, I don’t really expect them to be able to dribble with both hands, for instance. But if I ask them to dribble with their left hand I’d rather see a kid botch that, than dribble with his right hand proficiently. I can teach them, especially at 9, how to use their other hand. But again they have to be ready.

Between now and Monday

First I am going to nail down my plan for day 1 of tryouts. With the tryouts there are three days and a kid has to show up to two of them to be considered. A fair amount of kids really do show up to just two, so I can’t hold that against them. But it also makes trying to see a variety of things harder as I can’t teach a drill on Day 1 and assume on Day 2 every kid will know the drill. Anyhow, so I will likely post my try-out plan here sometime before Sunday.

The other thing I am going to try and do is get an assistant coach. I want to have an assistant both because I like being able to bounce ideas off of someone and because it makes life easier having a second pair of eyes and ears. The salary for the position is not large, but really I’m not doing it for the money. I do think of myself as a professional, as noted above. The money is such a small amount compared to what I expect to make hour, that the money is more important for the professionalism it infers than the actual amount. As such I have no qualms about giving some of it to another person. Plan A is to send notices to a local liberal arts college job center and education and athletic departments and see if I can find an assistant that way. I have no idea if this’ll be successful. Plan B allows me to keep the money but still get an assistant. I know many high school students through my various work and would simply try and get one who I know knows basketball to agree to be the assistant. The disadvantages of this are clear, which is why it is Plan B. While tryouts are next week, practices don’t really start until the end of October so there is not a huge rush on this front.

And that’s where I’m at. Comments, suggestions, criticisms, about basketball are always welcome. I also hope you find this an enjoyable read and if there is something I can do to make it more interesting for you as a reader please let me know.