Fall tourney 3rd place.

Kasuya gun runner up 2007
Chikuzen tourney appreance 2007
7th grade tourney champs 2008
Kasuya gun fall tourney 3rd place 2009

As hard as I am on myself, i must say I am semi-pleased looking at my accomplishments in my first 3 years of coaching basketball. Semi-pleased.

So we were able to finish in third place after pushing the best team in Kasuya gun to a semi-close 10 point game. Its amazing. The longer i coach, the more harshly i critique myself. And ofcourse, the more i learn about how to do the job. There are i think 3 elements to coaching at this level. 1) Team atmosphere 2) Recruitment 3) Motivation.

Team atmosphere is the correct balance of disipline and fun. I see some coaches go overboard with their hard disipline at the middle school level. You can only yell so much I think, to be effective at the level. To much yelling has kids scared to make plays and makes the either 1) tune you out or 2) play too stiff. I constantly remind myself that my job is not so much to win games as it is to develop talent. At this level, talent almost always beats stategy.

Recruiting WITHIN THE SCHOOL is important. I dont agree with kids commuting more than an hour to go to school. But getting kids involved with the club is very important. Good example. One game this past weekend was a game against a team of all 7th graders who had play on the same junior basketball team for at least 3 years. Their play was very seemless and surely they will be a force to deal with down the road. On our side, 3 kids that played junior basketball together were in the game with a 8th grader who moved from Kagoshima who had never played basketball until a year ago and a 7th grader who first picked up a basketball some 5 months ago.

It was a close game, which we won, but what i think was most important about this was that the 3 kids with skill had to learn to evolve their game to include the less experienced players. And the less experienced players had to understand how important their defense was. With them all working together, it gave a new group of kids the chance to enjoy the euphoria of basketball, even having limited skill. This was possible only by an open, friendly recruiting approach. The Kasuya Higashi program went from 15+ in 2006 to 14 in 2007 to 9 in 2008. I knew last year that a bad recruiting year would all but end the basketball program, so i let the kids do something very creative at the school recuritment assembaly.

I wish i could have seen it, but certainly it was very funny. One kid tied on a blindfold and made a free throw. One kid hit (or tried to hit) a three from near half court. One kid crossed over 2 kids who pretended they broke their ankles. Whatever they did, it got 11 kids into the basketball club. And thus, a new group of kids enter the basketball stage. As i watch schools stuggle with numbers, i have to remind myself that even though these kids are new to basketball, I have kids available to teach. That is a wonderful feeling.

Motivating kids isnt as hard as it may seem. Honestly, disiplining kids isnt either. They have to understand 1) the coach knows more than they do 2) the coach is looking out for their best interests 3) the coach has the same goal as the kids, to win. When kids figure this out, it all but eliminates the need to yell. Kids have to understand how beautiful it is, how good it feels to be able to count on someone else to have your back. They have to know why defense is most important. I find the key to this is give kids opportunities to succeed.

I wasnt really given a chance to succeed in high school. Im not sure why things went as they did, but my problem in school was my desire to be a good passer/playmaker and not being willing to shoot the ball. I needed a coach that would run a play for me in the first quarter so i could see the ball go in. A coach that would tell me/order me to shoot a shot. What it got was benched on a team that lost alot without having a true chance to see if i could do it at a high level.

So now, when i see a kid struggling with defense, i understand that i can motivate him several ways as opposed to just writing him of. My job is to get the most out of the kids that i have. I am getting better at doing that.

Did i mention that of the 6 games ; 2 seeding games( 1 win and 1 lost to the eventual number 2 team) and 4 tourney games (2 must win games on the first day, then loss in the semifinal to the eventual number 1 team and winning the consulation game) where all played without the starting point guard and 6/7th man? I hope it was a lesson to them that the team moved forward without them.

Good month. could have been better, ill give it a B-.

Now I gotta go back to breaking these kids down again.