Whilst everything here can and should be applied to your whole life, I am going to talk about it purely from a basketball perspective.

How you stand when the coach is talking to you - do you stand up straight and tall, and make eye contact? Or do you play with the ball you are holding, look around the gym and slouch to the side?
Both of these convey a strong message not only to your coach, but to your teammates and anyone else watching.


Everything that you do makes others form an opinion about you, either good or bad. Everything that you do conveys to other people, and importantly to yourself, what kind of person you are.

How do you want others to think of you? And importantly, what kind of person do you want to be?

How you greet your teammates and coaches - do you make eye contact, do you have a strong clear voice?
When you are doing sprints, do you just cruise or jog through it, and ALMOST touch the lines? Or do you push yourself as hard as you can to do it as well as YOU can, and touch every line?

Your body language, effort, approach and attitude to any and every task that you do, in and out of basketball, tells the world who you are.

Why not make a habit of doing everything as well as it possibly can be done? Don't be mediocre, don't fit in. Stand out by committing to excellence in everything you do.

Here's what I've found. The best players I've coached (and when I say best, I mean the most skilled players; the ones who are playing at the highest level) have been the most coachable. With very, very few exceptions.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are some very talented players with big egos who don't listen to anybody.
But for the most part, I've found that usually the better the player, the more coachable they are.

"Coachable" - able to be coached.
Requires:
1. Wanting to be coached - open to listening and trying your way
2. Being able to listen to the instruction, and then actually do it!
3. Not just taking the advice and doing it once and then forgetting about it and going back to old habits, but taking the advice 100% to heart, and doing it until it becomes second nature.

I was lucky enough to do a skills session for Ben Simmons (NBA prospect) and a couple of other guys (also pretty darn good players) when I was doing some volunteer coaching at Box Hill Senior Secondary College. It was one of the few times where I actually felt a little intimidated and wasn't sure how they would take me, or whether they would even listen.
They basically had no idea who I was, and even though they were all still at school some looked older than me, as those giant basketball-ing guys often do! 
Boy, did they listen! And boy did they want to be coached. They were some of the most, if not the  most attentive and most coachable players I've worked with. Every time I spoke or demonstrated something they had their eyes glued on me like hawks. They didn't want to miss a word.
And the most coachable of all of them - Ben Simmons.

You see, great players understand that even though they are good, they could be so much better. Average players think they are good, and can't get or don't need to get any better. 

Great players see a coach who might have no idea what he's talking about, and think "I'm gonna listen to every single word he says, in case he gives me one valuable teaching point I can use to improve 1%".
Average players see a coach who is known as a good coach, then think he's an idiot and tune out because they think they know better, because he said one thing they disagreed with.

You can never stop improving. Kobe, Lebron, Jordan got better every year. Every year, they worked on their game and added something. If they still have improvement left in them, surely you do too!

I read something great recently that I can't agree more with.

Excluding superstars (Kobe, Lebron, MJ) who can do EVERYTHING:

"There are only 4 positions in basketball. Point guard. Shooter. Athlete. Big man."

Think about it. What other type of player is there that is going to make a team? 

If you're tall, or super athletic, you can be a player based on that. If you're not, you have two choices - point guard or shooter.

There are a lot of kids who aren't tall or particularly athletic, who are guards, but not point guards and not great shooters. This is ok when they are young and everyone is fairly similar in height; this isn't much of a problem. However as they start to get older, their possible value to a team becomes limited. For coaches this type of player is hard to justify picking/playing. They ask themselves "What does he bring to the team?"

If you aren't a big man, and aren't an athlete, and you aren't a point guard (as that takes a certain type of basketball IQ), you have only one option - become a shooter.

With try-outs around the corner for rep clubs in Victoria, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on things you can do to maximize your chances of making the team you want to.

First things first, no matter what anyone tells you, coaches are NOT going to pick you for a team based JUST on your attitude and effort. You must have some skills or some athleticism to go along with it.  A good attitude on its own won't get you into a team; but a bad attitude definitely can put you OUT of a team!

However, certain intangible things that I'd be looking for in players which definitely raises their number on the list are:

• Play hard - sounds obvious, but if you aren't playing hard at try-outs, you probably never will
  If you want to get noticed take charges! No-one does that!
  Dive on the floor
  SPRINT from end to end in transition every time
  Box out every time
  If you're a rebounder, crash the boards every time
  Set great screens
• Talk! On defense and on offense
  
• Be coachable - when a coach speaks to you, eye contact. Then actually DO what they told you to do. Being coachable isn't just listening, it's taking what you've heard and DOING it.
• Be a great teammate - positive energy, high fives, rush over to help a teammate who's fallen down. Do you make the guys around you better players?
• Play PASSIONATE and INTENSE defense

Some players make the mistake at try-outs of either
a) trying to do everything themselves to show the coaches what they can do
b) trying to show the coaches how unselfish they are by passing it immediately every time they catch it.
Don't do either! Just play your normal game. Find a balance between the two.

Do what you do! Use your strengths, don't use your weaknesses!
If you're a good shooter, shoot the open shots. If you're a great defender, pressure the ball full court and show it. If you're not a great ball handler, try not to dribble it unless you have to!

Lastly, don't beat yourself up mentally because you made one mistake and the coach wrote something down on his clipboard! Basketball is a game of mistakes. Everyone else around you is making them as well.
As a coach I'm just as interested in your response to a mistake as the mistake itself. Move on immediately to the next play, show no mental weakness or negative emotions!

Good luck to all!

What an amazing week! 93 players, 14 coaches and 35 hours of basketball!
It was great to see players pushing through fatigue and giving everything they had to get better. 

Driving Teaching Points
Straight line drive - past defender not around them
Shoulder to hip - make contact
Active off hand - protect ball and pull yourself through

You must work on playing LOW but also being QUICK. It's easy to be one orthe other. What takes practice is being both at the same time.

Why do you want to be low?
When contact happens, unless their is a big difference in strength between the players, whoever is lower is going to have the leverage and power advantage.

“He who makes no mistakes makes no progress.”
-- President Theodore Roosevelt

If you aren't making any mistakes when you practice, you need to work on something more challenging!

Excellence = whatever you are doing in life, do it as well as you possibly can!!
Don't settle for being mediocre - excel. 
It doesn't matter if you are the president of a country, a professional basketball player, an accountant, a garbage truck driver, a doctor, a policeman, or a fridge salesman - become great at what you do! 

I went to get my car washed the other day (have to give them a shout out (IMO Carwash at Box Hill). It's $5 for the drive through wash, or $6 and the attendant guy will "clean your wheels and pre-spray your car". The attendant did that and then some. He spent between 5-10 minutes cleaning the car and scrubbing the wheels, for $1. 
His job was to clean car wheels. But he did it to the absolute best of his ability and then some. It may seem like a little thing, but doing that little bit extra, instead of just doing enough to scrape by, applies to all areas of your life, not just your work. 

Don't be mediocre, don't just scrape by = excel! It's up to you!

If you want to be a good shooter, don't practice shooting far beyond your range! Wrecks your form because you have to throw the ball at the rim.

Here is a good guide - if you can consistently make 6/10 from a distance, that is within your range. To stretch your range, take a small step back and shoot from there until you can make 6/10 consistently from that distance. And repeat. Very gradually increase your range.

Don't feel like you need to shoot behind the 3 point line if you can't do it! When I completely overhauled my shot at age 16, I didn't shoot a 3 for almost 2 years. But I was patient. Now I can make 6/10 from one step in front of the half court circle. It is not a quick process! But don't rush it, and you'll be very thankful later on!

“You need to play with confidence” says the coach.
“Be confident” says the parent.

If only it were that simple. It is no secret that confident players are better players; they are more aggressive in making decisions, they don’t hesitate and they do what they are good at without thinking about it. They are able to make 10 mistakes in a row and then immediately do 10 great things in a row.

Where do players get confidence from and how can they become more confident?

Confidence really comes down to two areas:
1.       Preparation
2.       What you focus your attention on

The first one, preparation, might be bad news for you – if you want to be confident, you have to deserve to be confident, and that means putting in the time.

I’m confident when I shoot the ball because I’ve spent hours upon hours shooting and taken tens of thousands of shots, so I should be confident. However would I be confident if you asked me to kick a goal in a footy game? Absolutely not, because I don’t practice kicking goals.

Confidence must be EARNED. You earn confidence by practice and repetition. If you are good at something, you’ll be confident. If you aren’t good at something because you haven’t practiced, you won’t be.

The second point is what varies greatly from person to person, but can absolutely be worked on and improved upon.

Let’s say in the first half of a game you shoot ten shots and make five. Some players will think about the five misses; how they clunked off the ring, how they’ve let their team down, how bad they are at shooting because they missed five times. Other players will be thinking about those five makes; how they swished through the net, how good they felt, how the crowd cheered when they made it and how good that felt. The latter are the ones who will be more confident going forward.

Whether a player has missed or made ten shots in a row, they are still as good (or as bad) a shooter as they were at the start of the game.

Another aspect of this second point is a player knowing his/her strengths and being proud of them and confident in them, whilst also being aware of their weaknesses. Knowing that "I am good at X" will give you confidence when doing X.

Players must focus on what they can control and the present. If they focus on negative things in the past or on things they can’t control they are wasting their energy. Put all your mental energy on the controllables and the present.

Your confidence is completely up to you; however it takes more than just telling yourself to “be confident”.

Put in the time working on your game, and focus on what you can control and the present, and you’ll go a long way to playing with more confidence.