Three Useful Basketball Resources

This is the last post that I will make regarding my trip to Merrimack College. One question I ask in my visits to the school is a longer version of, “What’s new?” Coach LeBlanc told me about three resources she recently discovered.

In prior visits the coaching staff told me about The Coaching Toolbox and Fast Model Sports. If you are not in the Coaching Toolbox mailing list, sign up. It’s free and they will send a daily email with three links. I hardly ever find the time to click through it daily, but topics do come up that suit me. Fast Model Sports is around $75 per year, so it might not be for all coaches out there. I catalog all drills, plays, and defensive concepts through it. Communicating to players and youth coaches is a little simpler using their software. I also can communicate in this blog with better clarity.

Here are three resources that Coach LeBlanc has benefitted from most recently.

The Basketball Podcast with Chris Oliver

The guests that Oliver get are diverse in their backgrounds (college, executives, NBA, and international) which yields diverse ideas. I have already gone through about four episodes and find the conversations to be interesting. One of the coaches recently described the “next play” philosophy in the context of how many possessions there are. Players are going to make mistakes throughout the course of a game with 140 to 160 possessions. The key is who will win the majority of those possessions. Perhaps the context of will go a long way to getting players to forget the mistakes and play hard.

Given the amount of idle time coaches spend commuting, this is a resource worth the multi-task. Coach LeBlanc told me she will sometimes pause the video and do a voice to text notes if she hears something applicable.

WBCA Video Library

The Women’s Basketball Coaches Association Video Library includes roughly 800 videos. These include videos on transition, offensive sets, and motivation. The cost for high school coaches and younger levels is $50, and the price rises a little steeper at the college level. I attended a WBCA clinic a few years ago and could not write ideas fast enough on my notepad.

Idea Journal & Books

Coach LeBlanc told me that everywhere she travels she carries an idea journal. Given the amount of basketball that she watches passively during recruiting visits, she will record ideas based on what she is seeing. It is just a simple notebook, but without it good ideas will escape.

There were four books that I heard through our conversations that I will now need to seek out. No Complain Rule by Jon Gordon, Think Like a Warrior by Darrin Donnelly, You Win in the Locker Room First by Jon Gordon and Mike Smith, and Think Like a Champion by Dick Divenzio.

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