Coaching Youth Hoops (Youth Basketball Coach)

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://sportsconflictlab.com/: Bill Taylor's company, teaching conflict skills to coaches, administrators, and parents.
• Managing Sports Conflict by Bill Taylor: available at SportsConflictLab.com, from Coaches Choice, or on Amazon.
• https://nukehydration.com/: clean sports hydration with no caffeine. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order.
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/: full season practice plans by age, with videos and images for every drill and play.

Coach Bill welcomes Bill Taylor to the show. Twenty eight years of coaching, a national championship, a pile of conference titles, and coach of the year honors. And yet the topic today is the one part of leadership he says he was not very good at for most of that run: conflict.

Successful, and still bad at conflict

Ask Bill Taylor during most of his career and he would have told you he handled conflict great. He would also have told you conflict was bad and something to stamp out. Then, in his ninth of twelve years at Lipscomb, he ran into a conflict he could not solve. It kept getting worse. Some of that was on him, some was on the people involved, and some came from an administration that did not have the skills either and escalated it without meaning to.

It started with his athletes questioning the training. The same training that had made them run faster than they ever dreamed and won conference titles. His reaction was basically, why would you question that? Success, he says, can hide conflict. And a coach with positional power can easily mistake "I said stop and it went away" for a resolved conflict. If people still have feelings and problems, even unspoken, it is not resolved. It is still changing how they see you and how much they enjoy the game.

A master's degree in conflict management opened his eyes. The championships were great, he says, but that is not why we coach. If something is keeping you from being effective as a leader and a developer of people, check your ego at the door and learn the skill.

Every program needs a conflict policy

Coach Bill asks how to tell a real conflict from a parent who is just being a jerk about playing time. Bill Taylor's answer: it is a conflict either way, and the same tools apply. Learn how to handle emotion, learn communication, and you will manage it better whether or not the other person has any skills.

The idea that grabbed Coach Bill from the book is the conflict policy. Bill Taylor believes every coach and every organization should have one, at every level. Hold a meeting, explain the parent's role, and lay out exactly what happens when someone has a problem. Do it for athletes, assistants, and administration too. Without a known process, emotion builds until it pops, usually at the worst possible moment. That is how you get the parent running onto the field, or the parent who texts the coach in the middle of a game.

Handling it in the moment

Coach Bill shares a recent game where an athletic player of his was getting blown by. When he pulled her, she was visibly upset and said the other girl was just better. Conflict happens in real time, even on Thursday Night Football. So what do you do when you cannot stop and walk through a four step process?

Do the best you can in that moment, and do not meet emotion with emotion. Get it down, get it logical. If you have a plan, you can point to it: I get it, you are upset, we will work through this later like we talked about. Then follow up when emotions have cooled and you can give that player your time, energy, and attention. That follow up is what shows you care.

Why the player has to be in the room

Coach Bill's policy is that if there is a problem, the player needs to be present, outside of safety issues. Bill Taylor agrees. If the conflict is between the coach and the child, you cannot resolve it with only the parent there. You get the parent's version of what the child said, filtered by emotion, and then any solution gets relayed back with plenty lost in translation. He calls going around the person you have a conflict with a three way conflict, and it rarely solves anything.

At what age should a parent ask, "Did you talk to coach yourself?" It depends far more on maturity than age. Kids whose parents let them do hard things are more resilient and more able to walk in and talk. Even when a parent needs to be there to help, the child should be the one speaking.

Be a great question asker

Coach Bill's approach in those meetings is to ask the player questions. Is this an individual sport or a team sport? Why did I pull you out? What did I ask you to work on? Bill Taylor says that is exactly right. Nobody likes being told. When we are asked good questions and speak the answer ourselves, we own it and we are far more willing to change.

A formal policy also sends a message. Most people avoid conflict and hope it goes away. It never does. It usually grows. A policy tells everyone, we are okay with conflict, we want to address it, and we want to do it right. Handled well, dealing with conflict is a superpower.

Conflict is unmet expectations

Parents are protective, and that is their baby. Bill Taylor's advice is to communicate your motivation in every way you can: you are trying to help their child become the best person and athlete they can be. His definition of conflict is simple: expectations not being met. If a parent's expectation is a full ride and a pro career, the numbers say that expectation needs to change. If it is for you to take care of their kid and help them grow, you can show them that is exactly what you are doing. Ask them why they have their kid in sports, because their why drives their expectations.

Money has changed the conflict

Families are cashing in 401ks and taking out second mortgages for travel ball, rankings, clubs, and training. The whole family is invested now, and bigger money in college and pro sports has made the possible outcomes look shinier than ever. There is nothing wrong with spending that money, Bill Taylor says, but be clear on why. Your why sets your expectations, and your expectations decide how much conflict you will have.

Coming up in Part 2

Coach Bill brings up the coach who shuts down a player for asking about playing time instead of teaching them how to ask. Part 2 picks up right there, then puts Bill Taylor in the hot seat with real youth sports scenarios.

Coach's takeaway

Conflict is not a sign something is wrong. It is a guarantee. Build a conflict policy before the season, keep the player in the room, ask questions instead of handing down answers, and get clear on everyone's expectations before they turn into a blowup.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/: full season practice plans by age, from drills to offensive and defensive schemes, with videos and images for every drill and play. Custom plans available if your team needs something more unique.
• Season Organization Checklist: free download, also found under the Free Resources tab at the top of CoachingYouthHoops.com. Covers practice planning considerations, game day prep, skill development guides, and team building ideas.
• https://nukehydration.com/: clean sports hydration, now in Lime Time and the new OG Orange. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order.
• https://heysami.com/: takes the scheduling chaos off parents and coaches. Not an app, just texts that pull every team’s schedule into one place.
• Want Coach Collins to speak at your spring clinic? Email steve@teachhoops.com.

A new season is right around the corner. Coach Collins is fresh off an October of clinic speaking engagements, on a plane nearly every weekend, and he is already booking spring clinics. Today the guys tackle preseason planning: what to map out, what to aim for, and how to handle the things no plan will catch.

Coach Bill points coaches to the Season Organization Checklist in the Free Resources tab at CoachingYouthHoops.com. It is thorough on purpose. A coach planning a full preseason can use all of it, while a CYO coach with only a couple of practices can skip what does not apply. Many of the questions are there just to get you thinking, because a lot of new coaches do not even know what questions to ask.

Coach Collins is not asking anyone to do six months of work up front. The practice plans are already done. What you do need is a map. When is your first tournament? When is your last? What needs to be in by when?

Do you have an out of bounds play? A press break? If you are not thinking about it ahead of time, you will find yourself at your last practice on Thursday, playing Saturday, with neither one installed. Coaches get absorbed in the layup line and everything else in front of them, which is exactly why you need to think whole, part, whole.

Coach Bill’s first step is simple: take five minutes and decide what a successful season looks like. Keep it to three things. That might be three skills you want to improve, like layups. It might be kids who are happy and want to play next year. It might be winning half your games.

If you already know you are not a strong team, set goals that fit. A target number of rebounds per game. Scoring a certain number of points every game, adjusted for age. You can also set three game goals to chase each week, with sub goals underneath. The point is to have something to work toward.

Coach Collins adds that planning looks very different by age. At the middle school level you have a better idea of what is coming. At third grade you might not know what you will see, and suddenly you are facing a fifth grade team.

So decide what you want the start to look like and what you want the end to look like. Maybe you need a zone defense in, your man to man sharpened, and better movement off the ball. How will you build that across the season, and what should it look like after your last tournament? A third grade team and an eighth grade team getting ready for high school will have very different answers.

Both coaches land in the same place: the unknown. You find out the opponent runs a zone and you have not touched your zone offense. Five kids will be gone for a tournament. Coach Bill recently got a 9:30 PM text from a parent asking if he knew everyone would be out that weekend. Nobody had told him.

Coach Collins compares it to teaching, when a kid gets sick in the middle of class, and to parenting, where you never know what is around the next corner. You are building and flying the airplane at the same time. Planning handles about ninety percent of it. The rest is being ready to adjust. Control the controllables.

And even with the best plan, you will not get through everything. Coach Bill notes that high school coaches who see their teams six days a week still cannot cover it all. Breaking it down lowers the stress.

Coach Bill gets into the details. Know your gyms. How many hoops do you have? Two in one gym and four in another changes how you set up drills. How long is your slot? If you only have an hour, every minute counts.

In California he can practice outside into November, sometimes December, rain and daylight saving time permitting. Coach Collins, already checking whether the snowblower is ready, is not impressed. But the principle travels. Have kids arrive half an hour early, outside or in a lobby, for stretching and passing without dribbling, so the nice balls stay off the cement. Kids are warmed up and in the mode, and nobody runs in five minutes late eating into your hour. Look for ways to extend practice on the front end or the back end.

Even planning a week or two ahead helps.

Download the checklist, define three goals, and map out what needs to be in by your first tournament and what it should look like by your last. Know your gyms and squeeze extra minutes where you can. Then accept that the unexpected is coming, and be ready to adjust when it does.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

• Start with the free checklistMap it out before it sneaks up on youDefine success in five minutesPlan the start and the finishThe hardest thing to plan forSqueeze more time out of every practiceCoach’s takeaway

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/: practice plans for every age, with skills, pictures, and videos laid out step by step. New and updated for this season, with free samples so you can see what they look like before you buy.
• https://nukehydration.com/: a cleaner alternative to the sports drinks loaded with additives. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order.
• https://heysami.com/: pulls TeamSnap, PlayMetrics, LeagueApps, and coach emails into one schedule, updates the family calendar automatically, and sends traffic, weather, and when to leave alerts.

Coach Collins puts today’s topic on the Mount Rushmore of youth coaching headaches: the A and B team split. Coach Bill agrees. It causes more angst, more emails, and more “I’m leaving” conversations than almost anything else in the youth game.

Coach Bill raised this topic recently on the Hey Sammy podcast with a sports mom, and her answer was simple: it comes down to communication. His addition is that parents sometimes have to trust the coach. A B team placement might sting, but in the vast majority of cases nobody is picking on your kid. There are bad actors in every system, but the coach is usually trying to do one thing: put the kid in the best possible position to succeed.

Coach Collins goes back to the classroom. You do not put a student in pre calculus when they are ready for algebra. A parent might believe their son or daughter belongs in pre calc, but if they are not ready, the right class is the one where they are learning alongside kids at the same level.

The pushback coaches always hear is that the kid will get better playing with better players. Coach Collins disagrees. A kid who does not know the law of cosines does not get better by sitting in a room where everyone else does. They get frustrated, their classmates get frustrated, and nobody is where they need to be. Coach Bill adds that the teammates feel it too.

• You meet kids where they are. Each group is learning with kids at their own stage of development.
• Better cohesion. A players are not frustrated by a teammate who cannot catch the ball or does not understand a five out offense, and that player is not drowning.
• Both groups are challenged. Split a sixth grade class evenly and the strong kids stop being pushed while the developing kids struggle.
• Fewer blowouts. If your B team plays legitimate B teams, the games are competitive. Both coaches admit that does not always happen, since some “B teams” are really A teams.

Coach Collins notes that at the youngest ages, second and third grade, you may not need a split at all.

• Friends get separated. Kids may not be playing with their buddies.
• The emails, texts, and threats to leave. Some families will head to another program that promises an A team spot.
• Apples to oranges. Another program’s A team might be your B team. The label does not tell you the level.
• Roster numbers. Two teams means you need enough players showing up for both.
• Scheduling. Finding the right competition for two levels is real extra work.

Coach Bill’s verdict: the pros still outweigh the cons over the long run.

A split does not mean the groups never see each other. Coach Bill scrimmages his A team against his B team regularly, which pushes the B players to get better. To keep the A team sharp, he scores something other than points, such as rebounding. If the B team outrebounds them, the A team runs the difference. Or whatever the B team scores becomes the number of down and backs the A team runs at the end of practice.

When the list goes up, many parents hear “you don’t think my kid is good enough,” or “my kid is stuck on the B team forever.” Neither is true. The right message for the kid is: okay, you didn’t make it this year, let’s get after it. More reps at home and more work. It is an education process for the kids and the parents.

That is why the coach has to set expectations before the season starts. We are having an A and B split. There will be tryouts. Here is how you make the A team. And placement on the B team does not mean your kid is not good.

Coach Collins recently read an article about playgrounds. They used to be dangerous, and now they have swung so far the other way that a kid can barely twist an ankle on one. His concern is that this generation has had almost no failure at all, and some failure is okay. His own son hit a wall in his basketball career, did not like it, and learned a lot from it.

Coach Bill’s point is that the stinging part is exactly what prepares kids for life, as long as the parent teaches them how to get through it. Your friends may have made the A team. You may be working your tail off and still not be there yet. That is okay.

Coach Collins has heard it plenty of times: my kid has worked harder than anyone. Maybe so. But he could spend ten thousand hours practicing singing and he is never going to be Beyonce. Effort matters, and it is not a guarantee.

Coach Bill has heard the variation aimed at the trainer: you’ve been working with her, so why isn’t she on the A team? The money I’m spending! His answer is that he does what he can with the time he has, and the player still has to put in extra work on their own.

If you have the numbers and it fits your program, an A and B split is better in the long run. Put kids in the class they are ready for, use practice to push both groups, and communicate early and clearly how teams are built and how a player makes the A team. Everybody wants to make the A team. Tell them exactly how.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

• The parent perspectiveAlgebra before pre calcThe pros of an A and B splitThe consPushing both teams in practiceWhat parents hearA little failure is good for kidsHard work is not the only variableCoach’s takeaway

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• https://heysammi.com/: Takes all your kids’ sports apps and puts them into one daily plan so you know exactly where to be and when. Get on the waitlist.
• https://nukehydration.com/: Clean hydration made for young athletes, no artificial flavorings or additives. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off.
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/: Brand new, revamped practice plans built by age level, with free samples to try before you buy.

What Skills Should Your Young Players Actually Be Working On?

Three skills per age group, and the drills to build them.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

Coach Collins shows up looking more relaxed than he has in years, with no season to plan and no tests to grade, and the guys dig into a big picture question: what are the best ways to develop grade school players in a short amount of time? Before getting to how, they start with what. For fifth grade and below, Coach Bill’s answer is ball handling, because one superior ball handler can beat a team at that age. Coach Collins adds handling pressure, meaning not panicking when doubled and knowing how to pivot. Round it out with layups, and those are the three skills that matter most.

Stationary ball handling is fine for a minute or two of warmup, but real development needs pressure. Coach Bill uses a drill called Stuck in the Mud, where defenders can move their hands but not their feet while players dribble through them, then finish with a layup at the other end. He also runs a one on one cone drill where the dribbler goes around the cones and attacks the hoop, with the defender’s cone moved closer as players improve. Coach Collins’ advice is to keep changing drills as kids master them, like letting the stuck in the mud defenders take one step in each direction. The best youth coaches he sees are always tweaking.

By middle school the priorities shift. Shooting comes first, and Coach Collins separates shooting from scoring: shooting is catch and shoot, and it is built on reps, form, and footwork, ideally to the point where players can self correct. Defense comes next, with stance, footwork, help defense, and how to shift in a trap. The third skill is a little more abstract: becoming a student of the game. Can a player adjust to different offenses and defenses, and run more than one system? That only happens if coaches put them in those situations instead of playing a two three zone for two straight years.

Coach Bill builds this through reads rather than plays. His Blitz offense is a base, and from there players learn to read and adjust to whatever the defense throws at them. You do not have time to teach every situation, but you can teach rules and scenarios that let kids figure it out on their own. Coach Collins adds that shared terminology, things like midline and helpline, makes all of it easier to teach.

The final takeaway is focus. Most youth coaches get a couple of short practices a week, so you cannot boil the ocean. Coach Bill picks three things to develop each season and drills down into each one, which is exactly how the new Coaching Youth Hoops practice plans are built, by age level, so you know what a second grader needs versus a fifth grader. As Coach Collins puts it, there are free samples on the site, just like Costco.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

TitleSubtitleShow Notes

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Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

Coach Bill welcomes Nate Dalena, CEO of Rugby NorCal and an eleven year youth coach, for a conversation that shows how much basketball and rugby share. James Naismith actually drew on rugby when he invented basketball, and Nate argues that both games are really about evasion: moving defenders where you want them and attacking the space you create. His ball carriers are taught to attack the “branches,” a defender’s arms and shoulders, not the center of the body, which is exactly what a good driver does on the court.

Nate also explains how rugby keeps kids safe through technique instead of padding, starting with how to hit the ground. His cue is “butt, back, ball”: land on your side, then your back, and keep your head up. Coach Bill connects it to taking a charge, which is disappearing in youth basketball because kids are afraid of the contact. Teach them to fall with bent knees, a tight body, and their side hitting first, and the charge gets a lot less scary. Nate adds a baseball style slide for winning loose balls, and a reminder for parents worried about a “soft kid”: confidence in contact is a teachable skill that comes with reps.

On growing a sport almost nobody knows, Nate walks through Rugby NorCal’s pathways, from non contact flag rugby for four year olds to Summer Sevens and high school leagues, plus partnerships with parks departments and youth organizations that fit into their calendars instead of competing with them. His biggest lesson is that parents of young kids are not choosing a sport. They are choosing an experience and a coach they trust. Show up early, shake every hand, start on time, end on time, and aim for what he calls a positive rugby day, which almost never has anything to do with the scoreboard.

When Coach Bill hands him an hour with a group of sixth graders, Nate starts with a fun game like ultimate basketball, moves to a drill on the day’s skill, then goes back to the game to apply it. In the rapid fire round, he would bring back rec basketball with teams picked on the spot, and he wants every coach to steal rugby’s tradition of each captain naming a player of the match from the opposing team. His closing message: let kids play multiple sports, build trust and fun early, and you will have players who love the game when it really starts to matter.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

Coach Bill welcomes Nate Dalena, CEO of Rugby NorCal and an eleven year youth coach, for a conversation that shows how much basketball and rugby share. James Naismith actually drew on rugby when he invented basketball, and Nate argues that both games are really about evasion: moving defenders where you want them and attacking the space you create. His ball carriers are taught to attack the “branches,” a defender’s arms and shoulders, not the center of the body, which is exactly what a good driver does on the court.

Nate also explains how rugby keeps kids safe through technique instead of padding, starting with how to hit the ground. His cue is “butt, back, ball”: land on your side, then your back, and keep your head up. Coach Bill connects it to taking a charge, which is disappearing in youth basketball because kids are afraid of the contact. Teach them to fall with bent knees, a tight body, and their side hitting first, and the charge gets a lot less scary. Nate adds a baseball style slide for winning loose balls, and a reminder for parents worried about a “soft kid”: confidence in contact is a teachable skill that comes with reps.

On growing a sport almost nobody knows, Nate walks through Rugby NorCal’s pathways, from non contact flag rugby for four year olds to Summer Sevens and high school leagues, plus partnerships with parks departments and youth organizations that fit into their calendars instead of competing with them. His biggest lesson is that parents of young kids are not choosing a sport. They are choosing an experience and a coach they trust. Show up early, shake every hand, start on time, end on time, and aim for what he calls a positive rugby day, which almost never has anything to do with the scoreboard.

When Coach Bill hands him an hour with a group of sixth graders, Nate starts with a fun game like ultimate basketball, moves to a drill on the day’s skill, then goes back to the game to apply it. In the rapid fire round, he would bring back rec basketball with teams picked on the spot, and he wants every coach to steal rugby’s tradition of each captain naming a player of the match from the opposing team. His closing message: let kids play multiple sports, build trust and fun early, and you will have players who love the game when it really starts to matter.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://nukehydration.com/: Clean sports drink started by a sports mom and dad out of Mississippi. Coach Bill is drinking the Lime Time. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off your first order.
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/: Build a custom practice plan for your team or print and go with one of the ready made practices. No more ChatGPT practice plans.

How Do You Cut a Kid Without Killing Their Love for the Game?

• Are You Sure the Kid Heard What You Actually Said?
• Who Should Be in the Room When You Cut a Sixth Grader?
• What Do You Say When a Kid Asks “Who Else Got Cut?”
• Are You Cutting Them, or Putting Them in the Right Heat?
• Why Does Every Cut Conversation Turn Into a Game of Telephone?

The right room, the right words, and the right heat.

After a quick check on the weather (California gets a little bit of fall, and its winter is mostly rain), Coach Bill and Coach Collins get into the follow up to tryouts: the conversations nobody wants to have. Cutting a kid, or moving a player down from the top team to a lower level. The goal is not just delivering the news. It is delivering it without killing the kid’s enthusiasm for the sport.

Coach Bill always has these conversations in person, and his rule of thumb depends on the age of the player:

• Eighth grade: parent and kid together.
• Seventh grade: depends on the situation.
• Sixth grade and below: usually just the parent, at least at first.

But he always makes the same offer. “I’m happy to sit with both of you, and I’m happy to talk to them specifically about the things they need to work on.” He encourages families to take him up on it.

His reasoning is the heart of the episode. You can say the exact same words to two different kids. One hears a challenge: this wasn’t my year, but next year look out. The other hears that the coach doesn’t like them, they’re horrible, and they’re quitting. Same conversation, same words, completely different landing. You have to know the kid, and you have to know the parent.

Coach Collins tells a story that proves the point. After his son Drew’s sophomore year, he sat down with him for a long and fairly blunt conversation about what his role would look like as a junior. Several assistant coaches were in the room, including Coach Kevin Klagos.

By the time Coach Collins got home, Drew’s mother was waiting at the door ready to give him an earful about why he told Drew he would never play for him.

That was not remotely what was said. He had to call time out, walk her back through the actual conversation, and offer to get Coach Klagos on the phone because he heard every word. What Coach Collins said was: here is where you fit and here is what you need to work on. What Drew heard, and what Drew carried home, was: I’m no good and I won’t play next year.

His message to every coach listening: what you say to a kid is not what reaches the parent. Ever. It is a game of telephone. That is exactly why, at the grade school level, you need to be talking directly to the parents.

And one more rule from Coach Collins: do not post it, do not put it online. Talk to people.

Coach Bill pushes for the actual language. What do you say to a sixth grader, or their parent, when what you really mean is “not good enough”?

Coach Collins admits that in a roundabout way, that is what you are saying. But here is how he structures it:

• Start positive. Here is what your kid is really good at.
• Name the gaps plainly. Here are the weak spots and the skills they need to get better at.
• Reframe the comparison. It is not that your son or daughter got worse. Some other kids got better and worked on these things, so we are moving them up.
• Give them the runway. You have the next 364 days. Here is exactly what to work on.
• Land on the upside. This is a better fit for the level and for the teams they will play. More playing time, more reps, more chances to build the skills they could not get otherwise.

Always bring it back to a positive at the end.

Coach Collins’ best analogy comes straight out of Madison, Wisconsin, which runs the biggest outdoor swim meet in the country every summer, with roughly twenty public pools feeding into an event called All City.

When the seven year olds swim the 25 freestyle, there are something like thirty five heats of it. The beauty of the meet is that every kid is placed in the heat that matches their time. Eight swimmers per heat, and if you win yours you get a ribbon. The top eight kids in the city are in the top heat. Everybody else is racing kids they can actually race.

Those kids leave the pool smiling. They competed. Nobody got lapped.

Basketball cannot sort kids that cleanly, and both coaches acknowledge it. But that is what most coaches are trying to do, especially in programs with multiple teams. Not rank kids. Put them in the right heat.

“Who else got cut?” Or “How many?” Or “Who did you keep?”

Coach Bill admits this is the one he struggles with. Nobody wants to be the only one, because that is embarrassing. And when a kid truly is the only cut, the natural follow up is: why cut just one kid?

Coach Collins’ half joking answer: I can only keep ten. Well, keep eleven. I only have ten jerseys.

The real answer, as Coach Bill puts it, is that the gap between number ten and number eleven is usually huge. It is about level, not the number.

He also raises a safety question that does not get talked about enough. Is it actually safe for this kid to be on this court the way they are right now? Coach Collins adds the other half: and would they even be happy there?

Coach Collins’ youth program has had sixteen kids show up for fifth grade. You cannot carry sixteen on a team, so either you are cutting four to six kids, or you are telling families to go find four more players and another coach. Nobody wants to do either. (Coach Bill’s response: “You’re destroying the dreams of fifth graders? Way to go, Coach.”)

Sometimes twenty kids show up and only one parent volunteers to coach. Then somebody has to step up, or the program has one team whether it wants to or not.

And for the parent who says they have never coached before? Coach Bill’s answer: don’t worry about it. Go to coachingyouthhoops.com, download the plans, and follow the instructions step by step.

On the club side, Coach Bill tries to make sure a cut is never a dead end. Didn’t make the first team? Come to our camps and pick up skills there. Play in our three on three. Keep developing. And plenty of city and church leagues run equal playing time, where every kid plays, which is its own valid path.

Pick the room based on the kid’s age. Start positive, be specific about the gaps, give them a 364 day plan, and end on why this level is a better fit. Assume the message will get scrambled on the way home, so get the parent in the conversation. Never post it online. And keep a door open somewhere so the cut is never the end of the sport.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesWho is in the roomThe Drew storyThe script for delivering a cutPut them in the right heatThe question every cut kid asksWhen cutting is a math problemFind a pathway for everybodyCoach’s takeaway

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Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show

Links mentioned in this episode

• ⁠TeachHoops.com⁠
• ⁠LakeShowHoops.com⁠ — Joey's club in the Bay Area. Contact info is on the About Us page
• ⁠CoachingYouthHoops.com⁠
• Beyond Pulse — the wearable band Coach Bill is testing with his team
• ⁠NukeHydration.com ⁠— the fifteen second voice note evaluation app Coach Bill is also testing

What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club?

Gym time, good coaches, and the myth of arriving.

Coach Bill sits down with Joey Fuca, who runs Lake Show in the Bay Area and is also, as Coach Bill puts it, his boss. Two years in the making. Joey has coached everywhere from his third grade son's team to the college and pro level, and Lake Show now runs about twenty six teams and roughly two hundred forty boys.

Strip away the uniforms, the tournaments, and the Instagram posts, and Joey's answer is simple: helping kids. Ages seven and eight through the teens, and then staying connected to those families for decades. Over the last four or five years he has hired coaches who played in the program. He has coached multiple sets of brothers. He had Lake Show guys in his wedding party as groomsmen. He calls it a lineage of players.

The club started in 2005 as a family project. His dad, Joe Fuca, a tech CEO who worked at DocuSign through its IPO and now coaches at a small school in Dublin, put it together for Joey and his buddies. Nothing more ambitious than that.

Joey's advice to players is the same thing he did himself: take one or two good things from every coach you have.

John Raynor, his high school coach at San Ramon Valley for over thirty years, taught him toughness, grit, and how to grow up as a young man and be a leader in the community. He and Mark Madsen, now the head coach at Cal, recently went up to visit him.

Chuck Martin, his college coach at The Master's College and a former Liberty coach, was a great leader of men and modeled spiritual values off the court.

Eric Musselman, whose kids came up through Lake Show, brought Joey on as a grad assistant at Nevada after Joey finished playing professionally in Germany. That opened up the business side, right at the front edge of the transfer portal era, which Musselman helped spearhead.

What carries over to youth coaching is smaller and more ordinary than you would expect: getting to practice fifteen minutes early, how you communicate during practice, how you actually run a team.

Coach Bill asks what that coach is thinking about wrong. Joey's answer is that the premise itself is off. People want the end state, the twenty or thirty or fifty teams, without the part that gets you there.

Build a product you can be proud of. If that is two teams, it is two teams. Growth follows quality.

The non negotiables:

• A good director. The leader of the program is what families actually see.
• Good coaches. They are the ones interacting with the athletes every week.
• Gym time. Everything else is theoretical without it.
• Community roots. You do not start a program where you have no influence. Joey's is in Danville, where his son goes to school and has his friends.

Coach Bill adds the part that catches most coaches off guard: at twenty five teams you are running a business. Books, payments, scheduling, conflicts. "I'm a coach, therefore I can coach a team" turns into "I have to learn how to run a business."

Hiring gets more delicate. Lake Show keeps it close to home, drawing from former players in the program or warm referrals from coaches Joey trusts.

Gym time becomes a hard ceiling. If you are in a district with a fixed allotment, that allotment is your program size. Basketball is an indoor sport and the season is fall and winter, so there is no workaround. Joey's advice to a new director: treat gym time as your business. Go to every district, every church, every space that might give you a relationship.

And you need help. Lake Show's director of operations, Jeff Maw, wears every hat: coaching, registrations, promotion. Coach Bill's version of the same point is to hire people smarter than you with strengths you do not have, which is hard for coaches who are used to believing they know everything.

For most of its life, it did not. The program was high school only, one or two teams, built around the goal of getting kids into college, D1, D2, or junior college. Joey's mom used to give them a hard time because they never ran it like a business. They poured their own time, money, and resources into it.

Joey started looking at it as a business about ten years ago. The youth program is only eight or nine years old. They added middle school because families had been asking for years, all those high school players had younger siblings, and the Fuca family wanted a way to keep the thing in the family while still serving the area. It started as one sixth, seventh, and eighth grade team. Once you have one team, you start creating more.

They set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017.

Coach Bill raises the outside perception: an Adidas 3SSB team looks like a club that made it.

Joey corrects the framing immediately. Nobody has made it. Lake Show spent ten to fifteen years earning their spot and is grateful for it, but the competition at the elite level is a dogfight every single year. You cannot be a flash in the pan with one blue chip kid and coast. He recently got an email from Adidas asking for the program's ten year history of players who went on to college, with NBA players highlighted. Who is in your program is a very real thing.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at ⁠TeachHoops.com⁠

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

https://teachhoops.com/

The debate over ankle braces is one of the most persistent topics in basketball, with coaches, trainers, and parents often split on the best approach. In this episode, we dive into the pros and cons of prophylactic ankle bracing versus traditional taping. We break down the cost-benefit analysis, looking not just at the price of tape versus a one-time brace purchase, but also at the effectiveness of each method after 15 minutes of sweating and intense gameplay.

We also tackle the biggest myth surrounding this topic: the idea that wearing braces will weaken a player's ankles over time. We look at what the actual research says about "dependency" and whether external support leads to muscle atrophy, or if that is just old-school coaching folklore. We discuss the importance of distinguishing between reliance on a brace and using it as a necessary insurance policy, especially for players with a history of recurrent sprains.

Finally, we explore the balance between protection and performance. Does locking down an ankle limit a player’s vertical jump or agility? We discuss the concept of the "kinetic chain"—the fear that bracing the ankle might transfer force to the knee—and how to mitigate that risk through proper strength and mobility training. Whether you are considering a team-wide mandate or just advising a player coming off an injury, this episode gives you the facts to make an informed decision.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show

Links mentioned in this episode

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://lakeshowhoops.com/ — Joey's club in the Bay Area. Contact info is on the About Us page
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/
• Beyond Pulse — the wearable band Coach Bill is testing with his team
• https://nukehydration.com/— the fifteen second voice note evaluation app Coach Bill is also testing

What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club?

Gym time, good coaches, and the myth of arriving.

Coach Bill sits down with Joey Fuca, who runs Lake Show in the Bay Area and is also, as Coach Bill puts it, his boss. Two years in the making. Joey has coached everywhere from his third grade son's team to the college and pro level, and Lake Show now runs about twenty six teams and roughly two hundred forty boys.

Strip away the uniforms, the tournaments, and the Instagram posts, and Joey's answer is simple: helping kids. Ages seven and eight through the teens, and then staying connected to those families for decades. Over the last four or five years he has hired coaches who played in the program. He has coached multiple sets of brothers. He had Lake Show guys in his wedding party as groomsmen. He calls it a lineage of players.

The club started in 2005 as a family project. His dad, Joe Fuca, a tech CEO who worked at DocuSign through its IPO and now coaches at a small school in Dublin, put it together for Joey and his buddies. Nothing more ambitious than that.

Joey's advice to players is the same thing he did himself: take one or two good things from every coach you have.

John Raynor, his high school coach at San Ramon Valley for over thirty years, taught him toughness, grit, and how to grow up as a young man and be a leader in the community. He and Mark Madsen, now the head coach at Cal, recently went up to visit him.

Chuck Martin, his college coach at The Master's College and a former Liberty coach, was a great leader of men and modeled spiritual values off the court.

Eric Musselman, whose kids came up through Lake Show, brought Joey on as a grad assistant at Nevada after Joey finished playing professionally in Germany. That opened up the business side, right at the front edge of the transfer portal era, which Musselman helped spearhead.

What carries over to youth coaching is smaller and more ordinary than you would expect: getting to practice fifteen minutes early, how you communicate during practice, how you actually run a team.

Coach Bill asks what that coach is thinking about wrong. Joey's answer is that the premise itself is off. People want the end state, the twenty or thirty or fifty teams, without the part that gets you there.

Build a product you can be proud of. If that is two teams, it is two teams. Growth follows quality.

The non negotiables:

• A good director. The leader of the program is what families actually see.
• Good coaches. They are the ones interacting with the athletes every week.
• Gym time. Everything else is theoretical without it.
• Community roots. You do not start a program where you have no influence. Joey's is in Danville, where his son goes to school and has his friends.

Coach Bill adds the part that catches most coaches off guard: at twenty five teams you are running a business. Books, payments, scheduling, conflicts. "I'm a coach, therefore I can coach a team" turns into "I have to learn how to run a business."

Hiring gets more delicate. Lake Show keeps it close to home, drawing from former players in the program or warm referrals from coaches Joey trusts.

Gym time becomes a hard ceiling. If you are in a district with a fixed allotment, that allotment is your program size. Basketball is an indoor sport and the season is fall and winter, so there is no workaround. Joey's advice to a new director: treat gym time as your business. Go to every district, every church, every space that might give you a relationship.

And you need help. Lake Show's director of operations, Jeff Maw, wears every hat: coaching, registrations, promotion. Coach Bill's version of the same point is to hire people smarter than you with strengths you do not have, which is hard for coaches who are used to believing they know everything.

For most of its life, it did not. The program was high school only, one or two teams, built around the goal of getting kids into college, D1, D2, or junior college. Joey's mom used to give them a hard time because they never ran it like a business. They poured their own time, money, and resources into it.

Joey started looking at it as a business about ten years ago. The youth program is only eight or nine years old. They added middle school because families had been asking for years, all those high school players had younger siblings, and the Fuca family wanted a way to keep the thing in the family while still serving the area. It started as one sixth, seventh, and eighth grade team. Once you have one team, you start creating more.

They set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017.

Coach Bill raises the outside perception: an Adidas 3SSB team looks like a club that made it.

Joey corrects the framing immediately. Nobody has made it. Lake Show spent ten to fifteen years earning their spot and is grateful for it, but the competition at the elite level is a dogfight every single year. You cannot be a flash in the pan with one blue chip kid and coast. He recently got an email from Adidas asking for the program's ten year history of players who went on to college, with NBA players highlighted. Who is in your program is a very real thing.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cuts During Tryouts

Links mentioned in this episode

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://nukehydration.com/ — clean sports drink started by a sports mom and dad out of Mississippi. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off your first order
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/ — build a custom practice plan or print and go. As Coach Bill puts it, more state titles than ChatGPT

Are You Sure the Kid Heard What You Actually Said?

Cut conversations, and the telephone game that follows.

The follow up to tryouts: the conversations nobody wants to have. Cutting a kid, or moving a player down from the top team. The goal is not just delivering the news. It is delivering it without killing the kid's enthusiasm for the sport.

Coach Bill's rule of thumb by age:

• Eighth grade: parent and kid together.
• Seventh grade: depends on the situation.
• Sixth and below: the parent first.

But he always offers the same thing. "I'm happy to sit with both of you, and I'm happy to talk to them specifically about what they need to work on." He encourages families to take him up on it.

His reasoning is the heart of the episode. You can say the exact same words to two different kids. One hears a challenge: wasn't my year, next year look out. The other hears you do not like me, I'm horrible, I'm quitting. Same words, same delivery, completely different landing. You have to know the kid, and the parent.

Coach Collins had a long, blunt conversation with his son Drew after his sophomore year about what his role would look like as a junior. Coach Kevin Klagos and other assistants were in the room.

By the time Coach Collins got home, Drew's mother was waiting at the door, ready to let him have it for telling Drew he would never play for him.

That is not remotely what was said. He had to call time out, walk back through the actual conversation, and offer to get Klagos on the phone because Klagos heard the whole thing. What was actually said was here is where you fit and here is what you need to work on. What Drew heard, and what Drew relayed, was I'm no good and I won't play next year.

His takeaway for every coach listening: what you say to a kid is not what reaches the parent. Ever. It is a game of telephone. That is exactly why the age of the kid determines who is in the room.

And one more rule from Coach Collins: do not post it, do not put it online. Talk to people.

Coach Bill pushes for the actual language. What do you say to a sixth grader, or their parent, when what you really mean is not good enough?

Coach Collins' structure:

• Start positive. Here is what your kid is genuinely good at.
• Name the gaps plainly. Here are the skills they need to get better at.
• Reframe the comparison. It is not that your son or daughter got worse. Other kids got better and worked on those things, and we are moving them up.
• Give them the runway. You have 364 days. Here is exactly what to work on.
• Land on the upside. This is a better fit for the level and the teams they will play. More playing time, more reps, more chances to develop the skills they could not get otherwise.

Coach Collins' best analogy, straight out of Madison. The city runs the biggest outdoor swim meet in the country every summer, with something like twenty public pools feeding into an event called All City at the end.

When the seven year olds swim the 25 freestyle, there are roughly thirty five heats of it. The whole beauty of it is that every kid is in the heat that matches their time. Eight swimmers per heat, and if you win yours you get a ribbon. The top eight in the city are in the top heat. Everybody else is racing someone they can actually race.

The kids leave those pools smiling. They competed. Nobody got lapped.

Basketball cannot sort that cleanly, and both coaches acknowledge it. But that is what a coach is trying to do. Not rank kids. Put them in the right heat.

"Who else got cut?" Or "how many?" Or "who did you keep?"

Coach Bill admits he struggles with this one, because nobody wants to be the only one. That is embarrassing. And when a kid truly is the only cut, the obvious follow up is why cut one kid at all.

Coach Collins' half joking answer: I can only keep ten. Well, keep eleven. I only have ten jerseys.

The real answer is that the gap between the tenth and eleventh player is usually enormous, and that it is about level, not about the number.

There is also a safety piece Coach Bill raises. Is it actually safe for this kid to be on this court the way they are right now? Coach Collins' addition: and would they even be happy there?

Coach Collins' youth program has had sixteen kids show up for fifth grade. You cannot carry sixteen. So you are cutting four to six kids, or you are telling families to go find four more players and another coach, and nobody wants to do either. Sometimes twenty kids show up and only one parent volunteers to coach, and then the program has one team whether it wants to or not.

Coach Bill's advice for the parent who says they have never coached: go to coachingyouthhoops.com, download it, follow the steps.

On the club side, Coach Bill tries never to make the cut a dead end. Didn't make the A team? Come to our camps. Play in our three on three. Keep the skills moving. And plenty of rec, city, and church leagues run equal playing time, which is its own valid path.

Pick the room based on the kid's age. Start positive, be specific about the gaps, give a 364 day plan, and end on why this level is a better fit. Assume the message will get scrambled on the way home, so put the parent in the conversation. And keep a door open somewhere so the cut is not the end of the sport.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesWho is in the roomThe Drew storyThe script for delivering a cutPut them in the right heatThe question every cut kid asksWhen cutting is a math problemFind a pathway for everybodyCoach's takeaway

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https://gc.com/basketball

https://nukehydration.com/

Youth basketball has become more connected, more measurable and more shareable and GameChanger is rebuilding its basketball experience around that shift. The new update combines personalized player profiles, automatic highlights, flexible stat tracking and ball-tracking video with tools that make life easier for coaches and club directors. It’s an attempt to bring the video, data and storytelling once reserved for higher levels of basketball down to the youth game.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Playing at the Proper Level

Links mentioned in this episode

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://nukehydration.com/ — clean sports hydration, no additives, low sugar. Coach Bill is drinking the Lime Time. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/ — practice plans and everything else you need as a youth coach

Should Your Kid Be Playing Up, or Is That Just You?

Talent, maturity, and the parent in the parking lot.

Tryout season continues, and this one is about the hardest call a youth coach makes: getting kids at the right level. How you decide, and how you tell the parents.

(Also settled early: nobody has ever called Coach Collins "Coach Steve." Coach Bill's fourth grade girls have been debating whether to call him Bill, Coach Bill, or William, and at least one of them knows his full name.)

Coach Bill lays out the case. You have a team that can do X, Y, and Z. You have kids above that and kids below it. Then you have the tweener: too good for her grade, maybe not good enough for the level above. Do you push her up for the challenge? Can she handle no longer being the best player in the gym, when one level down she would be?

Coach Collins refuses to put it in a box, and Coach Bill gives him a hard time about it the whole episode.

His frame is academic. If your kid is genuinely ready for calculus, they should take calculus, and the parent usually knows that better than anyone. But you do not want to push so hard that failure follows, and you do not want them so overwhelmed they quit and go play volleyball.

The line he borrows: you never want to be the best kid in the gym. Caitlin Clark was playing against much older boys young, and her parents knew she wanted that. That is a real thing. It is also rare.

At younger ages, Coach Collins leans toward keeping kids with their age group. His reasoning is blunt: nobody is scouting a fourth grade girls game on a Tuesday.

Coach Bill's counter is that it does not matter whether scouts are there. Parents believe they are. That belief is where all the angst comes from, and a coach has to manage the belief whether or not it is grounded.

Coach Bill's example is not hypothetical. A dad pulls his daughter out thirty minutes into the very first practice, says nothing beyond "we gotta go," then calls later to say she deserves to be played up. So you play her up. And she is not ready, or she is simply not as good as the other girls.

Now what happens to the kid?

Coach Collins' most useful point. A kid can be physically good enough to play up and nowhere near ready socially. A fourth grader with sixth grade talent and third grade maturity probably belongs with the fourth graders, even though she is better than all of them.

That is also why he will not hand over a formula. He has made good and bad calls on this with fifteen to eighteen year olds, and he does not always get it right.

Every parent thinks their kid is special. Coach Collins' test is behavior, not talent: is your kid going outside and shooting for three hours on their own? The truly obsessed ones are already obsessed in fourth and fifth grade. Nobody has to make them do it.

His own example is his son, whose obsession was never jumpers. It was building things. YouTube channel, trick shot videos before trick shots were a thing, out back all day. So he fed that monster instead. The question a parent has to answer honestly is whether the drive is coming from the kid or from them.

Coach Bill's addition: at that age the parent pushing is real and common, and a coach cannot do anything about it. All you can do is put the kid in the right spot.

"I'm worried about all the kids. You're worried about one kid. So I understand what you're saying, and I hear you."

Coach Bill's amendment: they are worried about two kids. Their own, and the kid they think theirs is better than.

Publish the rubric. Same point as the tryout structure episode. If you communicate how the team is built before tryouts, you take the mystery out of the placement.

Be timely. Everyone is on pins and needles waiting for the roster. Do not let it drag.

Remember the kids feel it. They pick up the stress from their parents and from the situation, and depending on age they may have no way to say so.

Know that parents cannot see the moving parts. "Why can't my kid be on so and so's team" sets off a domino effect across every roster in the program.

The tough conversations. Cutting a kid, and moving a kid down from the top team.

There is no formula. Weigh the skill against the maturity, watch what the kid does on their own time, publish your rubric, communicate fast, and accept that you will not get every one of these right.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesThe tweener problemWhy there is no ruleThe real life situationReady is not only about skillHow to tell whether your kid is actually that kidCoach Collins' line for parentsWhat coaches can controlComing nextCoach's takeaway

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://nukehydration.com/ — ready to drink clean sports hydration, shipped nationwide. Sample pack (two Lime Time, two OG Orange, plus extras) is $19.99 with shipping included. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off, sample pack included
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/

Is Your Kid Actually Hydrated, or Just Drinking Something Blue?

The couple taking on Gatorade from a Mississippi warehouse.

Coach Bill sits down with Marty and Lesley Frascogna, the husband and wife team behind Nuke Hydration and a sponsor of this show, which he discloses right up front. They found each other through a LinkedIn conversation, and Coach Bill's interest was simple: he was tired of picking up bottles full of dye and would never hand that to his own team.

Lesley owns this part of the story. Gatorade, Gatorade Zero, a stretch where their son drank Prime because he thought it was cool, and some Propel because, as she puts it, in her brain clear must mean healthy. The tipping point was standing over a grocery cart loaded with Gatorade she was about to hand out to a house full of kids and feeling guilty about it.

Marty's side was the Ironman. He came to triathlon with no background in it, and when his nutrition coach asked what he was actually putting in his body, the answer turned out to be not much: not enough sodium, not even enough fluid ounces. And he had played college sports. He thought he knew this stuff.

This is the running argument of the episode. Coach Bill had heard the Ironman version. Marty, an attorney for eighteen years and self described steady hand, says the Ironman was the setup, but Lesley took it and ran. She is the impulsive one. She had also been a florist for twenty four years and wanted a career change, and so did he.

Her one non negotiable from the start: it had to be ready to drink. Not a powder. A bottle a kid can hold. Marty asked about powder and she shut it down immediately. She was calling formulators the next day.

For the record, Coach Bill and Lesley referred to Marty as an Ironman six times before he brought it up himself. He wanted that noted.

Market research pointed to a real gap. Hydration packets are everywhere. Ready to drink is essentially Coke's Powerade and Pepsi's Gatorade and not much else.

When they walked into Whole Foods looking for the clean alternative that surely already existed, they found a couple of options with two problems. First, no cool factor. Their own kids laughed and said they would not walk around with it. Second, natural flavors. Lesley's view is that natural flavors are not really natural. They start from a natural product and then get heavily processed in a lab. That was a line they would not cross, and she notes that avoiding natural flavors is becoming a real consumer trend this year.

Their answer to what parents miss when they think hydration means water: most youth athletes are not drinking enough to begin with, they are not getting enough sodium, and they are short on electrolytes. Sweat goes out, salt has to go back in.

Coach Bill can vouch. He carries a large bottle, drinks three a day, and still came back dehydrated on routine bloodwork. Volume alone does not do it.

Marty's favorite frame, from his training: carbs are the gas, hydration is the oil. If you burn all the oil, you cannot retroactively pour it back in. The engine is already gone. He has actually blown an engine by skipping an oil change, so the metaphor stuck.

On timing, both agree with what Coach Bill preaches to his team. Hydration starts the night before. If your game is Saturday and you start Saturday morning, you are already behind.

This one they did not plan to collect. A high school team they work with gave players a Nuke two hours before a game, water alongside it, and another Nuke at halftime, in Mississippi heat. Not one cramp on the team. The coach said it was the first time in school history. They watched the opposing team go down every few minutes on TV, on a weekend when a player elsewhere died on the field from heat.

They have now seen it repeat for three straight weeks. They are also hearing from women who drink one a day and say it keeps their headaches and migraines away. A study with Mississippi State's kinesiology department on Nuke specifically is in the works, which should say whether the credit belongs to the coconut water, the Celtic sea salt, or the combination.

Coconut water as the base, for hydration and the added benefits, and because almost nothing else in the category uses it.

Celtic sea salt, not table salt. Lesley says the internal debate over which salt to use was close to infinite. They wanted something from the ocean, with the trace minerals that come with it.

Lemon and lime juice for actual flavor in the original Lime Time.

Five grams of added organic cane sugar. They deliberately did not go to zero. A little sugar helps hydration, carries flavor, and gives kids a small burst of energy. It is a fraction of what is in a conventional sports drink.

Stevia and monk fruit to balance the lemon and lime without piling on more sugar and calories.

They said no to extra vitamin C, extra vitamins, extra magnesium. Not necessary. The moment that defined the whole company came at the formulation lab, six months in, when they finally loved the taste and spotted an ingredient on the panel they did not recognize. They asked what it did. The answer was mostly color, with a little magnesium they did not need. Lesley's response: get rid of it.

Two halves. Nothing Unnecessary, and Keep the Energy. No, there is no caffeine in it, which is the first thing most people ask.

Nothing Unnecessary has become the filter for the whole company, not just the formula. Lesley catches herself planning a big elaborate activation in Nashville and then pulls it back to something simple that is all about the drink. Keep the Energy is about the daily wins: no sugar spike, no crash, one brick in the wall every day.

The bottle says no guilt. The team pushed back on putting it there. Lesley insisted, at a hundred and ten percent, because of exactly what she felt pushing that Gatorade cart. Mom guilt is everywhere, parents are doing their best, and if one decision can be made easier and feel good, that is the job. Coach Bill's version is the same from the coach's side: he does not feel bad handing it to his players.

Neither of them is a nutritionist and they say so. Lesley's honest answer is that the two go hand in hand and nobody is perfect. There is still junk food in their pantry. But fully hydrated and badly fueled is a moot point.

Coach Bill's version of this was handing out nutrition bars before early morning games, because so many kids skip breakfast and you can see how that game is going to go before it starts. Lesley's broader point: it is not just the kids who need educating. She did not understand the difference hydration actually makes until Marty started training. She thought eight glasses of water was just the recommendation so you do not die.

The second husband and wife pair to appear on the show, and Marty's first question was whether the first couple is still married.

They describe a good yin and yang: Lesley is passionate, impulsive, burn the boats, we are doing this now. Marty wants the long term plan and the strategy thought all the way through. The bigger problem is that they are never off. Date night turns into a work meeting. Lesley, diagnosed with ADHD at thirty six, needs the schedule to stay fluid, which frustrates a man who would like a schedule set in stone. They also have a warehouse and still fight over which corner of the house to work in.

Their kids, Lesley jokes, would like mom and dad to go back to their real jobs.

Two flavors now: the original Lime Time and the just launched OG Orange. A third is coming in the spring as a collaboration with someone they are not naming yet.

Direct to consumer at nukehydration.com, with a new site launching in about three weeks. Lesley ships it herself, nationwide, with handwritten notes. They are in independent grocery stores around Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham and expanding.

The growth they are proudest of is schools. Athletic directors are getting real pressure from parents asking for healthier options, and "we have always given the team Gatorade" is no longer an answer. Next goal: working directly with coaches to set up team shops so parents can buy straight from them.

And for anyone who does not want to commit to a full case, the $19.99 sample pack includes two of each flavor with shipping, and YOUTHHOOPS15 works on it.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

SubtitleShow NotesBefore Nuke, they were a Gatorade familyWho actually had the ideaThe void they foundHydration is not the same as waterThe Mississippi football data pointWhat is in it, and what is notWhat NUKE actually stands forThe two words Lesley fought forNutrition and hydration togetherWorking together, married eighteen yearsWhere to get it

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Parents' Role in Tryouts

Links mentioned in this episode

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/ — print and go practice plans built from years of coaching, not ChatGPT
• https://nukehydration.com/ — clean sports drink for kids and coaches, started by a couple out of Mississippi. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order

What Is a Parent Actually Supposed to Do During Tryouts?

Shoes, snacks, and getting out of the way.

Fall basketball season is kicking off, tryouts are here, and Coach Bill wants to talk about the person nobody writes a rubric for: the parent. Two sides to it. What coaches should be teaching parents to expect, and how parents can actually support their kid through a stressful week.

Coach Collins goes first, and his list is unglamorous on purpose. We are dealing with kids, not young adults who can drive themselves. So the number one parent responsibility is logistics: shoes that fit, a ball in the bag, properly hydrated, everything they need, and there on time. That is most of the job.

Tryouts can be genuinely stressful for a family, especially when nobody knows whether the kid makes a team at all, or which team. Coach Collins' advice is to drop both the coach hat and the parent evaluator hat and just be the supportive person in the front seat. When they get in the car, ask how it went. Ask what was fun today. Not "how'd you do" and not "were any of the other kids good." That one shift is what makes a kid want to come back next year.

Coach Bill's biggest coaching side point: share your tryout rubric with parents before tryouts. How are teams being picked? If there is an A and a B team, what actually separates them? If there are cuts, why would a kid get cut? Say it plainly and say it early, and you avoid most of the fallout after the list goes up.

He also names the thing everyone has seen: the leagues where the three dad coaches end up with the top three kids, automatically, because of how the structure works.

Coach Collins frames it as a triangle. Parent to kid, parent to coach, coach to kid. When one leg of that breaks down, what the kid heard and what the parent tells the kid stop matching what the coach actually said, and that is where the problems come from. Ten spots, here is what we are looking for, here is what competitive means. Say it out loud to all three points of the triangle.

Coach Bill lays out two scenarios worth walking through with your kid ahead of time.

Your kid makes it and their best friend does not. One kid is thrilled, the other is crushed. Teach yours how to handle that, because the bragging happens more often than you would think.

Your kid does not make the team you both expected. Talk through what it actually means, which is not much. A career is not over in fifth grade because someone did not make the A team.

Coach Collins agrees and adds the frame: life is about disappointment, and you learn more from failure than success. But he pushes it one step further.

His favorite parenting lesson from this episode. Before tryouts, have your athlete go ask the coach what they are looking for. After tryouts, have them ask what to work on for next year.

The story behind it: his son Drew, in fourth or fifth grade, got in the car furious about a book report. Coach Collins pulled over about three hundred yards from the school and told him to go back in and talk to his teacher, who was still there. The teacher had a great conversation with him. Coach Collins believes that single moment taught Drew more than the rest of that school year, and that it made him an advocate for himself through his entire education.

Coach Bill's addition is that this is really about teaching a kid how to speak respectfully to an adult in authority, which outlasts basketball by decades. And it is the kid who should do the asking, not the parent. Both agree a fourth grader is old enough. Coach Bill says he would love it if one of his fourth grade girls walked up and asked him to explain.

As Coach Collins puts it, your job is to get them ready to leave the nest, not to stay in it. Nobody wants their thirty five year old kid still hanging around the house.

Coaches: publish the rubric before tryouts, not after. Parents: handle the logistics, ask what was fun instead of how they did, and send your kid to talk to the coach themselves.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

TitleSubtitleShow NotesStart with the boring stuffThen take off the coach hatThe communication triangleRehearse the hard conversations before they happenTeach the kid to advocate for themselvesCoach's takeaway

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

https://teachhoops.com/

Tryout season is here, and Coach Collins frames the stakes right away: the two most important days for a high school coach are the day you pick your staff and the day you pick your team. At the youth level, the day you pick your team is just as big. Tryouts matter.

Youth basketball has several flavors and you do not always get to choose. Sometimes you are assigned players by area. Sometimes it is a snake draft. Sometimes it is a club tryout where you evaluate and then pick. And sometimes you are the one running the tryout, sometimes you are only evaluating, and sometimes you are stuck doing both. Coach Collins has done all three and says the variables change your approach every time.

There are also league quirks worth knowing. In Little League, Coach Collins' son Drew was slotted at a certain round and Coach Collins forfeited that round's pick to keep him. His own father worked the same system a generation earlier, drafting the other best player in each of his sons' classes as an assistant coach, and won the city three or four years running. Coach Bill had a similar situation with a set of very good twins that cost him two picks.

Will the kid actually show up? This is Coach Bill's first filter, and he has been burned. He once used a first round pick on a soccer player who was the best athlete on the floor and made maybe one game all season. Lose that pick and your number one is effectively the tenth best player. He now asks parents directly what other sports the kid is playing in season, and which one is the priority. Some boards he has served on added it to the registration questions.

Coach Collins adds the nuance: showing up because a parent is busy is a different problem than showing up because soccer is at the same time. And there is more variability with younger kids. A nine year old might want to be at basketball practice, but if the parents already committed to soccer, that kid is going to soccer. By seventeen, the player gets more say.

Effort, focus, and attention to detail. Coach Collins tells the Drake Baldwin story. Baldwin, now the starting catcher for the Braves, did not have a great tryout at nine years old and slid to the second or third round. Coach Collins picked him because he saw love for the game and effort where other coaches saw the miss. He was Baldwin's first Little League coach, and Baldwin's mom still has that first over the fence home run ball.

The point: effort is hard to define but you know it when you see it, and it looks different in a seven year old than a thirteen year old. As Coach Collins puts it, Caitlin Clark was probably pretty focused at four. Personalities do not change that much.

The parent factor. Coach Bill is blunt that plenty of coaches draft for the parents. If you know a parent is going to be difficult all season, that is a real consideration when you are volunteering your time. It has nothing to do with the kid, and it is still a factor.

Fit with your style. Go in knowing what you value. If you love ball handlers, look for ball handlers. If you are defensive minded, find kids who play that way. The free rubric on the site lets you check boxes and weight what matters most to you, which keeps you organized instead of reacting to whoever scored last.

Keep everybody moving. Same rule as practice. In a ninety minute to two hour window, there should always be something happening.

Chunk the group. Coach Bill sometimes has a couple hundred kids in one gym. Start everyone together, then split into rough A, B, and C groups so kids are competing against similar ability. Then move kids between courts to test them: try this one up on court one and see how it looks.

A little gamesmanship. Coach Collins will sometimes put the obvious top one or two players down on the B or C floor, because he already knows they are on the team and he needs his eyes on the ten kids he is unsure about. He never does it to a single kid, always three or four, so nobody reads too much into it. Coach Bill's warning: watch the parents' reaction.

Numbers and pins. Number every kid on the way in. Use running bibs or pinned numbers like a cross country meet, and be warned, getting them pinned on and keeping them on is one of the hardest logistical parts of the day. Run two sets of numbers so one group is getting pinned while the group on the floor is already running. And make absolutely sure the roster matches the numbers, so number ten on the floor is the kid every coach thinks it is. Mix ups happen.

Get volunteers. The more helping hands on the logistics, the better the whole day goes.

Bring in independent evaluators. This is the piece both coaches feel strongest about. Use someone with no kid in that grade: a parent from an older grade, a high school player, anyone with experience and no stake. Their job is to rank the players one through X, and their ranking is the final word. Coaches do their own ranking alongside, which gives them their draft board, but the independent evaluator settles the disputes and decides who lands on the A team versus the B team. Coach Bill's program used that split for their American and National teams. Coach Collins' feeder program did the same thing for one reason: take the parents out of it. Better for everybody.

Watch, do not run, if you can. If you get to pick your team, hand the whistle to someone else. Coach Collins compares running a tryout while evaluating to teaching a class and grading the test at the same time. You cannot do both well.

Plan for the kids who cannot make it. Someone is always sick, at football, or just back to school. Decide in advance whether you offer a makeup day, and consider running more than one date. Coach Collins' youth theater program runs four days across a couple of weeks for exactly this reason.

What to do when you have to cut kids, and how to handle it well.

Decide what you value before you walk in, find out who is actually going to show up, put an independent evaluator in charge of the rankings, and keep the gym moving. The free tryout and evaluation package on the site gives you the practice plan and the rubric to do all of it.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

First, know what kind of tryout you are inWhat the coaches look forHow to run the tryout itselfComing next weekCoach's takeaway

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

⁠⁠nukehydration.com⁠⁠, or follow along on Instagram @nukehydration.

Use Youthhoops15 for 15% off

• ⁠⁠TeachHoops.com⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠CoachingYouthHoops.com⁠⁠ — practice plans, season resources, and the free tryout structure guide under the Free Resources menu
• ⁠⁠HeySami.com⁠⁠ — new text based youth sports organization tool (Sami with an i)
• The Hey Sami Podcast — available on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you listen
• Questions for Hey Sami: ⁠⁠hey@heysami.com⁠⁠
• Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook Group — search "Coaching Youth Hoops" on Facebook
•

• Show Notes

The guys open by marveling that they are somewhere in the mid three hundreds on episode count, nearly four years of talking about youth basketball, and the Facebook group still produces questions nobody has asked before. Today's is one of those: do you adjust your practice plan based on how the last game went? You won big Saturday, or you got run out of the gym. Does Monday look different?

That question assumes two things, as Coach Bill points out. One, that you have a practice plan at all. Two, that your plans are organized and follow a progression across the season. If either is missing, you know where to go.

Thirty plus years at the high school level and Coach Collins is always adjusting, but not off the scoreboard. He adjusts off what the team did well and did not do well. In January it might be that they are not shooting, not getting to the help line, not hedging screens. Wins and losses do not drive that. Performance does.

The mechanic is simple reallocation. If something is going well it earns less time, and those minutes move somewhere else. Take ten minutes off out of bounds work and move it to offensive floor balance. He compares it directly to teaching: if the class has quadratics down in one area but not another, you stop running examples on the part they own and spend the time on the part they do not.

He also plants a warning flag. Go too far down this road and you are the dog chasing its tail. If every week is a reaction to the last thing that went wrong, you spend the season zigzagging and you are not going to like where you end up.

Coach Bill's biggest change in the last two months was not triggered by a result. He realized he was holding his players back. He had decided a fifth grader should be able to do X and was capping them there, when what he was really capping was their basketball IQ. So he sped practice up significantly and started teaching advanced skills they genuinely struggle with. Pushing through the barrier instead of playing it safe.

His week to week adjustments are smaller and follow the same "what did we do well" logic. After a recent tournament the problem was not ball handling, it was organization: kids clumping, not getting into the right spots in their sets against zone. So this week is more time on sets and more controlled five on five, less on ball handling. He is also asking a lot of them right now, running full court zone pressure out of a one two two and falling back into a three two, sometimes man. That kind of work requires a different type of practice than normal skills training.

The start of practice does not move. Coach Bill's new fourth grade girls team does the same opening every single time: ball handling, then their layup drill. He showed up late to the gym recently and they had run the first ten minutes themselves. When he walked in they told him they had their fifty layups in and were ready to go. Fourth graders. That routine is worth protecting.

The original question asked whether the adjustment should be more reps and volume or deliberate, slowed down instruction. The answer is that it depends on what you are fixing, and the real skill is pacing. Coach Bill's kids hate when he slows things down, because slowing down means more talking from him, whiteboard visuals, and a lot of questions. Other days he speeds practice up on purpose to put them under pressure. Practice is not one tempo, and knowing when to speed up, when to slow down, when to pile on reps, and when to pull back is a nuance you learn over time.

Coach Collins goes in structured every time. He also estimates that roughly half the time the structure gets thrown out in the first five minutes, because Johnny had a bad day at school and Susie has something going on. Forty years and he never walked into a classroom without an idea, but he was always ready to pivot on a dime. You need the outline. You are allowed to deviate from it.

That is exactly why having more planned than you can use matters, and how Coaching Youth Hoops started in the first place: Coach Bill had years of elaborate practice plans, other coaches laughed at how detailed they were, and Coach Collins told him to package them up so other youth coaches could use them. Pull a piece from practice three, a piece from practice seven, a piece from practice nine, and build what today's team actually needs.

The guys added a future episode to the list: practice plan structure for a ninety minute practice and what that should actually look like. There is a science to it.

Do not adjust to the scoreboard. Adjust to what you saw. Protect the routine at the start, reallocate minutes from strengths to weaknesses, vary the tempo based on what you are fixing, and always walk in with more than you can possibly run.

And leave a review, share the show with a coaching friend, and bring your questions to the Facebook group.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

• Coach Collins: adjust off performance, not resultsCoach Bill: the adjustment that had nothing to do with the scoreThe part that never changesVolume or slow it down?Structure first, then pivotComing soonCoach's takeaway

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• https://teachhoops.com/
• https://uplvl.com/ — the player evaluation app Joni and Mike built (Coach Bill also references it as "Get UpLvl" on the show)
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/

Show Notes

Coach Bill welcomes the first married couple in podcast history to the show: Joni and Mike Kazantzis, founders of UpLvl, an app that turns a fifteen second voice note into a full player evaluation. They met at an advertising agency in 2008, started a secret office romance in 2009, and UpLvl is now their second company together. Joni runs account management, operations, and strategy. Mike went to art school and handles creative and brand. They each coach one of their two daughters, on separate lacrosse teams.

Evaluations in youth sports happen twice: at tryouts, and at the end of the season. Then silence in between. And by the time you sit down in April to write them, you are working off the last three weeks because that is how memory works. The stuff from October is gone.

Meanwhile, a parent catches you after practice with the universal opener, "Hey coach, can I talk to you for a second?" You are picking up cones, thinking about dinner and backpacks, kids are running for the playground, and the honest answer you can give is "keep the stick in her hands, find a wall." Joni's point is that these parents are not being nosy. They want to be part of the development, and a mom who has never held a lacrosse stick needs something specific enough to actually use that night.

Mike frames the goal simply: every kid should leave practice knowing the one thing to work on next. He has twenty four girls on his team. He cannot go home and write twenty four evaluations every night.

The athlete needs one specific thing to hold onto. Not "play better." In lacrosse terms: get lower on your ground balls, bend your knees, have the stick down before you get into it.

The parent needs to see progress over time, and needs enough detail to help even if they never played the sport. UpLvl surfaces simple at home drills for that reason.

The coach needs it to be effortless. The alternative is what happens now: the kid gets in the car, mom asks what the coach said, and the kid says "I don't know, it was good." Repeat that for two weeks across twenty families and now every parent is asking the coach what is going on at practice.

Coach Bill calls this category "invisible tech" and says he has already written about it on LinkedIn. His long standing advice to clubs who want to stand out is to send one weekly email about what the team is working on. UpLvl is that idea, more often and with almost no coach effort.

Joni cites a George Washington University study that asked 142 kids what actually makes sports fun. Winning was not the answer. Positive coaching, trying hard, learning, and improving were. She points out what every coach has seen: tell a kid their throwing looks stronger and they stand a little taller.

Most of these kids will not play their sport forever. What carries forward is confidence, resilience, and a safe place to make mistakes and correct them.

Push record, talk for fifteen seconds about one player, save, and it advances to the next player. A twenty player roster takes about five minutes.

Behind that, the app writes a constructive session note from what you said, adjusts skill ratings based on your sentiment, and generates a parent report. Say a player's shooting was some of the best you have seen all season and her passing is getting solid, and shooting ticks up more than passing. Skills are grouped as technical, tactical, mental, and physical. Baselines come from the governing bodies of each sport, and for basketball that means dribbling, passing, footwork, game IQ, plus coachability and mindset. Every drill in the library carries a mindset rep, because the mental side rarely gets practice time.

Progress scales by milestone, foundational up to advanced. Younger players move in quarter point increments, older and higher level players in tenths, so growth gets appropriately harder. The app will never automatically lower a player's score. Only the coach can do that.

Parents click a link. No app to download, no signup, no payment. The profile lives with the coach and follows the player season after season, so a family can see career growth, not just this year's snapshot.

The fifteen second cap was deliberate. Early versions let coaches talk as long as they wanted, and Mike found that unnecessary. Fifteen seconds is enough.

Does it sugarcoat feedback? Coach Bill plays devil's advocate with the coach everyone has seen at tournaments, the yeller. What if he records something brutal? Mike says the app only produces constructive output. It will translate harsh input into development focused language. A coach can type anything they want manually, but the app will not generate it for them. Conversations about whether a kid should try a different sport belong face to face anyway.

Joni backs it with the research: when a kid is screamed at, the brain goes to fight or flight. They freeze and stop hearing you, whether they are seven or fourteen. Her line lands the point: sure, tell me I am horrible, but what do I do to become not horrible? That gap is exactly why they added the drill library, sourced from each sport's governing body rather than YouTube.

Development versus performance. Parents measure ROI in points. But Coach Bill has a point guard who threads passes nobody her age can make, and youth basketball does not track assists. Joni's answer: goalies, defenders, and facilitators are all recruited too, and their contributions never hit a stat sheet. A coach comment can capture what the box score cannot.

Bad days. Kids have them, and so do adults. Joni's take: give them the benefit of the doubt. They know it was a bad day, and so do their parents. The value is that the report is already in the parent's hands before the car ride home, so the conversation can be "let's get some ice cream and talk about your day" instead of "what did coach say?"

Practice or games? They encourage practice. Development happens on Tuesdays. Games are where it shows up.

Mike's daughter's team was down nine to one at halftime of their final tournament game. Their coach gave a pep talk he still cannot reconstruct, and they came out and clawed all the way back to a tie. They did not win. Weeks later, when asked about the whole tournament, his eleven year old did not talk about the games where she scored four goals. She talked about the tie, because she watched the development happen in real time and it felt like a win.

He is self conscious about pulling his phone out at practice, because he never wants a parent to think he is scrolling. So he told his parents up front what the tool is and that they would see him recording. Joni, who plays music from her phone at practice and lets the girls make videos, admits she had never thought about it.

He also appreciated what nobody said to him during the demo: "just have your assistant do it." Joni points out why that answer is nonsense at this level. Her lacrosse assistant is a state trooper with a full time job.

Coming from a world of desks and back to back calls, they had to build for a coach whose office is the front seat of a car, often with no signal. Making the app work offline mattered. And the single biggest improvement was adding the actionable piece: the drill library, so feedback comes with something to actually do.

Next up, they are gamifying it, not for players, but for coaches, who turned out to be more competitive with each other than anyone expected. As Joni puts it, coaches want positive feedback too. It is like getting a sticker as a grown up. Coach Bill's team already does that, with players handing stickers to each other after practice. Once in a while he gets one.

A young athlete knows they have a great coach when that coach... (Joni) makes them feel part of the team.

The biggest lie youth sports tells parents about player development is... (Mike) your kid is going to a D1 school.

The problem they set out to fixThe three sided problemThe research behind itHow the app actually worksThe harder questionsThe moment that proves the pointTwo things Coach Bill wanted to flagWhat surprised themRapid fire

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• https://teachhoops.com/
• UPLVL.com — the player evaluation app Joni and Mike built (Coach Bill also references it as "Get UpLvl" on the show)
• https://coachingyouthhoops.com/

Show Notes

Coach Bill welcomes the first married couple in podcast history to the show: Joni and Mike Kazantzis, founders of UpLvl, an app that turns a fifteen second voice note into a full player evaluation. They met at an advertising agency in 2008, started a secret office romance in 2009, and UpLvl is now their second company together. Joni runs account management, operations, and strategy. Mike went to art school and handles creative and brand. They each coach one of their two daughters, on separate lacrosse teams.

Evaluations in youth sports happen twice: at tryouts, and at the end of the season. Then silence in between. And by the time you sit down in April to write them, you are working off the last three weeks because that is how memory works. The stuff from October is gone.

Meanwhile, a parent catches you after practice with the universal opener, "Hey coach, can I talk to you for a second?" You are picking up cones, thinking about dinner and backpacks, kids are running for the playground, and the honest answer you can give is "keep the stick in her hands, find a wall." Joni's point is that these parents are not being nosy. They want to be part of the development, and a mom who has never held a lacrosse stick needs something specific enough to actually use that night.

Mike frames the goal simply: every kid should leave practice knowing the one thing to work on next. He has twenty four girls on his team. He cannot go home and write twenty four evaluations every night.

The athlete needs one specific thing to hold onto. Not "play better." In lacrosse terms: get lower on your ground balls, bend your knees, have the stick down before you get into it.

The parent needs to see progress over time, and needs enough detail to help even if they never played the sport. UpLvl surfaces simple at home drills for that reason.

The coach needs it to be effortless. The alternative is what happens now: the kid gets in the car, mom asks what the coach said, and the kid says "I don't know, it was good." Repeat that for two weeks across twenty families and now every parent is asking the coach what is going on at practice.

Coach Bill calls this category "invisible tech" and says he has already written about it on LinkedIn. His long standing advice to clubs who want to stand out is to send one weekly email about what the team is working on. UpLvl is that idea, more often and with almost no coach effort.

Joni cites a George Washington University study that asked 142 kids what actually makes sports fun. Winning was not the answer. Positive coaching, trying hard, learning, and improving were. She points out what every coach has seen: tell a kid their throwing looks stronger and they stand a little taller.

Most of these kids will not play their sport forever. What carries forward is confidence, resilience, and a safe place to make mistakes and correct them.

Push record, talk for fifteen seconds about one player, save, and it advances to the next player. A twenty player roster takes about five minutes.

Behind that, the app writes a constructive session note from what you said, adjusts skill ratings based on your sentiment, and generates a parent report. Say a player's shooting was some of the best you have seen all season and her passing is getting solid, and shooting ticks up more than passing. Skills are grouped as technical, tactical, mental, and physical. Baselines come from the governing bodies of each sport, and for basketball that means dribbling, passing, footwork, game IQ, plus coachability and mindset. Every drill in the library carries a mindset rep, because the mental side rarely gets practice time.

Progress scales by milestone, foundational up to advanced. Younger players move in quarter point increments, older and higher level players in tenths, so growth gets appropriately harder. The app will never automatically lower a player's score. Only the coach can do that.

Parents click a link. No app to download, no signup, no payment. The profile lives with the coach and follows the player season after season, so a family can see career growth, not just this year's snapshot.

The fifteen second cap was deliberate. Early versions let coaches talk as long as they wanted, and Mike found that unnecessary. Fifteen seconds is enough.

Does it sugarcoat feedback? Coach Bill plays devil's advocate with the coach everyone has seen at tournaments, the yeller. What if he records something brutal? Mike says the app only produces constructive output. It will translate harsh input into development focused language. A coach can type anything they want manually, but the app will not generate it for them. Conversations about whether a kid should try a different sport belong face to face anyway.

Joni backs it with the research: when a kid is screamed at, the brain goes to fight or flight. They freeze and stop hearing you, whether they are seven or fourteen. Her line lands the point: sure, tell me I am horrible, but what do I do to become not horrible? That gap is exactly why they added the drill library, sourced from each sport's governing body rather than YouTube.

Development versus performance. Parents measure ROI in points. But Coach Bill has a point guard who threads passes nobody her age can make, and youth basketball does not track assists. Joni's answer: goalies, defenders, and facilitators are all recruited too, and their contributions never hit a stat sheet. A coach comment can capture what the box score cannot.

Bad days. Kids have them, and so do adults. Joni's take: give them the benefit of the doubt. They know it was a bad day, and so do their parents. The value is that the report is already in the parent's hands before the car ride home, so the conversation can be "let's get some ice cream and talk about your day" instead of "what did coach say?"

Practice or games? They encourage practice. Development happens on Tuesdays. Games are where it shows up.

Mike's daughter's team was down nine to one at halftime of their final tournament game. Their coach gave a pep talk he still cannot reconstruct, and they came out and clawed all the way back to a tie. They did not win. Weeks later, when asked about the whole tournament, his eleven year old did not talk about the games where she scored four goals. She talked about the tie, because she watched the development happen in real time and it felt like a win.

He is self conscious about pulling his phone out at practice, because he never wants a parent to think he is scrolling. So he told his parents up front what the tool is and that they would see him recording. Joni, who plays music from her phone at practice and lets the girls make videos, admits she had never thought about it.

He also appreciated what nobody said to him during the demo: "just have your assistant do it." Joni points out why that answer is nonsense at this level. Her lacrosse assistant is a state trooper with a full time job.

Coming from a world of desks and back to back calls, they had to build for a coach whose office is the front seat of a car, often with no signal. Making the app work offline mattered. And the single biggest improvement was adding the actionable piece: the drill library, so feedback comes with something to actually do.

Next up, they are gamifying it, not for players, but for coaches, who turned out to be more competitive with each other than anyone expected. As Joni puts it, coaches want positive feedback too. It is like getting a sticker as a grown up. Coach Bill's team already does that, with players handing stickers to each other after practice. Once in a while he gets one.

A young athlete knows they have a great coach when that coach... (Joni) makes them feel part of the team.

The biggest lie youth sports tells parents about player development is... (Mike) your kid is going to a D1 school.

The problem they set out to fixThe three sided problemThe research behind itHow the app actually worksThe harder questionsThe moment that proves the pointTwo things Coach Bill wanted to flagWhat surprised themRapid fire

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

⁠nukehydration.com⁠, or follow along on Instagram @nukehydration.

Use Youthhoops15 for 15% off

• ⁠TeachHoops.com⁠
• ⁠CoachingYouthHoops.com⁠ — practice plans, season resources, and the free tryout structure guide under the Free Resources menu
• ⁠HeySami.com⁠ — new text based youth sports organization tool (Sami with an i)
• The Hey Sami Podcast — available on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you listen
• Questions for Hey Sami: ⁠hey@heysami.com⁠
• Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook Group — search "Coaching Youth Hoops" on Facebook

Show Notes

Another question pulled from the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group, and it is one every coach faces about four times a weekend: the other team rips off a run, the gym gets loud, your kids' shoulders drop. Do you call timeout?

Before the topic, the guys catch up. Coach Bill and Coach Collins have only met face to face three times in three years, most recently in Calistoga for what they are calling Coach Collins' launch party into full time entrepreneurial life rather than a retirement party. Nobody is going to find him in a rocking chair on the front stoop.

Youth basketball is not high school or college. Depending on the tournament you might have one, two, or four timeouts for an entire game. In a typical four timeout tournament you get two per half, they do not carry over, and if you sit on the first two they are simply gone. Use them or lose them. Tournaments are built to keep games moving, especially with twenty minute running halves, which means every timeout you spend is a real decision.

The golden rule both coaches keep circling back to is roughly six points. That is the point where most coaches feel the pull to stop and regroup. But the real answer is that it depends on your team, and Coach Bill's advice is to decide that number before the game, not during it. Ask yourself honestly: can this group come back from twelve down? If the answer is yes, you have room to let things breathe. If you are down twenty seven, a timeout is not saving anything.

Coach Bill scouted an opponent from the bleachers before tipoff. Bigger than his team, but he liked his ball handling, speed, and aggressiveness. He felt good. Then his team went down six to nothing in under two minutes on shots that had no business going in, and he admits he started to panic.

What saved him was an assistant coach, one of the dads he respects, sitting next to him saying "we've got this, let's not panic yet." He never called the timeout. The other coach did. Coach Bill used that stoppage to deliver one calm, stern message: turn up the defense, you are falling back, we are better than this. That team scored eight points the rest of the game.

Coach Collins raises the nuance that changes everything: how you use timeouts depends on where you think the game is headed. A sixty forty game gets one approach. A ninety ten game where you are overmatched gets another, because now the timeout is not tactical, it is about rebuilding confidence. At the youth level you often do not know the team you are facing, which makes that read harder and the pregame scout more valuable.

This is the best practical idea in the episode. Instead of calling a hard timeout to stop the bleeding, Coach Bill works the substitutions. He pulls two or three struggling players, gives them instructions on the sideline, and sends some of them right back in within thirty seconds. To the player, that is a timeout. To the coach, it costs nothing. He calls it giving the player a timeout instead of giving the team one.

The other version of this is running clock management. Coach Bill's girls literally practice working the clock. When they have the lead late, shoelaces mysteriously come untied, particularly on the player taking the ball out of bounds. They also have stall modes ready. All of it slows momentum without spending a stoppage.

Coach Bill's firm rule: in a close game, save a timeout for the final two minutes. Always. He would rather never use it than need it and not have it. In a tournament earlier this season he called one with thirty seconds left to walk his team through exactly what to do to close out the win, and it mattered.

Two other notes on that rule. If the game is not close, he rarely uses timeouts at all. And if he is down to five or six available players and they are gassed, he will spend one to get them air.

Does calling a late timeout also help the other coach draw something up? Both agree they do not worry much about it. If you can teach more in that huddle than they can, the timeout is an advantage for you. Coach Collins mentions the late game situation document he built during his high school years, a sheet his assistants treated as gospel on the sideline, though it had to be translated for AAU tournaments where the timeout counts are different.

Know how many timeouts you actually have. Decide before tipoff what size run forces your hand. Use substitutions, shoelaces, and stall sets to slow momentum for free. And on a tight game, save one for the last two minutes, every time.

Or as Coach Collins put it: sometimes you just have to get the tourniquet on and stop the bleeding.

Learn more and get everything you need for your season at https://teachhoops.com/

First, understand your timeout economyWhat counts as a runThe game that made the pointCoach Collins on reading the matchupThe timeout that is not a timeoutAlways keep one in the pocketCoach's takeaway

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