The Balance of Everything

When you spend enough seasons in college basketball, you’ll often get your fair share of guest speakers to come through the programs you work for. From former players to corporate executives, all any of them can offer is their unique experiences. However, the best speakers and groups I’ve seen walk through the door are those that are determined to make players think: about their futures, their fit in the team they play for, and most importantly, how to be their best selves in the same direction to be the best team they can be. I watched a group a few years ago talk about that last point with our team. There are cliches along this mindset you’ll hear coaches discuss with their teams: What will you sacrifice of yourself for the betterment of the team? I think what gets lost in translation is that you can’t ask anyone to completely change themselves, we all are who we are, but can you as a player, as a team member, as an individual in a group consider how to be yourself in a positive manner to build the team you coexist within. In other words, can you find the balance between yourself and the team. In my view, this is what team chemistry is.

When you spend as much time as I do looking at data and play by play lines, you’ll find yourself starting to look at every action and decision as a long list of instances making up a non-numerical combination that determines the makeup of the program you work for. As coaches or support staff members, we can’t force team chemistry, and in some cases it may develop naturally. But is it fair to expect it to always develop naturally, or is it our jobs to do our best to support it, nudge it in the right direction. I think about that meeting we had often, and I believe it is the first step in the balance of everything within organizing a program. I imagine a list of decisions you make to support your team, it could be a reward for behavior you wish to reinforce, or a system to encourage another concept within your team such as player development. In my mind, a teeter-totter appears, on the left side is the individual, and on the right is the team.

Take the list of these decisions, regardless if they were supposed to directly support team chemistry, or if you believe they may have an indirect impact, and ask yourself which side would they go on. I feel it is easy in today’s game to try to give attention to each player individually to the point that not enough is given to team focus. Ask yourself constantly throughout each season, what are our team goals right now? Every college program has the same goal in the long term, but how are you building towards it? What small steps are you taking and how can you measure progress? If there are a lack of team goals, there may not be enough being done to add to the team side, and the list of individual focuses will tilt downward out of balance. If the teeter-totter is hitting the ground on either side, team chemistry is likely non-existent, just a group of individuals sharing the same uniforms.

Now you may ask, what about if you go too far in the other direction, everything is about the team? I think there are programs out there that tend to build up a reputation to the point where they demand of the players that enter their programs only one course of action: Fit into what we do or find somewhere else to play. It’s hard for me to consider this as a demand of teenagers and twenty-somethings as many of them are still trying to figure themselves out. In my opinion, it is just as much our job to help guide players as individuals to support our vision of what the team should be. It’s a constant compromise to teach what behavior and culture our program will be, and what we hope to see of the individuals to steer with us in that direction. This is where the relationships that coaches build with every member of their program is important. We get to know how each player is and hope we can guide them for who they are to support the team goals.

I would place team chemistry as the center of three elements to a basketball team. You have your offensive and your defensive scheme; team chemistry is the element that makes them work, as how you wish to play requires the strength of interactions of the players on the court, therefore team chemistry determines the strength of those interactions.

With that being said, one case I think stems from team chemistry could be considered the next balance of your program: the balance of development and evaluation. Over the years, I’ve seen a number of attempts to try to establish competitiveness in practices and workouts. Time in the gym as a group is a constant push and pull between these two areas. How do you develop your players, while evaluating their preparedness to produce for you in the current season. One mistake that I feel is made often is the creation of divisive competition. Creating a system to try to evaluate, but in doing so, putting guys against each other in a manner that may become too individualized. I’ve seen systems like this turn players into perfectionists or choose to detach themselves from the work in a fear of failure against your fellow man and teammate. This result destroys player development in my eyes. Time in the gym, particularly during the offseason, should be the best time for player development, therefore in this case, I believe it is best to search for collective competition. Could you take the system that created the divide and make it more of a group setting, maybe a split of a few groups of three or four, and install the same kind of goal? Hopefully, the result would be a group of players feeling a positive environment to make mistakes and improve, while working together to reach a simple daily or weekly goal and raise the quality of the work being put in through a competitive fire as a team, not as individuals.

If you were paying attention in science class in fourth grade, your teacher probably at some point discussed Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the balance of everything, for every action, there is a direct and indirect reaction. There is a constant importance to monitor our decisions and actions for their reactions. Do they promote individualism, or team? Do they create a divide or a collective? Do they develop for evaluation later, or test us all too soon? I do not believe there is any right answer in how to create successful programs. Anyone can try just about anything to succeed as an organization, but I believe those that have found the most success have found the best balance in everything they choose to do.