A solid plan is imperative towards ensuring a tremendous season. A coach and his support staff should have the ability to lay out a solid, clear and concise season plan for the team to follow. By having a plan, the coach and his team will have a guideline to hold on to. If the plan was laid out perfectly and the coach followed it as best as possible, chances are the team will have an outstanding season. However, not having a plan will mean that the coach leaves everything to chance. Although things might work fine in the early stages, chaos will definitely reign soon after.
Based on this understanding of the importance of planning, many coaches go to the extra length of organizing their season well before it starts. This article will look at the crucial elements that must be covered when organizing your season. By following this brief guideline, you will be able to organize your season so that your team will undergo a holistic development. Even if you do not end up as champions – because there can only be one champion, you will see that by following a well laid plan, your players will improve both as an individual and as a basketball player.
Essentially, the two critical things that you have to bear in mind is that you need to have a clear goal or objective for the season and what you need to do to achieve them. The first thing that you should do after having this is to talk to your support staff and your players about these objectives. Once the team shares the same vision, mission and objective, you would be able to mould the team easier as they have developed into one cohesive entity.
Also, before the season starts, you should sit down with your coaching staff to discuss a training plan. Basically, you should list down a series of targets or levels that you want your players to achieve. Ideally, be sure that these targets are time based. This makes progress easier to monitor—having a list of targets that should be achieved for every training session is very helpful to develop your players.
You should also arrange practice sessions before your season even starts. There are various things that you should consider when organizing this. Among them are practice days, practice length, post mortem and also evaluation.
It is important that you arrange your practice session on a day suitable for everyone. A team practice would be ineffective even if only one member doesn’t attend it. This is because the absent player will be left behind compared to the other players. In addition to this, constant absences will reduce the level of camaraderie between your players.
The length of practice is also very important to consider. If the session was too long or too short, the effectiveness of training would be taken away altogether. Besides that, you should also consider to have scheduled post-mortems and reviews for the team and individual players. This will keep everyone alert and aware of their mistakes and what can be improved.
Overall, planning is an important component in shaping your teams’ success. Thus, together with your support staff, you should put in great time and effort into this process. Remember, failing to plan actually means that you are planning to fail!
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