How To Become Your Coach's Favorite Player

Now, I'm currently a high school varsity coach, and I've spent the last five seasons before this one as an assistant varsity coach. And I've been able to see firsthand one of the biggest struggles that players face, which is effectively communicating and interacting with their coaches. Players want more playing time, a bigger role, or more opportunities on the court, but often they make simple mistakes when communicating with their coaches. These mistakes hurt their relationships with their coaches, and it hurts their chances of earning those opportunities that they want. Here's the thing that you have to understand. Coaches do have favorites. And even the ones that tell you they don't have favorites absolutely do. The players that are their favorites are the ones that they want to invest the most in. So you have to ask yourself, am I a player that my coach wants to invest in? Coaches have limited time, limited energy, and limited focus to spend. Are you somebody that they want to give that to? Many players don't do the right things to earn that trust. In this video, we'll talk about exactly how you can become one of your coach's favorites and become that player that they want to invest in. Let's get into it. The most important thing when it comes to building a great relationship with your coaches is is understanding how to be a confident player and avoiding being an arrogant player. A lot of times, players get these two things confused, and they mix up arrogance with confidence. The difference is very simple. Confident players are always steady. They're never too high on themselves, and they're never too low when the situations are bad. They know that they're not perfect, but they believe that they can always improve. An arrogant player is emotionally inconsistent, so they get really, really high when things are great. And then as soon as something goes against them, they get really, really low or they lash out. Now, a confident player takes nothing that a coach says personally. They understand that from a coach's perspective, it's all about winning. Their criticism of you, their coaching of you, is not an attack on your ego. It's simply about pushing the team closer to winning, which is ultimately what everybody's goal should be. An arrogant player sees coaching and sees criticism as a threat. They believe that their coach is hating on them or belittling them or doubting their abilities. And. And they refuse to admit mistakes when they're wrong because they view admitting mistakes as admitting that they're not good enough or that they're weak. In reality, arrogance is the most obvious form of a lack of true confidence. The biggest key to having a great relationship with your coaches is to Display confidence and not arrogance. Now here's four quick things you can do to make sure that you're a confident player, not an arrogant player. Number one is you need to believe that no matter how good you are, how well you're playing you to need you can be better. Number two, always focus on the team's success and not your own. When the team success at the forefront of everything you think about, your ego is going to be in check and you're going to be able to take coaching, take criticism and respond in a way that a confident player would. Number three, believe that mistakes are the biggest part of growing and getting better and mistakes are not a bad thing. Getting called out on a mistake is not a bad thing. It's the best way for you to grow and get better. Going back to point number one and number four, believe that success is earned. Nobody owes you anything. Your coach owes you nothing. Your teammates owe you nothing. You need to go out and earn all those things. When you have those four beliefs, you're going to handle yourself as a confident player, which is going to lead to you having great relationships with your coaches and just overall more success on the court. The second area that's really important if you want to build great relationships with your coaches is being coachable, asking questions and following through with those things. A big part of the reason why players struggle to build a good relationship with their coach is because they don't actually communicate with them. It's very one sided where the coach is going to them and there's never any sort of dialogue or anything like that. If you want to show your coach that you're serious about improving and being the best player possible, ask questions and be coachable. Number one, regularly ask your coach what things you need to be improving or what it's going to take for you to earn more minutes, depending on the situation that you might be in. We'll get back to that in a second here. Number two, make sure you show that you're locked in by asking questions about the offense, maybe different offensive sets. Maybe you ask about defensive adjustments, maybe you ask about the game plan, the things that you guys are going through in practice or in meetings. Make sure that you're asking questions when you have them. Not just to ask, but you. If you have a question or something pops in your mind, be willing to have that conversation so that your coach knows that not only are you listening to what they're saying, but you're actually processing it and, and thinking about it so that you have these questions as a Coach, I really respect when players can come to me and ask questions about things because I could tell that they're actually thinking about it and wanting to understand it more. Going back to that first point, balance your communication. I would say like a 70, 30 split. So 70% of the quote questions, the conversations you have with your coach need to be team related. Things that we talked about, different questions about the offense, defense, game plan. 30% of that can be questions about playing time, your role and stuff. In that manner, a lot of players mess up because the only time they ever go to talk to their coach is when it's about playing time or about their role or about them. It comes across as very selfish and not looking at the whole picture. As a coach, we're tasked with looking at the entire picture. When your mindset is only about you and it's never about, well, how do I impact the team? You're not going to be on the same page as your coach. Think about it. With any relationship, if you knew somebody and they only ever talked to you when they wanted something from you, would you have a good relationship with them? In most cases, no. So it's the same with your coach. If the only time you ever go and ask questions to your coach or talk to your coach is when it's about you want more playing time, you want this, you want that, you want the ball more. Like if that's the only time you ever talk to your coaches, how can you expect to build a good relationship with them? Most importantly with this is that you want to follow through. So when you ask questions about how to improve, actually implement it. Periodically ask your coach about your progress. Hey, are you seeing improvement in this area? When you do this, you're going to build trust that you can follow through on something and you're going to earn a lot of respect from your coaches because you're actually applying what they're giving you. Don't just ask questions, don't be fake about it. If you're going to ask questions, be ready to hear what they're saying. Be ready to implement those things that they tell you. Now when you're asking questions, you want to make sure of a couple of things. First of all, speak in person, not over text. It's very easy to text your coach when you're upset about something or confused about something. Obviously if it's like a really simple thing, that's different. But I'm saying if you're asking about playing time or your role or you have like an in depth question, go talk to them in person. Because even if you get an answer you don't like, they're going to respect you for coming and talking to them in person at practice or whatever. Number two is, you want to make sure you avoid any sort of playing time role, any sort of emotional conversation directly after a game. That's never a good thing, especially if you lose the game. Coaches are thinking about, well, what do we need to do this? Where did we mess up? And if you come in there saying, coach, why don't I play more? Don't do that. Right, right. Go talk about it the next day. If you have a question about something, again, obviously if it's something that's not related to that, it's more team, more of a team focus. That's completely different. But if it's relating to you, you're playing time in your role, don't do that after a game. Very quick way to lose respect from your coaches. Number three is you want to frame everything around the team's success. So if everything is about you, why would your coach be more inclined to go with that? For example, if you feel like you should be getting the ball more and your teammates aren't passing the ball, how do you frame that in a way that says, hey, coach, I think I should be getting the ball more because I think that this will help the team in this way. I'm open and I know I can make these shots and I made these shots this year, but I'm not getting the ball. So I feel like if I get the ball more, I'll score more, which is going to help the team more. Can you frame these things to be team centric? Team focus is a very important thing as well. Again, even if you don't get the answer that you want, coaches respect players who ask questions and ask questions the right way. Number three is you need to make sure that you stay engaged when you're not playing. The fastest way to lose a coach's respect is, is by checking out when you are not playing. Stay locked in when you're on the bench, when you're in practice and not getting reps, make sure you're focused on what's going on. Because the worst thing that can happen is that you finally do go in and you don't know what you're doing because you haven't been locked in or you're not mentally prepared to go because you're not locked in. But you also have an opportunity to help your teammates by communicating with them from the bench, trying to help them when they come off the floor about maybe you saw something, maybe they're feeling down, you have a chance to lift them back up. So you have a very important job in that regard as well. But you can't do that job if you're checked out. And coaches respect players who stay locked in, especially the players who might not be playing. It's really easy to be locked in when you're playing all game. But the players who are able to not play or not play that much and still be engaged and locked in just with the guys who are playing, those are players who not only coaches respect, but your teammates will respect you more, the people in the stands will respect you more, and people will want you to succeed, including your coach. If you zone out, if you sulk, if you stop putting in effort in practice or whatever, you're only hurting yourself in the long run because you're just losing everybody's respect. Nobody respects a selfish player. So even if you're not getting minutes now, stay engaged because it's ultimately going to pay off in some way for you. At the bare minimum, you're going to gain the respect of everybody around you. And then number four, last thing, don't shoot yourself in the foot. This is stuff that immediately is going to get you put in the coach's doghouse. Number one, show up on time. Ideally, you're going to show up a few minutes early to practice. Number two, handle your academics. Most coaches are going to assume that you're just not putting in effort unless you go and communicate and say, hey, coach, I'm struggling with this class is what I'm looking to do to improve it here. But I'm giving my best effort, I'm turning things in on time, I'm doing my work, all this sort of stuff. Coaches will again respect that more if they understand that it's a true struggle for you and not just you being lazy and not doing what you're supposed to do. Number three is be proactive about fixing problems. So instead of sitting around waiting to be told something, a coach is going to take account of everything that you do in determine whether or not you have the trust level with them for them to invest in you. And if you apply these things consistently, you're going to quickly become a player that your coach wants to invest in. This is a super important area of being a successful basketball player that a lot of people don't think about or talk about. We talk about a lot more stuff in this realm inside of Basketball IQ Academy, which is our full basketball IQ course. But it also comes with an emotional intelligence course. Learning how to communicate better with your teammates, with your coaches. Learning how to handle adversity and deal with stress in a more effective way. Learning how to manage all the little things that that derails so many basketball players in a super effective way. That's a full program that's included inside of Basketball IQ Academy. Along with that, we also have our full confidence program as well that's going to teach you how to build elite level confidence as a basketball player. And there's so much more included inside of Basketball IQ Academy that's going to be linked down below highly when you check it out. If you're interested, I appreciate you for watching. Talk soon. Peace.