St Andrew’s College Basketball Handbook 2019
CONTENTS Welcome Programme Ethos How to Succeed as a Team Player Selection Criteria Style of Play Important Dates Staff Contact Details
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Welcome to St Andrew’s College Basketball A total of 26,481 Secondary School students played for their school basketball team in 2018, the second most played sport in New Zealand. The sport is growing at an exponential rate and there are boundless opportunities that are becoming available to these students who pursue basketball. The flow on effect from the sport rapidly growing is leading to more and more amounts of players from our very own city and College who are being offered full and partial scholarships to attend Colleges in the United States, representing New Zealand teams, travelling domestically and internationally to play basketball, and also playing professionally. The bonds and memories created within this sport are second to none, through club competitions, school Junior and Senior South Islands tournament, Senior Nationals tournament which is covered on a live stream which broadcasts all over New Zealand. These bonds and memories that you create with your team mates while going through this basketball journey at St Andrew’s College will stay with you forever. To be a part of the St Andrew’s College basketball community is a very special honor, we have a tight knit culture where we preach the ideal that a good person makes a good player. To become successful within this programme you are going to have to buy into the culture that we have created, and not only just work hard at your sport, but work hard at being a better person. In this handbook you will find a guide to our culture and our programme. If you stay on the path which is our basketball programme you will find yourself with lots of opportunities to grow as a person and as a basketball player.
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Programme Ethos “Leave the jersey in a better place” First of all what is an ethos, an ethos is defined as the characteristic spirit of a culture, manifested in its attitudes and aspirations. What this means is that our ethos is defined by our actions, not just a selective few of them, every single one. This means that 24/7 you are representing our team and our College, and your actions portray those of our culture. Now the All Blacks have a great rule that helps ensure that their culture is maintained. They select players based on character, not just talent. It is also my belief that a collection of talented individual’s with no discipline will ultimately and inevitably fail. Character always triumphs over talent. This has also led onto them also using the motto, “Good people make good All Blacks”. This mantra can be applied to any sport, the reason why the San Antonio Spur’s have remained such a successful franchise over the last two decades is because Popovich recruits on character over talent. Now our ethos is dependent on every action you take knowing that you are leaving the jersey in a better place than when you found it. That comes from little things like volunteering to referee on a Friday, getting good grades in school, passing on your knowledge to younger members of the team, acting with humility and respect.
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How to Succeed as a Team
“Never be too big to do the small things that need to be done” There is a story called ‘sweep the shed’ which some of you may have heard at the Ram’s or Mainland Eagles camp which I will try to shorten a bit for you guys, but basically the All Black’s had a test match against Wales. This was Richie McCaw’s 91st test match as an All Black, and during the match Dan Carter also managed to have another amazing match scoring 27 points, both leading the team to a 42–7 win. In the sheds after the match the drinks flow, journalist’s come in and interview the coaches and players, and recovery sessions are had. After a while the room is cleared by the manager and this is where something amazing happens that you might not expect. Two of the senior All Blacks pick up a long wooden handled broom each and begin to sweep all the mud, tape and plastic bottles into small piles in the corner of the shed. Tell me who you think these two players were? Embrace Expectations Don’t just be good, be great. Don’t be satisfied to reach your targets, go higher. Jonah Lomu always described it as the worst person to come second to is yourself. Don’t sell yourself short. It is this internal benchmark that separates the good from the great. Tino Best, a West Indies fast bowler shows how it is done on his answerphone. “This is Tino Best speaking, the fastest bowler in the world. I can’t take your call right now, but I will get back to you as soon as I have finished practicing getting faster.” Take Care of the Details Under coach John Wooden, the UCLA Bruins basketball team won the US National Collegiate Championship for seven straight years starting in 1967. At the start of each season he would sit his team down in their locker room and, for a long time - for a very long time - they would learn how to put on their socks: Wooden would say “Check the heel area. We don’t want any sign of a wrinkle about it. The wrinkle will make sure that you get blisters, and those blisters are going to make you lose playing time, and if your good enough your loss of playing time might get the coach fired.” The lesson wasn’t really about blisters, or playing time, or whether the coach got fired, it was about doing the basics right, taking care of the details, looking after yourself and the team.
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Marginal Gains This is also a theory that has been coined as ‘Marginal Gains’. In 2010, Dave Brailsford faced a tough job. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour De France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Great Britain’s professional cycling team, Brailsford was asked to change that. His approach was simple, Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as “aggregation of marginal gains”. He explained it as “the 1% margin for improvement in everything that you do”. His belief was that if you improved everything related to cycling by just 1 percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement. They started by optimising the things that you might expect, the nutrition of the riders, their weekly training programme, the ergonomics of the bike seat, and the weight of the tires. However, Brailsford didn’t stop there, they looked for improvement in tiny areas which were overlooked by everyone else. The pillow that offered the best sleep at hotels, the best massage gel, the best way to wash their hands. They searched for 1% improvements everywhere. With the initial goal of a Tour De France winner in five years, Brailsford achieved that in three.
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Group Mind
Peer to Peer Enforcement
A flock of Kawau birds carve a graceful V across the breaking day. One bird leads, another follows, another then takes the lead in an endless synchronized support system, much like the peloton of professional cyclists. Ornithologists say that flying this way is 70 percent more efficient than flying solo. If a bird falls out of formation it feels the wind resistance and rejoins the flock. Should one fall behind, others stay back until it can fly again. No bird gets left behind. This is an extraordinary organisational dynamic - and the perfect metaphor for the Maori concept whanau. In Maori mythology, whanau is symbolized by a spearhead, an image derived in turn from the flight formation of the Kawau. A spearhead has three tips, but to work properly all the force must move in one direction. And so it is with us, for this team to function properly everyone must move towards the same point. We need people who are going to work hard, and work hard for their ‘brother’. Phil Jackson describes this mentality as the “Group Mind” and it was the basis of his extraordinary coaching career. When Jackson joined Michael Jordan at the Bulls, Jordan was already the best player in the league and had three scoring titles to his name. Yet no NBA Championship, he hadn’t even made it out of the first round yet. According to Jackson “a great player can only do so much on his own, no matter how breathtaking his one on one moves may be, if he is out of sync psychologically with everyone else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship. On a good team there are no superstars, there are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team. They make sacrifices and they do things necessary to help the team win.” The key to this is how do I help make the people around me better? Know your role!
Respect as a value is vague, but has impact when players decide this means no phones in meetings, no talking over each other, no dribbling when a coach is talking, being on time to training. Values alone risk becoming wallpaper and meaningless unless they are defined and enforced from the bottom up. An example of this is during the Rugby World Cup, Israel Dagg and Cory Jane decided to have a big night on the town. The next day as the media were calling for them to be cut by the team, the sheepish pair were brought before the seven most senior players and asked to explain themselves. For young men, at the prime of their lives, in the tournament of their dreams this must have been both mortifying and humbling. Later they made a public apology to the rest of the team and the case was closed. The being of team begins from the inside. High standards must come from within. And you are all accountable to each other to make sure they are enforced. Train to Win Intensity of preparation, training to win, conditions the brain and body to perform under pressure. It allows peak performance to become automatic. It develops the mindset to win. Muhammed Ali use to say “The fight is won and lost far away from the witnesses. Behind the lines, in the gym, out there in the road and well before I dance under the lights.” Most people have the will to win, few people have the will to prepare to win. I know its a cliche saying, but you play how you train. So make sure that when you train you are training with the mindset that everything is on the line every single rep.
Authenticity and Honesty
Sacrifice
Be genuine, be real to who you are. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become, everything else is secondary. If you can be authentic with yourself that will reflect on other people and allow them to be authentic back. The key to strong peer to peer interaction is a high level of trust. This is trust in the sense of safe vulnerability. There needs to be an environment where you guys get to know each other as people and gather insight into each others personal story. This needs to be supported by the leaders role modelling behaviour around admission of mistakes, weaknesses and fears. This is important for safe conflict and safe confrontation. Where the most important interaction often occurs. In the belly, not the back. This saying embodies honest feedback, give it to them straight up. But do so with authenticity and respect.
What sacrifices are you willing to make to achieve your goals? You might set yourself a goal but how many sacrifices are you willing to make between now and then? Are you prepared to put in the work, how willing are you to give up going to a high school party so that you can watch film or read over the playbook, how willing are you to not jump in the Fortnite squad but get to the gym to lift weights. How willing are you to give up a sleep in so that you can get some extra shots up. Everyone wants to win. But what is the price that you are willing to pay. The second part of sacrifice is not in time, but on the court. Will you sacrifice individual glory for team success? Michael Jordan himself said “There are plenty of teams in every sport that have great players and never win titles. Most of the time, those players aren’t willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the team. The funny thing is, their unwillingness to sacrifice only makes their individual goals that much harder to achieve.
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Player Selection Criteria PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES
GAME SENSE
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Height & Wingspan
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Ability to play without the ball
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Athleticism (Explosiveness, speed, jumping ability, timing, agility, lateral
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Court vision
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Instincts
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Basketball IQ
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Play within the system
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Movement
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Stamina
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Power
CHARACTER •
Next play mentality (Ability to handle adversity, positive body language, ability to overcome mistakes)
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Work Ethic (Disciplined, committed to getting better)
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Competitiveness (Tenacity, passion, always competes)
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Coachability (Receptive to feedback, learning capacity)
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Leadership qualities (Ability to lead others, help team mates get better)
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Good team mate (Ability to work with others, has team first mentality)
BASKETBALL SPECIFIC SKILLS
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Dribbling (Both hands, under pressure, at pace)
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Passing (Both hands, under pressure, at pace)
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Shooting (From range, different finishes, proper technique)
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Defending your position (Off and on ball, foul discipline)
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Body movement fundamentals (Footwork, stance, running technique, jumping and landing technique)
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Style of Play Key Points
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Spread five out offence
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Multi-dimensional offensive action – read and react, following offence, use of screens
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Intelligence around defending the pick and roll
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Importance of defending without fouling
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Green light to shoot
Screen coverages:
Wing on ball – Blitz Middle on ball – Flat show Off ball – Gap Hand off – Squeeze Last six seconds – Switch everything
Long-term Player Important Dates Development CLUB COMPETITIONS
TOURNAMENTS •
Junior Secondary Schools’ Premiership Zone 4 (31 August – 3 September), Dunedin
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Schick Premierships AA Zone 4 (4 –7 September), Nelson
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Schick Championships AA Secondary Schools’ Nationals (30 September – 5 October), Palmerston North
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Staff Contact Details
Senior A Head Coach: Assistant Coach: Manager:
Aled Jones Scott Baker Mitch Howard
aled_jones@hotmail.co.nz scott45@hotmail.co.nz MHO@stac.school.nz
Senior B Head Coach: Manager:
Troy Lipsham Beka Roest
troy@atam.co.nz BRS@stac.school.nz
U17A Head Coach: Manager:
Mike Karena mkarena@hotmail.com Jacqueline Gilbert JGI@stac.school.nz
Junior A Head Coach: Manager:
Scott Baker Justine Wyld
scott45@hotmail.co.nz justinewyld@gmail.com
U15A Head Coach: Manager:
Maurice Corkery Rachael Morris
Maurice.Corkery@movelogistics.co.nz Rachael.morris@rockgas.co.nz
Senior A Girls Head Coach: Assistant Coach: Manager:
Sussan Graham Mark Douglas Ann Price
Isamgraham45@gmail.com
Intermediate A Girls Head Coach:
Margaret Smeaton MST@stac.school.nz
Basketball Administrator Cherie Methven
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APR@stac.school.nz
CME@stac.school.nz
Thank You to our Sponsors
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347 Papanui Road, Christchurch 8052, New Zealand P +64 3 940 2000 W stac.school.nz