Accountability
Self-Starter: Intrinsic Motivation
No one is going to hold your hand and you must keep yourself accountable. All you need is a few pieces of equipment (basketball, skipping rope, medicine ball, gloves, etc), time, work ethic, discipline, persistence, and passion.
Through the process of becoming a great player you must commit yourself and find ways to motivate yourself even when the path looks bleak and you are tired. Everyday you have a choice with how you want to spend your time and how much effort you want to put into it.
Planning
Life happens to everyone. Do not let it to grossly affect your plans - there is always a way. Make sure you are proactive with your planning to ensure you have access to facilities and you are scheduling your workout times. Reaching your potential is not something that just happens. You must be resourceful, purposeful, and have great attention to detail. Make sure you have access to a court, if an indoor court is not available, plan accordingly and have a back-up outdoor hoop.
The top is a lonely place and takes great courage and sacrifice. You have to stay committed to what you originally planned to do long after the original motivation has worn off. Even when you don't feel like it. This is how you build mental toughness. You must develop a love for the ‘process of becoming’ and trust the plan. There is a certain level of unshakable confidence that is earned when you know you are truly committed to something and you are maxing out your days in the pursuit of excellence.
Self-Evaluation: Truth
You have to live the truth, tell the truth, and be able to handle the truth. The first step to self-improvement is you have to be self-aware. You have to be painfully honest with yourself. If you are not honest you will not be able to gauge a true starting point, determine areas for growth, evaluate your day-to-day effort level, nor track your progress over time. Everything we do is grounded in truth - everything when it is uncomfortable. If you are around people who only ever tell you what you want to hear - you have the wrong people around you.
Documentation + Analysis
Write everything down. If you do not write it down, document it and / or track it, it is not real and it doesn't count. We are not interested in getting in the gym aimlessly. We have a plan for everything and we want to see data that shows our progress over the course of time.
In order to attack our long term goals we must track everything. The best coaches in the world, regardless of their differing philosophies agree on one thing. You must write it down, document it, and critically analyze everything. Each workout over the course of this program has a competitive undertone to it. In order to mimic the conditions and pressure of a game so our work transfers to high level performance improvements, we must be keeping score.
Buy a notebook or binder, take notes, and start a daily journal.
------
There Is ALWAYS A Way
By: Doug Plumb
When I was 15 years old, I moved to a small town in the Midwest. I was coming from a place where I was the big fish in a small pond. I was a top 10 player where I was coming from but it was fake because the talent pool wasn’t deep enough. I was moving to a place where no one knew me with only 3 years of high school to go. My goal was to obtain a scholarship in the US.
I was a gym rat in every sense. I lived in the gym. When I moved to the US, football season was still in full swing and HS basketball was not allowed to train, run practices... do anything until the start date. I had no car and there was no other gym besides our HS gym that I had access to within 20 miles. The school was afraid of being sued if someone got injured on their own, so as a result I could not get a hoop down to work on my game before tryouts - so they told me.
I was terrified I was going to get cut when tryouts started, that I wouldn’t be good enough, and everyone back home who criticized me and told me I would be back home in a year - would be right. I was paranoid and obsessed with proving them wrong and proving myself right.
I offered to be a student aid in exchange for a teacher to come supervise me before school so I could work on my game over those first two months. They said no.
I offered to get a job and pay them for their time to come to school early and do their grading in the mornings while I worked on my game. They said no.
I offered to sign a waiver. They said no.
I visited the athletic director and told him my situation and that all I wanted was to be able to train before the season and I would do whatever it took. They said no.
I visited the principal. They said no.
I wrote a letter to the superintendent. They said no.
I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper telling them my situation and if they could publish what I wrote as an example of how being too rigid and litigious was affecting my chances; in hopes it would apply pressure. They wouldn’t publish it.
Then I said forget this. I woke up at 5 am and went to the school every morning for 4 weeks without a hoop being down. The court was open because there was a walking track above for the community as winters were cold. There was a janitors closet attached to the court. For 4 straight weeks I dribbled basketballs outside the janitors room and switched off doing stationary ball handling, defensive work, ball handling on the move and running line drills. The lights weren’t on in the gym. They wouldn’t turn them on for me.
Right when I was about to give up one morning at 6:15 am, mid-workout and in a full sweat without a hoop still, the janitor came out with his coffee in hand. I thought I was in for bad news that I wouldn’t be allowed to even do this. We still had a month to go until tryouts and it was already snowing outside.
I will never forget what happened next. The janitor came up to me. He praised me for my resiliency and steadfast attitude of not taking no for an answer then he said the following:
“Look kid. I want to drink my coffee in the morning in peace without those basketballs being pounded right outside my door. Here is a spare key to put the hoop down. Don’t tell them I gave it to you.”
I kept and still have that key.
I went on to become the schools all time leading scorer, became All - State and accepted a full ride scholarship following HS. In University I won an award as being one of the top 10 players in the country and I went on to play professional basketball. Following playing, I got into coaching, where I am now a head coach of a professional team.
There is always a way. Find it and don’t let up. Time to get to work.
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War. 500 B.C.
