Crooked Necks

Posts Tagged ‘coach’

Kansas State University, often abbreviated K-State or KSU, has a success basketball program that is often nationally ranked.

The Division I program located in Manhattan, Kansas (lightheartedly referred to as the Little Apple) competes in the highly competitive Big 12 Conference whose members include many perennial powerhouse programs including in state rival the University of Kansas. The intrastate rival Kansas Jayhawks are often referred to simply as KU and are located a mere 85 miles to the west with the city of Topeka separating the two schools.

The K-state men’s basketball program has been around for over a hundred years with competition on the hardwood beginning roughly ten years after the game was invented. KSU played its first game in 1902 and would go on to enjoy an impressive seventeen conference championships over the years and enough noteworthy victories to land a spot in a 2005 list by Street & Smith (New York City publication) as one of the top 25 greatest college basketball programs ever.

This article is specifically for athletes. Making the most of your training session is simple. You simply must never be on autopilot when training. A great mentor of mine once said, “If you want to learn quickly – slow down.” What he was referring to is what I call, conscious training. In this article, I show you how to do this so you can get on top of your technical changes faster than ever before.

Do you know the feeling I am referring to when I talk about being on autopilot? Perhaps you have driven to training in your car and could not even remember the trip? Perhaps your coach has been talking to you and you couldn’t hear anything. Are you just going through the motions? These are all symptoms of being on autopilot. Being on autopilot, for a whole training session means you have not improved.

To ensure you are not on autopilot you simply need to focus on what is going on around you. Listen, see, feel, taste and smell your environment. Get in touch with your surrounds and tune in to them. This is the first part of consciously training.

University of Arizona basketball is a source of pride for hundreds of thousands of alumni that have come out of the Tucson, Arizona based school. With over 25,000 students attending the college commonly referred to as U of A or simply Arizona there is a tremendous following of the University of Arizona basketball schedule with the winter moods of many people being dependent upon how well the current Arizona basketball coach did the night before.

Arizona has been playing basketball since the early twentieth century with their initial win coming in the first game the program ever played. A 1904 contest that resulted in a victory over the Morenci YMCA team marked the first of what would become many wins in the storied tradition known today as Arizona Wildcat basketball. Long before joining the Pacific 10 Conference (Pac-10) in 1878 many of the games during their first decade of existence came against local YMCA competition, a practice that was surprisingly common in that era. In fact, the University of Kentucky which has the current record for most men’s basketball wins also began their tradition with a single win over a Lexington YMCA team in 1903.

Athlete Assessments recently had the great pleasure of being invited to the US Lacrosse Coaching Conference in Baltimore, MD. A significant highlight was hearing Lou Holtz’s keynote presentation about his philosophy on coaching and life.

For those who do not know Lou Holtz, he is a legend in US College football coaching and is the only coach in NCAA history to lead six different programs to bowl games. He is also a multiple winner of National Coach of the Year honors.

These are the key messages I took note of and trust you will also find inspiring and educational:

Note 1: Coaching is about influencing the lives of young people. It is a role of true significance and meaning, never should it be about money. It is fundamentally about building relationships with young people.

Note 2: A great quote about Leadership, “I can name you the coach, but I can not name you the leader. Leaders are named from below.”

Note 3: Coaching is a leadership role. As such, coaches are to have a vision and are accountable for the choices they make. Above all, coaching is about “Obligations and Responsibilities”. Never is coaching about “Rights and Privileges.”