Ten questions to answer before your first practice

Most of what gets written about coaching philosophy isn't much help. It's usually somebody else's system explained like it's the only way to play, or it's the kind of thing that sounds good in July and does nothing for you in November.

Here's a simple test. If your answer to a question doesn't change what you actually do in the gym, it isn't a philosophy question. It's a slogan.

These ten questions change your practice plan from day one. You've probably answered some of them already without writing anything down. The ones you haven't answered are the ones that cost you in January, because your team figures out the answer anyway. They just figure out the wrong one. Do yourself a favor and write out your answers to these before the first day of practice.

1. What are you choosing to be great at?

You get a set number of practices before your first game, and the reality is that once the season starts, practice time is even more limited and valuable. Every minute you give to one thing is a minute you took from something else.

Most coaches, asked what they want their team to be known for, will list five or six things. Great in transition. Tough on the ball. Good free throw shooting team. Rebound the ball. Share it. That is not a choice. That is a wish list.

Pick two. Let the rest be fine.

This isn't about accepting that you'll be bad at something. It's about being honest that you're already choosing, every time you write a practice plan, and you might as well choose on purpose. The teams that have an identity in February are the teams whose coach decided in September.

What a good answer sounds like: "We're going to be the best defensive rebounding team in our league and we're going to guard the ball. That is our identity."

2. What pace do you want to play at?

If you only answer one of these, answer this one.

Pace drives almost everything downstream. It changes how you condition, what your practice segments look like, how you break a press, what you do out of timeouts, and how you build a game plan. Two coaches with the same roster and different answers here will run practices that look nothing alike.

The options run on a spectrum from deliberate to breakneck, and there's no correct answer. There's only the one that fits your team and the one you're willing to actually practice.

That last part is where coaches get themselves in trouble. Wanting to play fast is easy. Playing fast means practicing fast, which means shorter segments, more conversion work, more cognitive overload for players so you're getting them used to playing fast, and living with mistakes you wouldn't tolerate otherwise. If you say you want to run but you stop every possession to fix spacing, you don't want to run. You want to want to run.

What a good answer sounds like: "Fast. We push it off makes and misses, we take the first available good shot, and we can live with some transition turnovers."

3. What is your defensive identity, and what does it cost you?

Man to man, zone, matchup, or something trap heavy. Pick one to be your base. And then once you've figured that out there are plenty of variants on top of it. What's your base coverage on ball screens? What's your base coverage on off-ball screens? Do you want to funnel baseline or middle? Where should everyone expect help to come from?

Every one of these decisions buys you something and hands something back. That's basketball, the offense inherently has an advantage so that means there are tradeoffs to make. Man to man gives you accountability and a defense that travels, but it can also ask a lot of your worst defenders. A 2-3 hides those guys and keeps things simpler, but you give up the corner three and the offensive glass. Trapping creates chaos and turnovers, but it'll get you scored on and leave you susceptible to big runs when it's not executed well (and it probably won't be for 40+ minutes).

None of that's a knock on any of them. The mistake is picking one and pretending it has no cost, because then you never plan for the cost. If you're going to play zone, you'd better have a plan for the offensive glass, and it had better live in your practice plan and not just in your head.

What a good answer sounds like: "Base man. We're icing side ball screens, hedging the middle, and funnelling everything baseline. Help comes from the weak side low man, every time, so everybody knows where the next rotation is. That leaves the weak side corner open and we can live with that shot."

4. What is your offensive identity, and does this roster support it?

Same question on the other end, with one addition that matters more than people admit.

Look at what you actually have before you decide what you run. Five out, four out one in, motion, ball screen heavy, flex, dribble drive, Princeton, horns, or something you built yourself. All of them work. None of them work with the wrong personnel.

The trap here is automatically running last year's offense when you have fundamentally different players. It worked, you know how to teach it, your returners already know it. But if the two guards who made it go graduated, you're about to spend six weeks teaching an offense that doesn't fit the guys in front of you. You'll figure that out in December, when it's too late to change.

Personnel first. System second.

What a good answer sounds like: "Four out one in with a lot of ball screen. We've got two guards who can turn the corner and a five who catches and finishes, and we don't have the off-the-dribble creation from the frontcourt positions to play five out this year."

5. What roles exist on your team, and how do you decide who fills them?

Starters, rotation, depth. Everybody knows the categories. The question is how you decide, and what you say to the guys who end up in the third one.

Be honest about the first part. Are roles based on what you see in practice, on matchups, on what a guy did last season, or on some mix you've never actually described out loud? Your players have a theory about this whether you've told them or not, and their theory is usually worse than the truth.

The second part is harder and it matters more. A roster is fifteen guys and your rotation is eight. What's the deal for the other seven? Not a speech about staying ready. An actual answer. What do they get out of this season, what are they working on, when do they get real reps, and how do you keep them bought in during the second week of February when they haven't played in a month?

If you don't have an answer, you're going to lose those guys. Maybe not loudly. They'll just stop competing in practice. Then your starters are getting worse reps every day, and you won't connect the two things until it's too late to fix.

What a good answer sounds like: "Roles come out of practice, and I tell them that in week one. Depth guys get a skill to own, real reps in our development segments, and I tell each of them exactly what would have to change for the rotation to change."

6. Is individual player development inside practice or outside it?

There are three real answers and they're all fine. It happens in team practice as a daily block. It happens on dedicated days. It happens outside practice, with an assistant or on the player's own time.

What isn't fine is not having decided, because then it happens by accident. Some weeks the skill block survives and some weeks it gets cut for a scout, and by January neither you nor your players could tell you what your development plan was.

Whatever you pick, say the expectation out loud. If development lives outside practice, somebody has to tell each player what he's working on and when he's supposed to be doing it. Otherwise "get in the gym" is just something you say.

This one also decides what you cut when the gym is short, which is why it comes up again in the first day of practice plan.

What a good answer sounds like: "Fifteen minutes every practice, position groups, and it doesn't get cut for anything short of a game the next day."

7. What will you stop practice for?

Every coach has a short list of things that stop everything. Most have never said the list out loud.

Write down three. Not twenty. Three things that, when you see them, the whistle goes and the whole gym hears about it.

Three works because your players can remember three. If everything is a stoppage then nothing is, and your team learns that your intensity is about your mood that day instead of about a standard.

What a good answer sounds like: "We stop for a jogged sprint, for not talking on a screen, and for arguing with an official. That is it. Everything else gets corrected on the fly."

8. How much are you installing before your first game, and in what order?

Almost everybody installs too much.

It feels productive in September to get your press break and your zone offense and your baseline out plays in early. Then December comes and you're reteaching all of it, because a team that has seen something twice in October hasn't learned it. They've been shown it.

Decide what has to be in by game one and what can wait. Be ruthless about it. A team that runs three things well beats a team that runs nine things badly, and it isn't close in a possession game in February.

Order matters too. Put in the thing your identity depends on first and give it the most reps. If you decided back in question two that you want to play fast, transition goes in before your half court sets, not after.

What a good answer sounds like: "Primary break, one half court entry, man defense, one baseline out. That is game one. Zone offense goes later when we encounter it."

9. Who talks in the huddle?

Small question, and you can tell a lot about a program from the answer.

In some huddles the coach talks and the players listen. In others the players talk first and the coach cleans it up. Both work. What doesn't work is not knowing, because then the huddle is whatever it happens to be that day, and usually that means silence.

If you want your team to communicate on defense, the huddle is where the habit starts. A team that says nothing in a timeout isn't going to call out screens in the second half.

This is the one you can change on Tuesday. It costs nothing. Just start asking a player what he saw before you tell him what you saw.

What a good answer sounds like: "First timeout of every practice, a player tells me what's going wrong before I say anything. By December I want them to have it before I do."

10. How will you know a practice worked?

Most coaches answer this by feel. The gym was loud, guys competed, it felt good. That's not nothing, but it isn't much, and it's gone by the next morning.

Decide what you're actually going to look at. Maybe it's whether the three things from question seven showed up. Maybe you ask two players on the way out what the point of practice was and see if their answer matches yours. Maybe you write two lines at the end of the day about what worked and what didn't.

The method matters less than having one. Without it every practice feels about the same in hindsight, you can't tell a good week from a bad one, and nothing you learned in October is still available to you in January.

The coaches who get better across a season are almost always the ones who wrote something down.

What a good answer sounds like: "Two lines after every practice. What worked, what I'm fixing tomorrow. I read the week back on Sunday before I plan."

What to do with your answers

Say them out loud to your staff, then put them somewhere your assistants can actually see. Not a document nobody opens. A page, or a whiteboard in the office. You might even want to share them with your players too.

Then write your first practice plan and check it against the list. If you said you want to play fast and your first practice has one transition segment buried at the end, one of those two things is wrong. Usually it's the plan.

That check is worth running every couple of weeks through the first month, while the gap between what you said and what you're doing is still small enough to close.

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Answer these ten and you've done most of what BenchOS basketball asks for before it writes you a practice plan. That is on purpose. The plan should come from your answers, not from ours.