The Kee to Coaching: Preparing to be a Head Coach

Good afternoon! We are now one week away from our first game, and I couldn't be more excited. I am now in my sixth season as a college basketball coach, and I still get the same excitement and butterflies when approaching a game-day. We scrimmage Elmira College tomorrow evening, and it will be our final tune up, before playing Hobart on November 15th. It will be my first time in Spiedel Gymnasium, sitting on the visitor's bench, and I look forward to competing against a group of guys I coached and helped recruit. We have a very challenging non-conference schedule, and we will find out early on, exactly how good of a team we actually are.

My ultimate career goal is to be a NCAA Head Basketball Coach. I have been blessed to have some great coaching mentors in my life. Each mentor has given me a different piece of advice or experience, and it has helped me greatly. This post focuses on different pieces of advice that I've been given, along with things that I am doing now to prepare myself to be a head coach.

1. Study the Game

- It's no secret that my journey as a coach has taken an unconventional path. I don't have a real playing background, and I didn't have a father who coached at the collegiate level. I have really had to learn the game from observing and research. Technology these days is amazing and you never have to work to hard to find a coaching resource. I've done a good job of documenting different drills and plays that I've seen and like, as well as different coaching philosophies. I try to read at least five different coaching articles, along with watching a few coaching videos each day. Twitter has been a great resource for me. I can't imagine living before the social-media era. I follow some successful coaches, and my timeline is filled with insightful posts. It's almost like being at a 24/7 coaching clinic.

2. How to Raise Money

-I've been very fortunate to have worked with five different head coaches during my career. Each head coach has a different personality and has helped me gain experience in a different area of coaching. At each school I've worked for, their have been different challenges. These challenges can range from location, to admissions standards, to lack of funding, to cost of the school, to league that the school plays in.

Working at Keuka has helped me gain ideas of different fund-raisers that I could run with my team to help bring in money to our program. Coach Phillips does a great job of maintaining relationships around the campus and community, and we are able to enhance the experience of our players with the donations he helps us attain.

At Elmira, we had a strong network of alumni, who supported and helped fund the program. Coach Torgalski would work with the New York City alumni chapter, and was able to help make improvements to our whole athletics department. I learned the importance of keeping ties with all former players and to keep them involved. The more they feel apart of the program, the more they are willing to donate.

At Marymount, we ran a summer for two weeks during the summer. I was able to have a big hand in planning and running the camp, and the 160 campers we had each week helped us pay for a team trip to Florida.

3. Each Day as a Head Coach is Completely Different

- Anytime that your career involves working with 18-22 young adults, their will be some moments when you'll have to play the role of psychologist or disciplinarian. Over the course of my career, I've been allowed to sit in on meetings with players, and I've learned how to handle the various tough decisions that a coach has to make each day. As a coach, player meetings can happen for a variety of reasons. Meeting about playing time, grades, girl problems, family issues, poor behavior, and homesickness are all common. No manual exists on how to handle each problem, but sitting in on these meetings has helped me think about how I would approach a difficult situation or meeting. Players want to see that you care, and that has been a positive trait of each coach I've worked for. They generally care about all members of their team.

4. Importance of Time Management

-They're only so many hours in a day, and it seems like a coach has to complete a thousand tasks in a day. One trait of every head coach that I've worked under, is their high-level of organization. Coming out of college, I wasn't the most organized guy. I'm still not at the level that I'd like to be at, but I've greatly improved. My boss and I share a calendar through google, which we utilize for keeping track of recruit visits, recruiting events, our game/practice schedule and our personal schedules. Along with this, we share a recruiting program, where we both keep detailed notes on our contact with recruits. At a school like Keuka, you have to recruit a large number of kids, and I couldn't imagine doing it without the help of our software. We are able to break the recruits into different groups and it automatically logs our conversations with potential student-athletes. We've been able to have some success recruiting, and I really think our organized approach has made the difference.