NCAA President Myles Brand, the first university president to serve as the Association’s chief executive and a champion of academic reform, fiscal responsibility and student-athlete well-being, died Wednesday from pancreatic cancer.   Dr. Brand was a tremendous leader who always had the best interest of student-athletes in his mind and one who did a valuable job of steering the entire body in a very positive way.  My family and I extend our deepest condolences to Myles Brand’s family – our thoughts are with them during this difficult time.

It would benefit you a great deal to read the legacy of Dr. Brand from the NCAA website.

OTHER LINKS:

Myles Brand, NCAA president, dies By Marcus K. Garner  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Eric Musselman

One of my goals this year is to travel to as many different successful schools, professional teams, businesses and organizations to observe and learn from the wide variety of successful philosophies out there.  Successful people are successful people no matter the profession.  Success is bread with a variety of traits and to be able to have the time to invest in discovering these systems, philosophies and traits is a tremendous gift.  We can all learn every day.  Those lessons can be applied to coaching, anything. My time away from the court is going to make me a better person, father, husband and basketball coach.

Below you will find Coach Musselman’s thoughts and the original article by KC Joyner.

Make the game plan specific to the opponent.

Belichick’s play-calling is the epitome of the Tony Dungy saying that I have been so fond of quoting over the years, “70% of NFL games are lost rather than won.” Belichick takes this mind-set to heart by always going after the weakness of an opponent. If it is a schematic weakness such as an offense always blocking a certain type of blitz the same way, he’ll exploit it. If it is a personnel weakness, he’ll target that. This is by far and bar none the centerpiece of the Belichick philosophy of winning games.

Build your team so that it can go after any of these weaknesses.

The Patriots lost the best quarterback in the NFL not even one quarter into the 2008 season, yet they were still able to adjust their offense to attack defenses in any manner needed. Need proof? Try this. The Pats rushed for 257 yards against Denver in Week 7, the most by a New England team in 23 years. They also had a backup quarterback become only the fifth player in NFL history to throw for over 400 passing yards in back-to-back games. They found a way to run or pass with extraordinary effectiveness whenever they needed to.

Combine athletic ability with intelligence as often as possible.

This has two rewards. First, intelligent players are going to be able to adjust to new game plans. Second, because the game plan is based on the opponent, the plan each week is always going to be a fresh one. This approach will appeal to intelligent players and keep their interest levels higher than it would unintelligent ones. Mental stimulation is an extremely effective tool in helping an organization stay focused late in the year.

A team doesn’t need a great running back to win.

A good one will do if you have quality blocking up front (and New England had that in 2008, ranking 2nd in the team POA win percentage run blocking metric). And if all you have are a collection of solid backs, always use the healthiest one. This is why the Patriots drive fantasy football coaches up a wall -– they’ll always go with the healthy back and will never let anyone know who that is until the game starts.

If you can’t go after a specific weakness in your opponent, use every tool in the playbook to put your players into the highest percentage position possible.

The Patriots provided a textbook case of this in the Week 7 game against Denver last year. They repeatedly called plays with pre-snap motion that had the receiver get up to full speed right as he was reaching the tackle or tight end at the edge of the offensive front wall. What this did was prevent the defender from getting a clear view of the receiver. Because of this, he would not know that the man he was due to cover suddenly went from a slow trot to a full sprint and would thus be at a speed disadvantage at the snap. This happened time and again that night and caught Denver defenders slow on multiple occasions.

Don’t ask players to do things they aren’t capable of.

I spoke in the Kansas City section how Matt Cassel had more than a bit of trouble throwing vertical passes. The downfield passing attack was the focal point of the 2007 Patriots, but Cassel wasn’t capable of it, so Belichick altered the game plan to ameliorate his weakness as much as possible.

The team’s psychological state cannot be ignored.

Before the Week 8 game against St. Louis, Belichick showed his team a video of them being solemn and grim and told them no more, he wanted them to loosen up. He expects his players to be professionals who don’t need the constant prodding that a personnel-based coach would give them, but he also knows his role in keeping them on an even keel when they get too serious or too laid back.

Teach players how to do the high percentage things.

The Week 11 game versus the Jets on NFL Network had a stat that illustrates this team’s aptitude in this area. Coming into that contest, the Patriots were the least-penalized team in the league, with 26 penalties in the first nine games. According to the broadcast crew, that was the fewest penalties a team had in the first nine games of the season since the 1962 Steelers.

Teach players that if the defense is giving you anything, take as much of it as you can.

Wes Welker is a master at this when he runs crossing routes. Most receivers will run that route at the same depth no matter how deep the linebackers drop. Welker will base his route depth on where the linebackers are. If they go seven yards off the line of scrimmage, he’ll run it four to five yards downfield. If they drop to ten yards back, he’ll run that same route at a seven to eight yard depth. It is one of the reasons that Randy Moss and Welker ranked #1 and #3 in short pass YPA last year.

Know how to work the clock in very creative ways.

The most famous instance of this was the intentional safety New England took in that Monday Night game against the Broncos a few years ago that helped them to a win, but they did something just as creative against the Bills in Week 10.
The Pats had a first-and-goal at the Buffalo one-yard line up 13-3 with 3:18 left in the 4th quarter. Most teams would have just tried to punch the ball in, but Belichick wanted to run some clock while at the same time not losing yardage. What he ended up doing was having Cassel try a couple of half-hearted quarterback sneaks. Cassel didn’t make an effort to score but he also made sure the ball stayed at the one-yard line. Those two plays took the clock down to the two-minute warning and on the next play Belichick called for a run by BenJarvus Green-Ellis that resulted in a touchdown. They could have picked up those seven points earlier but Belichick knew the value of keeping the two-minute clock stoppage out of the Bills’ hands.

Don’t let superstition get in the way of things.

Early in the 2008 season, New England had back-to-back games at San Francisco and San Diego. Instead of flying back to the East Coast and then returning back a few days later, the Patriots just stayed out west the entire time. That trip ended with a disheartening 30-10 loss against the Chargers. New England then had another western double dip with games at Seattle and Oakland in Weeks 14 and 15. Many coaches would have changed their travel plans and gone back east out of a superstitious mind-set to avoid a repeat of the SD loss, but Belichick knew that staying out west was still the best thing to do. New England won both games and thus validated his approach.

Don’t let a macho attitude get in the way of things.

Ty Warren missed a few games late last year with a torn groin. By Week 15, the injury had healed some but not fully. He told the coaches that he could play on run downs but not on passing downs.

The Belichick Way: Still the Best

By KC JOYNER

This is an excerpt from Scientific Football 2009:
After reviewing the game notes from the 2008 season, I am convinced that Bill Belichick is the NFL’s version of The Beatles.
That The Fab Four were extraordinarily charismatic was evident from the very moment they set foot on American soil and Beatlemania took off. What wasn’t known at the time was just how far into the ground their reservoir of ability went.

Patriots Coach Bill Belichick. Is he more like Lennon or McCartney? (Gary Wiepert/Reuters)

The Beatles’ first five albums (Please Please Me through Help!) contained enough brilliant works to ensure them a place in musical history, but that was only the beginning. Those were followed up by a run of truly phenomenal records. Rubber Soul. Revolver. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Abbey Road. I didn’t grow up in the 1960s, so I can only imagine what it must have been like to see this artistic genius displayed over the course of eight years. Just when you thought that the last album was by far the best the boys from Liverpool could do, they went out and topped themselves again.

Two interrelated items made John, Paul, George and Ringo’s works so amazing. The first is that they could take a musical type being done by their competitors and add a Beatles touch that raised it a quantum level. A good example of this is when Paul McCartney wrote the song Helter Skelter in response to reading a comment by The Who’s Pete Townshend saying that the song I Can See For Miles was “the loudest, rawest, dirtiest song The Who had ever recorded.” McCartney figured that he could do that one better and set about doing exactly that.

The second is that they saw a musical landscape that their competitors simply weren’t capable of seeing. This is best told via an anecdote about the Beach Boys’ lead singer, Brian Wilson. Wilson was so blown away by Rubber Soul that he dedicated his life to trying to equal or beat it. He seemingly accomplished that goal with Pet Sounds, but that only drove The Beatles to take things up a notch by recording what is widely hailed as the greatest album of all time, Sgt. Pepper’s. The ingeniousness of that record was so vast that Wilson reportedly had a nervous breakdown upon hearing it. He came to the same conclusion the rest of the world did – musically speaking, these guys were just on another level that no one else could reach.

That’s how it is with Belichick. Even after all of these years, no one comes close to having the same kind of grasp that he has on operating a football team.

The funny part about this is that the New England approach seems simple enough for anyone to implement. It merely requires following a set of core principles:__* Make the game plan specific to the opponent. Belichick’s play-calling is the epitome of the Tony Dungy saying that I have been so fond of quoting over the years, “70% of NFL games are lost rather than won.” Belichick takes this mind-set to heart by always going after the weakness of an opponent. If it is a schematic weakness such as an offense always blocking a certain type of blitz the same way, he’ll exploit it. If it is a personnel weakness, he’ll target that. This is by far and bar none the centerpiece of the Belichick philosophy of winning games.

* Build your team so that it can go after any of these weaknesses. The Patriots lost the best quarterback in the NFL not even one quarter into the 2008 season, yet they were still able to adjust their offense to attack defenses in any manner needed. Need proof? Try this. The Pats rushed for 257 yards against Denver in Week 7, the most by a New England team in 23 years. They also had a backup quarterback become only the fifth player in NFL history to throw for over 400 passing yards in back-to-back games. They found a way to run or pass with extraordinary effectiveness whenever they needed to.

* Combine athletic ability with intelligence as often as possible. This has two rewards. First, intelligent players are going to be able to adjust to new game plans. Second, because the game plan is based on the opponent, the plan each week is always going to be a fresh one. This approach will appeal to intelligent players and keep their interest levels higher than it would unintelligent ones. Mental stimulation is an extremely effective tool in helping an organization stay focused late in the year.

* A team doesn’t need a great running back to win. A good one will do if you have quality blocking up front (and New England had that in 2008, ranking 2nd in the team POA win percentage run blocking metric). And if all you have are a collection of solid backs, always use the healthiest one. This is why the Patriots drive fantasy football coaches up a wall -– they’ll always go with the healthy back and will never let anyone know who that is until the game starts.

* If you can’t go after a specific weakness in your opponent, use every tool in the playbook to put your players into the highest percentage position possible. The Patriots provided a textbook case of this in the Week 7 game against Denver last year. They repeatedly called plays with pre-snap motion that had the receiver get up to full speed right as he was reaching the tackle or tight end at the edge of the offensive front wall. What this did was prevent the defender from getting a clear view of the receiver. Because of this, he would not know that the man he was due to cover suddenly went from a slow trot to a full sprint and would thus be at a speed disadvantage at the snap. This happened time and again that night and caught Denver defenders slow on multiple occasions.

* Don’t ask players to do things they aren’t capable of. I spoke in the Kansas City section how Matt Cassel had more than a bit of trouble throwing vertical passes. The downfield passing attack was the focal point of the 2007 Patriots, but Cassel wasn’t capable of it, so Belichick altered the game plan to ameliorate his weakness as much as possible.

* The team’s psychological state cannot be ignored. Before the Week 8 game against St. Louis, Belichick showed his team a video of them being solemn and grim and told them no more, he wanted them to loosen up. He expects his players to be professionals who don’t need the constant prodding that a personnel-based coach would give them, but he also knows his role in keeping them on an even keel when they get too serious or too laid back.

* Teach players how to do the high percentage things. The Week 11 game versus the Jets on NFL Network had a stat that illustrates this team’s aptitude in this area. Coming into that contest, the Patriots were the least-penalized team in the league, with 26 penalties in the first nine games. According to the broadcast crew, that was the fewest penalties a team had in the first nine games of the season since the 1962 Steelers.

* Teach players that if the defense is giving you anything, take as much of it as you can. Wes Welker is a master at this when he runs crossing routes. Most receivers will run that route at the same depth no matter how deep the linebackers drop. Welker will base his route depth on where the linebackers are. If they go seven yards off the line of scrimmage, he’ll run it four to five yards downfield. If they drop to ten yards back, he’ll run that same route at a seven to eight yard depth. It is one of the reasons that Randy Moss and Welker ranked #1 and #3 in short pass YPA last year.

* Know how to work the clock in very creative ways. The most famous instance of this was the intentional safety New England took in that Monday Night game against the Broncos a few years ago that helped them to a win, but they did something just as creative against the Bills in Week 10.

The Pats had a first-and-goal at the Buffalo one-yard line up 13-3 with 3:18 left in the 4th quarter. Most teams would have just tried to punch the ball in, but Belichick wanted to run some clock while at the same time not losing yardage. What he ended up doing was having Cassel try a couple of half-hearted quarterback sneaks. Cassel didn’t make an effort to score but he also made sure the ball stayed at the one-yard line. Those two plays took the clock down to the two-minute warning and on the next play Belichick called for a run by BenJarvus Green-Ellis that resulted in a touchdown. They could have picked up those seven points earlier but Belichick knew the value of keeping the two-minute clock stoppage out of the Bills’ hands.

* Don’t let superstition get in the way of things. Early in the 2008 season, New England had back-to-back games at San Francisco and San Diego. Instead of flying back to the East Coast and then returning back a few days later, the Patriots just stayed out west the entire time. That trip ended with a disheartening 30-10 loss against the Chargers.

New England then had another western double dip with games at Seattle and Oakland in Weeks 14 and 15. Many coaches would have changed their travel plans and gone back east out of a superstitious mind-set to avoid a repeat of the SD loss, but Belichick knew that staying out west was still the best thing to do. New England won both games and thus validated his approach.

* Don’t let a macho attitude get in the way of things. Ty Warren missed a few games late last year with a torn groin. By Week 15, the injury had healed some but not fully. He told the coaches that he could play on run downs but not on passing downs.
That’s exactly what Belichick wants his players to do. He wants an honest assessment of what they can do and what they can’t do physically. Once they tell him that, he knows it is up to the coaches to figure out what they have to do to work around it.

The real beauty of this is that it shows how intelligence can be used in conjunction with the typical macho attitude. The Pats want their players to gut it out but not at the cost of hurting the team. Many coaches would say, “you have to be at 100% or we won’t use you” and force the player to either play hurt (which damages the team and could put the player at longer term risk of injury) or not play at all (which limits the benefit the team could be getting from him).

I think some of these coaches do this because they can’t get over the macho bull of no compromise. It may also be that they do this because some intelligence and thinking are required to do the compromise. The physical limitation means that the head coach and his staff have to remember that the player can’t go on passing downs and change their system accordingly. Belichick and his staff are smart enough to do this but there are coaching staffs out there that either aren’t smart enough, or they are too macho to use what intelligence they have.

The Beatles took what looked to be an uncomplicated form of music and turned it into an art form that many have tried to replicate but none have come close to duplicating. Belichick’s seemingly basic methods are in the same boat. They look easy but, as was noted both in Blindsided and in a terrific ESPN The Magazine 2009 NFL Preview Magazine article by Seth Wickersham, Belichick seems to be the only one who can master them.

(You can follow KC Joyner on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/ckavry or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kcjoynertfs).

 The NCAA has mandates regarding out of season workouts.  To see a PowerPoint of the NCAA guidelines follow this link: Out of Season Bylaws

 Twitter, Facebook, BLOGS are all jammed with coaches “First Day of”… class, workouts, conditioning, etc stories.

 You can follow any of the links below for stories, tips, video and more…

Try Googling your favorite team name or coaches name and the word twitter , eg. “Joanne Boyle Twitter’” and you will more than likely find a Twitter page and links to notes, video, etc about Fall Workouts.   For Coach Boyle you get:  CalCoachBoyle

Here is a good one for the University of Arizona’s Women’s Fall Workouts:  ARIZONA WOMEN

Love that they are using Performance Training, Jackie Ansley’s group.  They are the BEST for Speed, Agility & Quickness training.

Fall workouts should include conditioning, agility, basketball skill work and strength work.  Taking into consideration the NCAA out of season rules and allotted time rules a typical 5-Day plan for Fall Workouts could look like this.

5-Day Fall Basketball Workout Schedule

 Monday         Tuesday            Wednesday        Thursday             Friday       

 Speed & Agility   Weights           Speed & Agility        Weights            Weights

 Conditioning   Skills                   Conditioning             Skills                 Bike or Pool

 Voluntary Pick-up Games  —————————————>

I like to give the student-athletes Friday off of voluntary pick-up games in the Fall.  They still get a chance to go home for the weekend before everything gets going in October.

Every college basketball program has “voluntary” pick up games.  Usually it is organized and run by the captains and a great way for team building to take place.  The basketball itself?… just like any other pickup game, probably develop more bad habits than good.

I believe you should play a :15-second shot clock, games to 3 or 5 by 1’s.

Have only two rules: 

1.     You MUST take the first available open shot. 

2.     Posts MUST touch the ball in the half-court. (unless breakaway lay-up)

 These rules help to accomplish several things:

 1.      They ALL must RUN the floor every trip, especially posts (if they want to ever see the ball in scoring position.)

2.      Posts get to touch the ball on offense.  (*Guards don’t take every shot in a pickup game, Posts stay happy and rebound and defend)

3.      EVERYONE is looking for a “GOOD”, “OPEN” shot early.  (Builds confidence in each other, players feel worthy of taking shots.)

 Doing this for at least some of the days early during Fall workouts is a very good way to get the team moving/playing fast, have everyone looking for shots and forces people to play defense or lose a game quickly.

 If you find any good thoughts, workouts, video, articles or links on Fall workouts – send them our way!

I stumbled across his Hoop Thoughts…

LSU Tigers Associate Head Coach Bob Starkey

He was sharing with us some thoughts on Teaching Leadership.  Powerful.  Excellent.  Here with a very good leader Temeka Johnson, I am certain she learned many of those skills through his teaching.

From Mark Shead at Leadership 501:

Teamwork is not something that is easy to teach. While you may know certain teamwork principles, it is something that needs to be developed in each team on its own. If you take 5 people from separate organizations and try to put them together into one team, there will be a certain amount of learning that takes place, regardless of how skilled each individual is at teamwork.

When it comes down to it, most of learning to work together as a team is learning to communicate with and trust your fellow team members. When you are creating a team, keep this in mind and try to create an environment where people can learn how to communicate and trust each other.

Often, you can improve your team by creating a temporary environment that requires everyone to learn to communicate and trust each other. Many of the infamous corporate games and simulations help attempt to achieve this. You just have to know what you are trying to accomplish. Corporate games and team building exercises get a bad name when they are done without any particular end in mind. If you don’t know why you are doing them, there are probably better uses of your time.

One of the easiest ways to improve communication and trust is put people in a difficult situation and let them work their way out of it. In day to day business settings, we have a lot of ways to avoid communicating directly or learning to trust each other. You want to look for a situation that doesn’t lend itself to these types of avoidance mechanisms.

Here are a few ideas of ways to help create a temporary environment to help your team grow:

Take an afternoon and go work on something together where it is easy to see what you’ve accomplished. For example, take your team out to paint walls at a local charity. Painting works well because it is easy to see how much you’ve accomplished. Many of our business activities are difficult to quantify, so we are deprived from a real feeling of team accomplishment in our day-to-day work. Painting is also good because it gives people a chance to talk while they paint and get to know each other better outside of work conversations.

Do a ropes course or something similar together. This gets everyone working together in a hands-on way and solving problems. With the right activities, it can really help strengthen the trust in a team. I’m not just talking about the activities where you close your eyes and fall backwards and let another team member catch you. There is a lot of benefit in just forcing people to work through problems together in a different type of setting.

Do one of the survival simulation type games. In these types of simulations, your team has to work together to rank the most important objects to take with them after an airplane crash or similar disaster. The point is that they have to reach a consensus about what items to take, and they aren’t allowed to just take a vote and go with the majority. This forces people to explain themselves and helps them work through conflicting opinions.

Find more great articles on leadership and management at: http://www.leadership501.com