East Bay Basketball

From the Floor Up Series: 16 Years of Lessons Only the Game Could Teach. LESSON TWO: Every Level Has a Ceiling. Great Relationships Don’t. A JUCO player who trusts you will outperform a Division I talent who doesn’t. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. Trust the relationship before you trust the recruiting profile. I spent years coaching junior college basketball & before anyone misunderstands what that means, let me be plain: junior college basketball is where some of the most important developmental coaching in this country happens. These are players who needed a second chance, a different environment, or simply more time to grow into what they were always capable of becoming. The coach who can build genuine life, long, love relationships in a JUCO environment, where the roster turns over fast, where the academic pressure is real, where the players come from backgrounds that require more of the mentoring infrastructure than the basketball system, that coach is developing skills that translate to every level above it. The relationship model I built in junior college basketball is the same model I brought to mid-major Division I. The level changed. The standard didn’t. And neither did the results that genuine investment produced. I lost players I shouldn’t have lost at the early levels of my career because I was coaching the level rather than coaching the person. When I started coaching the person, when I stopped letting the resource level or the conference affiliation determine how much I invested in the relationship, everything changed. Players stayed longer. They developed better. They called me after they graduated. That last part, the phone call from a former player years later, is the only statistic that actually tells the truth about your coaching. #purpose #basketball #coach #d1 #mentor