As a coach, a God send, is having strong assistants, is having a good assistants. They are kind of your right hand people. Sometimes what I have seen is that head coaches know extremely well how to utilize their assistants and sometimes they do not. I think that they take too much on their own plate and they do not divide up the responsibilities and it really can muddy the waters a little bit. So, I do encourage head coaches out there, if you can find able bodied assistants or if you are already fortunate enough to have full time assistants, if you are at the college level or even at the high school level. If you are working with someone for a long time, I do think that it is important to really figure out how to best utilize those assistants.
One way to really manage your assistants and help your assistants is to have an organized practice, is to have an opportunity to sit down and put down on paper who want doing what, when so they know exactly how practice is going to run and they know exactly how their role is going to be and then when it is their turn to talk about whether it is a defensive drill, you want them to run for you, or a shooting drill, you want them to run, let them do their thing and as a head coach, put in your little pieces here and there but allow your assistants to feel like they have got a good firm hold on their job.
The other thing I would suggest about assistants is to meet with your assistants. Again that communication piece is very important. Ask your assistants what they like to contribute. Ask them what you think they could and what we need to do better as a team or a program. Make it a point to really involve your assistants. Get their opinions, and listen to what they have to say. Jot some notes and then incorporate them into the overall practice plan or development of your program. I think you will be pleasantly surprised if you allow your assistants to really give feed back and accept it. Do not take it defensively, have everything be on a constructive level. Listen to what your assistants have to say and then run with it. But most importantly with assistants, they best thing that you could do is to be able to compliment them as a head coach. Let your team know you have confidence in your assistant coaches and their abilities and give them specific roles and jobs to do within a practice, within a game. I think that is very important and stick with it. Make sure you demonstrate that you stick your assistants and the way that they do things and if there is something you want changed, sit them down and talk to them about it immediately. If you want their mannerism to change a little bit on a certain drill, if you want them to give a little more energy, if you want them to be a little more constructive or positive or if you want them to be a little more disciplined and really get in your team, your players faces on something that you think it would be real good push then, just communicate that. Let them know on a regular basis. Give them that feed back and hopefully they will run with it.
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