Coach‘s Corner appears weekly at Outside the Huddle. The author Bob Lapadot coached for 28 years. He spent the last 12 years of his coaching career as the girls basketball head coach at Garrett, where he went 193-91 and won three Sectional titles and one Regional title.
The opening week of games is one of the best times of the year. All of your work, since last February, finally gets to be put on display. Players, coaches, and fans all feel the excitement of the opening game. Joy, nervousness, and stress are all part of the emotional rollercoaster you go through in game one and week one.
As a coach, you’ve spent the spring working on skill development, the summer on team building, then the fall brought back the individual skill focus. Week 1 brings the excitement of getting to see if you worked on the right things, and if your vision of how your team would look, and how they would play, was correct.
Because of all the time you can spend with your players between seasons, I think early season expectations are much different now than when I started coaching 29 years ago.
Back then, you really had no idea what your team was or what they could be. Coaches weren’t allowed to spend time with the entire team and you didn’t play summer schedules like today. Players didn’t spend near as much time on their game, and if they did, they did it on their own in the driveway. Now, your vision is much clearer, you may have played 20 to 25 games over the summer and you have a good feel for rotations and the strengths and weaknesses of your team.
Your players are also much more prepared, they may have played 60 games since last season, and I think both coach’s and player’s expectations are much higher because of all those factors.
Game one is likely the most unprepared a coach will feel all year long. You usually can’t scout the team you’re playing, so scouting reports are small and mainly based on last year’s tendencies, and you are doing everything you can to be as ready as possible for anything you might see. You also don’t know how your younger or inexperienced kids will respond to the bright lights. No coach likes being surprised by something in a game, and game 1 is the time it happens the most.
Depending on your schedule, the opening week could bring much more stress than it does excitement. We always had a sectional opponent or back to back conference games to start the year. That brings on more stress for a coach because you never want to give a sectional opponent confidence and starting 0-1 or 0-2 in conference is about as bad a feeling to start the year as you could have.
Regardless of the outcome in your first game, I believe that not overreacting to it might be the hardest, yet most important, thing to do. It’s very common to want to add a bunch of stuff if you won and looked good, or change everything if you lost and things didn’t look like you had envisioned. Win or lose you build from your first game and the improvement you see in game two is usually the biggest jump you will see all year, so you have to stick with your plan and trust the vision that you developed over the time leading up to the season.
There may come a time to change course, but after week one isn’t it.
More time to scout, more time to prepare, shaking off the nerves, and settling into the routine of the season will bring about many more emotions throughout the year, but nothing tops those opening game emotions of being back in a crowed gym playing and coaching the game you love.
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