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For many basketball coaches and players, success is measured solely by the wins and losses on the court. If this is your team’s only definition of success, fulfillment may prove to be very hard to maintain. Don’t get me wrong, I believe it is important for a team to always give their best effort and game plan for victory. However, it will leave a very thin line for “success” if our definition simply stops there. Instead, it’s important for coaches to dig deeper as they define success with their athletes and teams.
While there could a million different lists for calculating success, there are four key pillars that must be present to define success for any team that you play on or coach.
1. Seek Continued Improvement
For our athletes and coaches in the programs that I led, we constantly talked about the idea of becoming “Better Every Day.” It’s this relentless pursuit of the best version of yourself that allows you to find success that is deeper and more impactful than lights on any scoreboard. It’s the idea that we have to stop comparing ourselves to others, after all, comparison is the thief of all joy. Instead, start competing with ourselves on a daily basis. After all, your best competition is you, yesterday.
2. Keep A Magnifying Glass Handy
Simply put, you must be willing to do the small stuff to get the big victory. Players, coaches, and teams often miss the mark because they're always zoomed out and only looking at one thing - the scoreboard.
While it’s important to know the big picture and what must be accomplished on a large scale to find success, coaches and players shouldn’t neglect the opportunity to use a magnifying glass to analyze their little things on a daily basis. From a team perspective, this could include things like 5-10 minutes of daily film study, spending the first 10-15 minutes of practice focused only on specific fundamentals, or not moving on to the next drill until the current one is being accomplished with excellence.
On a personal level, keeping a magnifying glass handy would be to wake up early enough to plan out your day, set aside time to read, intentionally journal, etc.
It’s daily, effective tasks such a these that will lead to larger successes, both as a team and in one’s personal life.
3. If It’s Important, Measure It!
Pop quiz time.
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Coaches: Do your players know the three things you value most on offense and defense? How do you measure those things in practices and in games?
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Players: Do you know what the top 1-2 things your head coach values on both offense and defense? How does he or she use your performance to measure those things in practices and games?
For the last several years, I’ve asked those questions to coaches and athletes across the US, and it’s amazing to me how many of them struggled to answer them! If we’re truly going to define success in other ways than the final score, we must have clear expectations of what wins look like across all parts of our program and development.
Let me give you an example. One program I coached defined success on a defensive possession with these things:
1) No uncontested 3’s
2) No catch and shoot shots
3) No paint shots
4) One shot per possession.
Not only do our coaches and players all know those four things, we also track them each possession throughout the game. As a coach, I can’t list 17 different things that are important and expect they'll all automatically happen. As players and coaches alike, we must have a laser like approach to the things that are most important, and find tangible ways to measure their success.
4. Learn Through Losing
Ouch. This one is definitely the toughest. Obviously, no one likes to lose. But what separates true champions from others is their ability to learn through their losses. Olympic track and field champion Wilma Rudolph said it this way:
“Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.”
We are all a collection of our own habits, and this self-evaluation of our failures is what will lead to more successful and consistent habits. It’s a necessity to take our eyes off a single moment or game to define one’s success, and instead, focus on the journey to developing the best version of ourselves.
That’s a true definition of success.
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