The 10 Conversations That Shaped My Coaching
Another year around the sun has a way of making you take inventory.
Not of accomplishments, but of the moments that quietly changed you.
As I started reflecting on the last twelve years of coaching, I expected to remember championship games, heartbreaking losses, or the biggest wins. I expected certain practices to come back to me or memorable performances from players.
Instead, I kept coming back to conversations.
Not long conversations. Sometimes just a sentence.
But those sentences stayed with me.
It’s funny how that works. You can spend hundreds of hours listening to clinics, reading books, and studying film, yet a thirty-second exchange with the right person at the right time can permanently change the way you see the game.
Looking back, I realized much of my coaching approach wasn’t built in front of a whiteboard.
It was built one conversation at a time.
“Dance with the girls at the party.”
One of the earliest lessons came from my high school coach, Jared Goldstein.
Like a lot of young coaches, I spent far too much time thinking about the players we didn’t have. The athlete who chose another sport. The talented kid who never came out for basketball. The player we wished was walking through the gym doors.
Whenever I’d start talking that way, Coach Goldstein would smile and say,
“Dance with the girls at the party.”
His point was simple.
Coach the team you have.
At the time, I thought we were talking about recruiting. Looking back, we were talking about perspective.
It’s easy to believe better coaching starts with better players. But some of the best coaches I’ve ever been around have an incredible ability to invest completely in the people standing right in front of them. They don’t waste emotional energy wishing for a different roster.
That phrase still pops into my head every season.
“So what did we get out of this?”
Coach Goldstein unknowingly gave me another lesson.
Like many young coaches, we’d spend hours after games talking. We’d replay every possession, complain about officiating, dissect rotations, and revisit every decision that had been made.
Eventually I’d stop us and ask,
“So what did we get out of this?”
Sometimes the answer was...Nothing.
We had spent an hour venting without moving an inch closer to solving anything.
That question changed how I approach coaching meetings, film sessions, and honestly, life outside basketball.
Reflection is valuable. Complaining isn’t.
Every difficult conversation should leave you with a better question, a better plan, or a better understanding. Otherwise you’re simply rehearsing your frustrations.
Ron Adams and the harder question
I’ve had the privilege of spending time with legendary NBA assistant Ron Adams on a couple of occasions during Summer League.
Both conversations have stayed with me.
The first started with what I thought was a simple question.
Why don’t more NBA teams play zone defense?
I expected an answer about spacing, elite shooting, or the defensive three-second rule.
Instead, Ron looked at me and said,
“A lot of coaches play zone because they don’t know how to adjust their man defense.”
I don’t know if he intended it this way, but it felt like a challenge.
That conversation sent me down years of studying defensive adjustments. Not because I became anti-zone, but because I didn’t want to use something simply to avoid solving a harder problem. I had a lot to learn!
“Looks like a lot of running.”
The second conversation with Ron left me with an even shorter answer to a question.
At the time, coaches everywhere were talking about a new pick-and-roll coverage called NEXT. It was becoming popular online, diagrams were everywhere, and coaches were debating whether it was the future.
We watch a few possessions of it at Summer League and I asked him what he thought.
He watched quietly before saying, “Looks like a lot of running.”
That was it.
Four words.
At first, I almost wanted more.
Then I realized I already had it.
I was evaluating the coverage from the whiteboard. Ron was evaluating it from the player’s perspective.
Not, “Does this work?”
But, “Can five players execute this possession after possession, game after game, month after month?”
Ever since then, every new defensive concept I study gets filtered through that question.
Basketball isn’t played on a clipboard. It’s played by tired human beings.
Coach the player in front of you
After Virginia won the national championship under Tony Bennett, I had the opportunity to ask their staff about closeout technique.
At the time, I had spent months obsessing over the smallest technical details. I expected an answer filled with footwork cues and biomechanical precision.
Instead, they surprised me.
Unless a player was truly struggling, they generally didn’t try to rebuild how he naturally moved.
Coach the player in front of you.
That conversation was surprisingly freeing.
As coaches, especially those of us who love film and details, it’s easy to become fascinated by tiny optimizations.
But practice time is finite.
The best coaches don’t just know what can be taught. They know what’s actually worth teaching.
“What do we have to do to win this game?”
One of the biggest lessons of my career came in the middle of a game.
I was frustrated because our defensive coverage wasn’t being executed the way we’d practiced it.
We burned a timeout. Made the correction. Went back out. Nothing changed.
I was getting increasingly frustrated when our head coach, Keith Kenny, finally looked at me during a somewhat heated back and forth,
“I know it should be working. But we need to figure out how we’re going to win this game.”
That sentence completely reset me.
I had become more concerned with proving our original plan was correct than finding an adjustment our players could actually execute.
We simplified. We adjusted. We won.
That conversation taught me something I still remind myself of during every game.
Toughness isn’t taught. It’s trained.
When I worked under Lee DeForest at Combine Academy, we spent a lot of time talking about toughness.
Like many young coaches, I thought toughness was a trait or could be summoned from the right speech, the right quote, or the right motivational moment.
Lee saw it differently.
He believed players often had no idea how tough they actually were. Their bodies were capable of far more than their minds allowed them to believe.
The answer wasn’t another lecture.
It was exposure.
If you want players to dive on the floor without hesitation, they need to dive on the floor every day.
If you want them to finish through contact, they need to experience contact every day.
If you want them to run through fatigue, they need to discover—again and again—that fatigue isn’t the end.
His philosophy was simple: desensitize the mind.
The more often players experienced something difficult, the less power it held over them.
That conversation completely changed how I think about toughness.
Toughness isn’t a personality trait. It’s not something a player either has or doesn’t have.
It’s a skill.
And like every other skill, it can be trained. And those were the toughest teams I had ever coached to that point in my career by far!
Coach your best players
Watching a Coach K practice at Duke left an impression on me.
Not because of a drill.
Not because of a speech.
Because of where his attention went.
He intentionally spent his time coaching his best players while his assistants handled much of everything else.
Looking back, I realized I had often done the opposite. I coached down the roster instead of coaching up it.
You could leave a practice feeling like you coached your butt off, but then you reflect, and realize who actually received your coaching… probably your worst players.
It seems obvious now, but your best players deserve your best coaching.
They’re the ones carrying the greatest responsibility every night. They should receive the greatest investment from you.
The question that started everything
The conversation that probably changed my life the most wasn’t with a famous coach.
It was with a fourth grader named Dylan.
After practice he walked over and asked,“Coach, can you help me become a better defender?”
12 years ago I didn’t have a good answer. That bothered me.
I couldn’t confidently answer one of the simplest questions a young player could ask.
That question stayed with me long after practice ended.
And quickly became an obsession.
Looking back, Lockdown Defense started right there, in that gym, with a 4th grader named Dylan and a question I didn’t feel I could answer properly.
The only conversation I chose not to follow
Early in my career, I attended a Jr NBA conference.
A respected coach asked where I was coaching.
“Middlesex, New Jersey,” I replied.
He smiled and asked,
“Well...what’s in Middlesex?”
His point was clear.
If I wanted to make it, I needed to attach myself to bigger programs, bigger players, and bigger opportunities.
It was good advice.
I just knew it wasn’t the career I wanted.
I’ve never wanted to spend my coaching journey chasing the next logo. I’ve wanted to make wherever I was worth noticing, make the big time where I was. I wanted to build programs. Develop players. Create relationships that lasted long after the season ended.
Maybe that’s slowed my career. Maybe it hasn’t.
But I’ve never regretted investing fully in the people and places in front of me. I have great coaching friends, great relationships with former players, and great places I’ve called home.
Looking back
As I look over these conversations, something stands out.
I think great mentors aren’t the people who give you the best answers.
I think they’re the people who quietly change the questions you ask.
I’m grateful for every coach, player, and mentor who unknowingly left me with one of those questions.
I’m excited to see what the next 12 years of conversations has in store!