Post by rainman on Oct 17, 2007 5:41:38 GMT -5
Basketball: Coaching to personality
By Bob Hertzel
For the Times West Virginian
MORGANTOWN— On the surface it is the most simple of games, this American brainchild of Dr. James Naismith.
Five players to a side, one round, leather ball, two hoops hung 10 feet high with the objective of putting the ball into the hoop.
Simple? Yes, until coaches came along.
All of a sudden, there were as many ways to play the game as there were coaches to coach it.
“I think that’s what makes it such a beautiful game,” said West Virginia’s new basketball coach Bob Huggins.
He should know.
Bob Huggins, you see, finds himself caught up in a dilemma brought about by what he believes makes the game beautiful, a coach with a system who has taken over from another coach who ran a system based on an set of diametrically opposed values.
Bob Huggins’ basketball is to John Beilein’s basketball what Woody Hayes’ football was to Don Coryell’s. It is a Joel Zumaya fastball contrasted with a Tim Wakefield knuckleball. It is Cajun chicken compared with chicken broth.
Beilein ran a zone defense to Huggins man-to-man. He never pressed, while Huggins lives on pressure. Rebounds were a dirty word to Beilein. To Huggins they are an ode to the basketball gods. Beilein prefers back door cuts, while Huggins prefers to beat in your front door. Beilein lives off the three-point play, Huggins will intimidate you with slam dunks.
If you had just landed a spacecraft from another world, you would think the men were not even coaching the same game, yet each is considered a master at his craft.
How does this happen, two highly intelligent men taking such radically different approaches to reaching the same goal, that of winning basketball games?
“My background comes from my father,” said Huggins, whose father, Charley, is a former coach. “When you live in the same house with a guy for 18 years, you kind of start to look up to him and adopt some of his philosophies, whether you want to or not. So, I think most of my background came from my father.”
Beilein wasn’t the player Huggins was, having been a reserve at Wheeling Jesuit while Huggins was a captain at WVU. He didn’t grow up the son of a coach, but he got to watch games from a coach’s perspective and fell in love with different aspects of the game than did Huggins.
When he decided to take it up, it became a far more cerebral and far less a physically oriented game. Beilein believed in precision and execution, Huggins more in athleticism.
Which is right?
Both.
Beilein’s greatest strength is as a teacher of the game. Ask Rod Thorn, the former WVU star who now runs the New Jersey Nets.
”A lot of guys can sit down at a table and X and O, talk all about it, but most can’t touch John in his ability to teach it on the floor and get guys to do it,” Thorn said during Beilein’s first year at WVU.
“What he’s done with this year’s team is especially remarkable. They lost all their players, and he’s got guys who didn’t play last year, or weren’t big recruits — and it’s just amazing how they still carve people up.”
Much of how a coach evolves is environmental; much of it is inborn, an outgrowth of his personality.
Picture Huggins and you see a snarling task master on the sidelines. Picture Beilein and you see someone patting a player on the rump or having a quiet, yet stern, talk with him.
“I think the coach coaches to his personality,” Huggins said when asked where personality plays into the mix. “When you get out of trying to coach your personality, you really confuse your guys. If somebody came in and said I want to coach like Coach Calhoun one game, then one game like Coach Beilein, then the next game like whoever, your guys are looking like who is this guy.
“I think young guys go to clinics and they say, ‘I want to coach like Coach Knight.’ They come back and they try to run that motion and try to play that kind of defense and it’s not their personality. Then, when things don’t go well, they look at it and say ‘I should have been more like this or that.’
“I think the guys who are successful believe in what they’re doing, hence they go out and do the same thing every day. Hence, their guys believe in it. That’s a big part of it.”
Hence, as Huggins would say, you have Jim Boeheim at Syracuse coaching a 2-3 zone, you have Beilein with 1-3-1 zone and you have Jim Calhoun at Connecticut coaching a three-quarter-court pressure defense
It is true that there are times when a coach may alter parts of his philosophy, even if he would prefer not to. Huggins says he has certainly done it in his past.
“Honestly, we’ve played a lot of ways over the years because you don’t always have the guys who fit the system that you want to implement. So you change,” he said.
“I changed dramatically when I had Danny Fortson because Danny was so good at certain things. I didn’t want to take that away from him, and I thought that gave us the best chance to win.”
Danny Fortson was a star at Shaler High in Pittsburgh, something of a maverick who played three years for Huggins at Cincinnati, where he averaged 18.8 points and 8.7 rebounds a game before entering the NBA where he had a long, sometimes troubled, career.
In the end, though, a coach has to be true to himself, which turns basketball into a eclectic game and is why March has become such a wonderful time of year.
By Bob Hertzel
For the Times West Virginian
MORGANTOWN— On the surface it is the most simple of games, this American brainchild of Dr. James Naismith.
Five players to a side, one round, leather ball, two hoops hung 10 feet high with the objective of putting the ball into the hoop.
Simple? Yes, until coaches came along.
All of a sudden, there were as many ways to play the game as there were coaches to coach it.
“I think that’s what makes it such a beautiful game,” said West Virginia’s new basketball coach Bob Huggins.
He should know.
Bob Huggins, you see, finds himself caught up in a dilemma brought about by what he believes makes the game beautiful, a coach with a system who has taken over from another coach who ran a system based on an set of diametrically opposed values.
Bob Huggins’ basketball is to John Beilein’s basketball what Woody Hayes’ football was to Don Coryell’s. It is a Joel Zumaya fastball contrasted with a Tim Wakefield knuckleball. It is Cajun chicken compared with chicken broth.
Beilein ran a zone defense to Huggins man-to-man. He never pressed, while Huggins lives on pressure. Rebounds were a dirty word to Beilein. To Huggins they are an ode to the basketball gods. Beilein prefers back door cuts, while Huggins prefers to beat in your front door. Beilein lives off the three-point play, Huggins will intimidate you with slam dunks.
If you had just landed a spacecraft from another world, you would think the men were not even coaching the same game, yet each is considered a master at his craft.
How does this happen, two highly intelligent men taking such radically different approaches to reaching the same goal, that of winning basketball games?
“My background comes from my father,” said Huggins, whose father, Charley, is a former coach. “When you live in the same house with a guy for 18 years, you kind of start to look up to him and adopt some of his philosophies, whether you want to or not. So, I think most of my background came from my father.”
Beilein wasn’t the player Huggins was, having been a reserve at Wheeling Jesuit while Huggins was a captain at WVU. He didn’t grow up the son of a coach, but he got to watch games from a coach’s perspective and fell in love with different aspects of the game than did Huggins.
When he decided to take it up, it became a far more cerebral and far less a physically oriented game. Beilein believed in precision and execution, Huggins more in athleticism.
Which is right?
Both.
Beilein’s greatest strength is as a teacher of the game. Ask Rod Thorn, the former WVU star who now runs the New Jersey Nets.
”A lot of guys can sit down at a table and X and O, talk all about it, but most can’t touch John in his ability to teach it on the floor and get guys to do it,” Thorn said during Beilein’s first year at WVU.
“What he’s done with this year’s team is especially remarkable. They lost all their players, and he’s got guys who didn’t play last year, or weren’t big recruits — and it’s just amazing how they still carve people up.”
Much of how a coach evolves is environmental; much of it is inborn, an outgrowth of his personality.
Picture Huggins and you see a snarling task master on the sidelines. Picture Beilein and you see someone patting a player on the rump or having a quiet, yet stern, talk with him.
“I think the coach coaches to his personality,” Huggins said when asked where personality plays into the mix. “When you get out of trying to coach your personality, you really confuse your guys. If somebody came in and said I want to coach like Coach Calhoun one game, then one game like Coach Beilein, then the next game like whoever, your guys are looking like who is this guy.
“I think young guys go to clinics and they say, ‘I want to coach like Coach Knight.’ They come back and they try to run that motion and try to play that kind of defense and it’s not their personality. Then, when things don’t go well, they look at it and say ‘I should have been more like this or that.’
“I think the guys who are successful believe in what they’re doing, hence they go out and do the same thing every day. Hence, their guys believe in it. That’s a big part of it.”
Hence, as Huggins would say, you have Jim Boeheim at Syracuse coaching a 2-3 zone, you have Beilein with 1-3-1 zone and you have Jim Calhoun at Connecticut coaching a three-quarter-court pressure defense
It is true that there are times when a coach may alter parts of his philosophy, even if he would prefer not to. Huggins says he has certainly done it in his past.
“Honestly, we’ve played a lot of ways over the years because you don’t always have the guys who fit the system that you want to implement. So you change,” he said.
“I changed dramatically when I had Danny Fortson because Danny was so good at certain things. I didn’t want to take that away from him, and I thought that gave us the best chance to win.”
Danny Fortson was a star at Shaler High in Pittsburgh, something of a maverick who played three years for Huggins at Cincinnati, where he averaged 18.8 points and 8.7 rebounds a game before entering the NBA where he had a long, sometimes troubled, career.
In the end, though, a coach has to be true to himself, which turns basketball into a eclectic game and is why March has become such a wonderful time of year.
