Building bonds with your players has never been more important. Gone are the days of coaches being tyrants, purely ruling by fear with their players. With so many other sports and extracurriculars vying for their time and attention, coaches must make sure players feel connected to the program they are in and to the coaching staff personally.

Organize Team Bonding: We establish a plan for our team to meet on a regular basis outside of basketball, most commonly as team feeds, but sometimes with fun activities like paintballing or going to Girls Athletics games together. Once the schedule is established, it is important for the coaching staff to be there and also be engaged in building relationships during the activity. At a team feed, the coaches shouldn’t sit together separate from the team, they need to mix in and loosen up a bit. They should be able to talk about things unrelated to their basketball team. They should be willing to joke around and be vulnerable. There is a big difference between just being present at an activity and being present but also engaged to building a relationship.

Utilize the In-Between Time: Everything can’t be planned in relationship building. The most sacred parts of life are not the big moments or the planned but the day to day regularities of life and routine. As a coach, you want to use those seemingly trivial times to relate to players and show a lighter side of you as a person. It’s the time between the end of school and practice, or randomly seeing a player in the hallway, or walking to our cars after practice, or while waiting with a player for a ride to show up. How those situations are handled go a long way to make your players comfortable and feel like you are approachable, and not someone who just yells at them and holds them accountable over basketball.

Be There For Them: In crises, big or small, players will remember how you handled things. Take the opportunity to be a mentor at all times. It could be little things like helping them get organized for an away game, or something bigger like a mental health issue. It could be offering them a ride (if you’re a female coach that is) when they are in need, or opening the gym to get some shots up. Of course you need to set boundaries for yourself and your family, but it will go a long way the more players feel like they can depend on you and trust you.

Help Them Get Recruited: If a player aspires to play beyond high school, we need to do everything in our power to facilitate that. We can get them connected with the right AAU team, call college coaches, make highlight reels, help them develop a workout plan—whatever it takes. We also need to be realistic. If a player has no chance to play after High School, and we’ve got outside evaluations that confirm that, we need to able to gracefully tell them that. This also includes monitoring and holding players accountable for their grades.

Have Formal Communication Times: We have two formal communication times throughout the season. The first is an exit interview after the season. This is where we sit down with each player visually to breakdown the season and develop a plan moving forward. We will find out a lot of interesting things in these meetings if we foster an open minded and comfortable conversation. I think it is key to players and coaching staffs to be on the same page. We go through a line of questions and then go through a document we call our “Curriculum Vitae.” This is a document that outlines all the fundamentals and skills from our Player Curriculum that go into a complete player. The goal of this document is to motivate, and to raise awareness of what it takes to reach their potential as a player. The second formal communication time is during tryouts. We call this the “Prospect Sheet.” At the beginning of tryouts, each player fills one out to evaluate their prospects for a rile role for the upcoming season within the program. Within the document, players tell us what level they think they belong at, and what kind of role they think they deserve. This document will uncover a lot of potential chemistry issues that could arise within a team. If we think a player might be our 8th player on varsity, and she reports that she thinks she is the best player on the team, there is going to likely be a problem with role acceptance. If there is anything alarming in a player’s response, it is a great time to have blunt communication in private.