Inspirational Quote of the Month
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires."
--William A. Ward


Quick Tip: How to Motivate Your Players
Here's a new and fresh idea to help you keep players motivated:

For a fun way to keep things interesting and provide a little motivation, try giving out rewards after games...

This is silly, but I used to give a Gatorade to players every time they took a charge and drew the foul during a game. This helped with "top of mind awareness" so they were often thinking about charges. But the players also had a lot of fun with it. One of the first things they'd say after games, with a big SMILE on their face, would be, "Did you see that charge coach? You owe me a Gatorade!"

Even at the high school and college level, you'd be amazed how such a simple thing like a Gatorade is such a big deal to young players. They seem to love taking a dip into the coach's pocket book. :)


Quick Tip: How to Develop Better Relationships With Your Players
Demonstrate that you care about players by showing a sincere interest in what they do OUTSIDE of basketball. For example, you could attend their choir concerts, soccer games, baseball games, or whatever they participate in. This will show them that you really care about them and will help you build a better relationship.


Announcements

• New Content -- In case you haven't noticed, we're adding new content to our website. The site will be growing quickly, and very soon we're going to add more information about fundamentals, player development, offenses, defenses, conditioning, nutrition, coaching philosophy, and more.
  
  
• New eBooks -- We're also working very hard on several new eBooks about various basketball topics that many of you have asked for. It's very time consuming, but we've made good progress, and we're making a big push to publish as much information as possible before the season starts for the majority of us. Keep your eyes peeled for lots of new stuff coming out soon.
  
  
• Free Content for Your Website -- Do you have a basketball or sports-related website? If so, drop us an email with your website link. We have a bunch of unpublished articles and content that we're providing to website owners. We only have a limited number of articles, so if you're interested, send us an email right away.
  
  Even if you're not interested in the articles, send us your link. We'd like to find out what our subscribers have for websites!
  
  

Here are some new plays, drills, articles, and tips:

• A Little Known Secret to Improve Team Passing and Dramatically Reduce Turnovers
  
  
• 6 Tips to Improve Passing and Reduce Turnovers
  
  
• NEW Drill: Middle Man Passing - This drill will overload players to help them improve passing speed, accuracy, strength, and confidence. If done properly, the middle player really gets a workout!
  
  
• NEW Drill: Pass and Switch - This drill is meant to simulate high speed, game like situations to help players improve passing speed and accuracy. It's also a lot of fun for players because it's fast paced!
  
  
• NEW Drill: One Hand Pound - This is an extremely challenging drill for players of all levels (including professionals). It improves dribbling, passing, hand strength, weak hand, and confidence.
  
  
• 5 NEW Ballhandling and Dribbling Drills, Tips, and Fundamentals - Lots of great stuff here for coaches and players. Learn the fundamentals and tricks of the trade!
  
  
  

We hope you enjoy the new tips and information!

If you have any suggestions or questions, leave us some comments on any of the pages above.

Sincerely,

Jeff and Joe Haefner