Lessons from School’s Basketball League

Arpita’s school’ Vivek High Sector 70; has started a new initiative where the parents will be involved in the school basketball league; as managers or as coach. This league will have three sections and each section has 6-8 teams. They play basketball among themselves and the aim is to build sportiveness with young kids.

I have volunteered to be coach of ‘Royals’; which is Arpita’s team. We had our first weekend matches and it was fun working with kids, motivating them, working out the strategy and rejoicing in their win. Trust me, it’s not a simple job to coach J

I learnt few lessons in this coaching work:

·         Kids Execute Really well: It was amazing to know that kids have excellent power to execute the plan once decided. Before both the matches we worked out a strategy and each and every kid worked as per the designed plan; be it was defender or point guard. It was told them that you need to guard couple of good shooters from the opposition and our defenders exactly did that. The kids switched their game as per the tempo of the situation; between defense and offence styles.

·         Strategy works: Another lesson for me is to notice that strategy works. During one of the games, we clearly laid out a plan as who should play what role in the overall strategy of the game. Due to this, we could able to contain the opposition. The plan was to contain school’s best shooters and the strategy was to deploy two guards who will watch those two shooters. It worked out so well that the shooting really struggled; while our defenders do this our offence took chances and did baskets to end in a winning note.

·         Kids express great emotions: Kids now a days show lots of emotions and bondage as a team. Imagine 8 year old kids discussing strategy with coach and coming back with suggestions that some part is not working fine.

Main focus area for me is to build the team spirit; if everyone thinks about the team and understand the role he/she is playing towards winning of the game; that is half job done. And I truly believe it’s a learning for the life.

I must appreciate school’s initiative to bring parents to the league and it’s amazing to be part of this. I am really enjoying my role and each day is a great learning experience for me to work with kids.