Tyler Coston

Here are three simple things great basketball teams and players do that most teams are missing.

Everybody knows that it’s painful and hard to wake up at 6AM and get to work. We know it’s difficult to make 500 shots every day in a shooting workout. It’s painful and difficult to get in the weight room and tear up your body to build new muscle. It’s difficult and painful to study for a test. It’s difficult and painful to sacrifice your lesser desires for greater desires: to sacrifice sleep and hanging out with your friends.

Excerpted from a PGC/Glazier Coaching Clinic session in Los Angeles, CA. Tyler Coston spoke on How to Develop Leaders in Your Sports Program. Leadership is more than just doing the right thing.

There is a basic human instinct that is as old as ‘fight or flight’. When a person feels threatened or under pressure, our body automatically reacts with basic physiological responses. These automatic reactions can hinder athletic performance, if we let them. It is vital to understand how our body and our mind responds to playing under pressure so we can control those automatic responses and keep them from hindering performance.

I have studied champions at every level, and a few things have become obvious. Champions do simple things really well and have a ridiculous attention to detail. After examining these championship characteristics, I have put together what I believe are ten steps, essential, to athlete success. By themselves, these habits are not special. What is special, and very rare, is finding an athlete, that will close the gap between knowing these steps are essential to success and actually doing them, CONSISTENTLY.

We talkin’ about practice. Not just practice, we talkin’ about pre-practice. The champions approach to practice is to play with MORE focus, preparation and love than they do in games. Why? It’s more difficult to bring your passion to practice on a daily basis but the key to championship performance is to learn to master the boring and love the mundane details as much as you love to play on the stage in front of the bright lights.

Don’t waste time nearly every weekend this summer trying to get seen when you are not yet good enough. Get good first, then get seen. Play pick up with players that are better than you, do things you don’t get to normally do on your team. Stretch yourself to do things others won’t.

When a young athlete wakes up to instagram, eats with snapchat and falls asleep next to youtube, then their whole paradigm of what a basketball player is becomes what is captured in a loop of video. The hero is someone who can make others fall, a hero is someone who puts someone on a poster, and the loser … never be the loser who get’s made fail-famous in a video.