Tips for Coaching a Terrible Team.

Mid-season is quickly approaching and things may not be going as you had hoped. There are a number of reasons that this could be happening. You may have had a number of injuries, your team may just be under performing, or you might not be very talented. Injuries have a way of working themselves out and there are numerous articles on fixing an under achieving team. I want to focus on teams that simply are not good because the players are not skilled and athletic.

I have coached every level of sports from youth league to college athletics. I have also won just about every championship available to a coach including league titles, sectional championships, regional championships and more. I have also coached a handful of teams that I quickly discovered were going to struggle during games. It was never for a lack of effort or preparation, it was simply because they were not very good and there was not enough time during our season for them to develop the skills needed to be a good team.

There are four things that you can do to make your season a better experience for everyone and keep your team playing hard.

1.  Be honest with your team. Kids are smart. They know if they are not very good and you will have a lot more credibility with them if you say it out loud. Tell your team, “WE are not very good.” Use the word “we” so that they know that you are in this with them. Explain to them what you are going to do to help them get better and more importantly what you are going to do to help them be more competitive in games.

2.  Defense, Defense, Defense. The greatest equalizer in any game is defense. It is also the best friend of a team that is limited in skill. Defense is essentially the same in all sports and relies on one major factor: effort. If you have athletes that are good lacrosse players, but bad basketball players they can still play defense. As the coach you need to pound this into their minds. Make them understand that it is never alright to give up points. Teach them to remember and hate every time a point is scored on them. You will be amazed at the impact this attitude has on the final score.


3.  Quarters. If you coach a sport that plays an opponent only once per season, you can focus on quarters, periods, innings, or whatever the measurement is for your sport. Set a team goal for the game to win one quarter or three innings. Set a goal that is attainable for the team.

4.  What is a win? A couple of years ago I was coaching a middle school girls basketball team that struggled. We had managed one win, competitive in a couple others, and were destroyed a number of times. Our final four games were against teams that had already beat us by an average of 24 points. That is a lot in middle school basketball. I walked into practice the day before the first of the four games with a whiteboard. It listed all four opponents and the margin of victory of the first game.

I told the team that we probably weren't going to win any of the games and that was ok. The important thing was to show that we had improved more than any of these teams. On the whiteboard was a third column labeled Win/Loss. I told the team that if we lost by a closer margin of victory that we were calling it a win. At first they thought it was silly, but what it did was make them play their butts off in the fourth quarter. They became a team that was diving for loose balls, while being down by 15 points late in the final quarter. They embraced the idea so much that in our final game they were down by 11 going into the fourth. That was the margin of the first game. To start the quarter, I told them win the quarter and win the game. They played so hard that the other coach had to call a timeout because we cut the lead to three with two minutes left. We didn't win the game, but we definitely won the battle and this group of kids improved more than you can even imagine.

The reality is that very few teams truly compete for their league title and if you coach kids that are JV or younger, it doesn't even matter. The focus should always be on getting better and being the best athlete and team that you can be. If you truly believe this than you can have a team that goes 3-10 and honestly call them a great team.