Athletic Program Building. Episode 1

In this podcast episode, Gary Childress, a retired high school basketball coach, shares his insights on building and maintaining a successful athletic program. He emphasizes the importance of class, discipline, and integrity in representing the school and community. Childress also discusses the philosophy behind his team's playing style, focusing on aggressive defense and looking for easy scoring opportunities on offense. He encourages coaches to have a clear mission statement for their program and to constantly review and uphold their guiding principles. Overall, Childress aims to provide guidance and new ideas to both new and experienced coaches in any sport. Hello and welcome to the introductory episode of the podcast Athletic Program Building. My name is Gary Childress. I coached high school basketball as a head coach for 41 years. I recently retired. Those 41 years were spent in schools of varying sizes. I started at a school that was only a hundred students and then I ended up at schools that were close to 3,000 students and I had stops at numerous sizes in between. I'm doing this podcast out of a desire to hopefully help young coaches at the beginning of careers and also give veteran coaches some new ideas to think about, some new concepts that helped me over the course of those 41 years. My initial idea for the name of this podcast was building and maintaining a program of class, discipline, and integrity. That's too long of a title obviously for a podcast so I shortened it up a little bit. I do have to admit that the podcast will be a bit skewed towards basketball. However, it's my intent that there may be a good deal of content in here that will be relevant to coaches of any sport and I do believe that going through the size progression of schools has uniquely qualified me to do, to talk about, and to relate to coaches of every size of school. I'm also hoping there's some things that young college coaches can get out of these podcasts. Probably just about halfway through my career, I wrote on the board one night in the pregame locker room that we are a program of class, discipline, and integrity. It just came out at the time. The words seemed to roll off my tongue and certainly the words were something that I always wanted to have represent programs I coached. But as I continued my coaching journey, they took on greater meaning, more importance, and I was able to more succinctly define and flesh out what I meant by those words. Let me begin with class. I really always wanted people who came into contact with our program to say that we represented our school and our community with class. That included the way we treated each other, the way we treated opponents, officials, game personnel, the other team, anybody who was working the game, anybody that showed us to our locker room, etc. There was also a factor in trying to put my team in the best uniforms that we could afford at the time, travel warm-ups. I wanted them to feel like they were wearing classy gear. I tried to class up our locker room as much as I could, as much as you can class up a high school locker room that you only get to use for a few months and everyone else uses. I put logo mats on the floor for the players to stand on while they were dressing. I brought in chairs so they could sit in chairs and move the chairs around in front of the whiteboard as we were talking so they didn't have to just sit on the concrete slabs in front of the lockers. I put magnetic name tags on their lockers and put plenty of signs up around the locker room as well. Of course, we always expected classy behavior from our players in the classroom, the hallways, and the community as well. There were times when I would hear from someone via phone call or email that maybe one of our players wasn't progressing in that manner. We'd always sit down and have to talk about it and very, very seldom did I ever have to part ways with the player because he just chose to continue to not do that. I wanted our coaching staff to look classy on the bench. I always wore a coat and tie. I asked my coaches to at least wear nice slacks and a sweater. Of course, during COVID, we wore polos and slacks like everybody else did. Also, even before COVID, if we were at a preseason tournament at times, we would wear polos instead of coats and ties. Let me move on to the discipline piece now. I believe that living a life in a disciplined manner is one of the best lessons a young person can learn. We intended to help our players understand how discipline can help them on the court but also off the court. It's important in basketball and basketball as well as every other sport to develop a habit of doing the small tasks over and over again, whether it's boxing out in basketball or staying in a defensive stance. A couple of examples there. Discipline has been defined as doing what has to be done, doing it when it has to be done, doing it how it has to be done, and doing it that way every time. I apologize for not knowing who I could attribute that quote to, but I love it. It just applies to sports in a huge way. It's really also so much more important in life. As adults, we have to learn how to not cut corners. If we're hoping for sustained success and long-term success in anything, including marriage, raising children, and certainly our jobs. Of course, there's adults who never buy into that concept and eventually success that they have seems to fall apart. It's a lesson I've tried to teach young men who were in our program that discipline in their lives will provide them with the best opportunity to reach goals. Discipline in life is usually rewarded with success. The third of those three staples, integrity, defined as doing the right thing when no one is watching, of course. Everybody's heard that definition. It may actually be the most important of this trilogy, encouraging players to not do anything that would embarrass themselves, their parents, their school, or our program. We also talked to them frequently about the fact that you might get by with something doesn't mean that it doesn't make it right, that it makes it right. The intent was to help them develop a conscience that would carry them into adulthood, one that would make them great husbands, fathers, and employees. On another note, this also applies to the concept of giving to others without expecting anything in return. Finally, in addition to class discipline integrity, we also stress student leadership, excuse me, servant leadership. It's a concept that has long been part of our philosophy and we didn't really verbalize it until a little bit later. Little acts of doing things to your teammates, getting water during timeouts, for example, planted the seeds of doing more impactful things for others. Challenged our players to find a student in a class who no one ever talked to and then we asked them to befriend that student. It also carried over to keeping their school clean, serving their families, anyone else that they thought they could help. It was truly an intent of getting young men to place others before themselves, to think about the greater good of the whole. Certainly it's a concept that serves the team well and is even more important at the societal level. Those were some of the philosophical concepts that we tried to impart and those were the staples of our program. But speaking of philosophy, for what it's worth, our actual playing philosophy, the way I believe basketball should be played, was that we would play an aggressive, relentless, hard-nosed defense with all five players on the court working in harmony. They call it, they call it being connected today, I believe is the term that you hear most of the time on TV when they're talking about defense. All five players working together to make any shot taken by an opponent a difficult one. And then on offense, we're always going to look for an easy scoring opportunity. We would start with every time pushing the basketball, there would be, there would be a once or twice a game. I tell our point guard or our players to slow it down just a little bit, but most of the time we would always be looking for transition to the offensive end of the floor. And if that opportunity for an easy shot didn't present itself there, we'd put pressure on the defense with just a variety of techniques that would lead to hopefully finding an easy shot. And then none of this happened every time, obviously. Those were our philosophies, those were what we were looking to do as often as possible. Those were our general defensive and offensive philosophies. Whether your personal philosophy is for your sport and your style of play that you believe, make sure that it's clearly stated to your team. I was told once someone should be able to watch your team play and they would know exactly what you work on in practice. I took that to heart and it greatly bothered me if I felt that hadn't been evident in the game. I had an instance where somebody who I knew really knew basketball would say something like, you know, guys didn't guard tonight or something like that. They would give me the hard truth, harsh reality, and that really bothered me knowing how much we had worked on it. But most of the time people would, most comments would be that we certainly had put time in on the things that we held in high esteem. In addition to your playing philosophy, I believe every coach should consider a mission statement for their program if you haven't already. The mission statement I put together for our basketball program is that our mission is to be a partner in the development of young men, both on the court and off. The development on the court would take place where we would work tirelessly to improve their skills and decision-making so that they could be the best players they were capable of becoming and help us be the best team we were capable of being. More importantly, this development would also take place off the court where we'll help a student athlete understand their accountability, their responsibilities, and expectations as they mature in demand of character and continue their education. I think it's really important to have these guiding principles, not necessarily the ones I've shared with you, but your guiding principles for your program. It's important to share these with your players, but with their parents as well. It's also very important that you keep in mind at all times that you review your philosophies and your principles so that you're holding yourself, your staff, and your team accountable. I'd like to finish today's podcast by comparing a high school head coach to a high school varsity coach. These are not necessarily synonymous terms. One thing that I was always very proud of was that I believe we built a program and a program that valued every player in the program and really those players that tried out for the program. We tried to always value those young men. Lower-level opportunities weren't sacrificed for the varsity. It's important the head coach oversees the entire program. You're going to have sustained success if you want to build a program. I've known some head coaches who consider themselves just varsity coaches. They turned over every aspect of the JV, the sophomores, and freshmen teams to their lower-level coaches to the point where they show little regard for the players in those programs and what offense they ran, what defense they ran, whatever. I once noticed that a fellow head coach hadn't watched any of the JV game that preceded our varsity contest. When I mentioned something to him about it, his reply was that none of those players would ever play for him. I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped because that was the exact opposite of my philosophy. I believe that you have to build your program from within. You have to develop players at every single level, take great interest in every single level, and make certain that your coaches are operating in alignment with your philosophy. That's how you develop a program. I always tried to promote the concept that my assistants and I were all coaches of the basketball program and equals in that regard. We had different assignments within that program, but we were all coaches and as such should coach every kid at every level. At summer workouts, I expected the freshman coach to feel as comfortable coaching varsity-level players as I did coaching a freshman who was the candidate for the freshman team. I appreciate you listening today. In future podcasts, we will get more into the nuts and bolts of actually running the program. A lot of philosophy stuff today. We will also be giving you an email address so that you may be able to contact me and ask for some of the handouts that I'll be referring to as we go through this journey together. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be here once a week for about 15 minutes or so. Take care.