Talking Split

Where would we be without the trusty assistant coaches? We explore how to find a good one, how to work with your assistants, roles and tasks for games and training, and who is responsible for getting the chair at the break!

It woudn’t be a long weekend without basketball, and the Labour Day long weekend is home to the U16 Combine, with nearly 100 of the best athletes from around the state vying for a position in the Country and Metro teams. We check in with Dom Linossier (U16 Metro Men) and Mat Holmes (U16 Country Women) to talk through the difficulty in selecting a team, what they’re looking for, how they get everyone’s opinion, and their mindset coming into a big weekend of basketball!

Everyone’s favourite podcast segment is back with 2 new contestants – Would You Rather? We throw a range of questions at the newly returned Jenni and Coops and discuss Jenni’s alter ego chess master skills, and Coops love for the move Father of the Bride. It took some weird turns this week.

It was the All State Camp in Bendigo last weekend, where our HP coaches added “photographer” to their PD with 300 plus kids to coach and take photos of! We talk to Zoe and Darren about what the content was, why it was in there, how it went, and what coaches at Club & Association level can be doing to give themselves and the players the best chance of success!

On the back of the U20 Championships and the Country Championships, we look through some of the things that coaches will need to consider for tournaments. There’s things like rest and recovery, knowing your fixture, what tech gear you need to have, and of course, how are you going to defend those pesky onball screens?

The Head Coach of Paris Basketball – Will Weaver joins us on the podcast this week, to talk all things coaching. We cover what pathways look like around the world, how you coach in a different country, assembling a team in the middle of a COVID pandemic, and what it’s like to travel the world as a professional basketball coach, whilst also balancing a family on the side. Will was incredibly generous with his time, and made us very welcome in a foreign country, and we can’t thank him enough for Talking Split with us!

And just like that, we are into February. But what happened to January? As it turns out, quite a lot. With East Coast Challenge (ECC), Australian Country Junior Basketball Cup (ACJBC) and Southern Cross Challenge (SCC) all running we have a look at how the teams and coaches went, and what the areas of focus are coming out of the tournaments. We also discuss the National Performance Camp (NPC) and what the key takeaways were from what the coaches saw.

Final episode for the season is upon us! We dive back into the listener mailbag and discuss how to impact defence without zoning in junior basketball, how to deal with a difficult opposition coach, how long to stick with an offence or defence before changing, balancing teaching and intervening in drills and some of the things we think could potentially improve the basketball experience for everyone! The information about Bio Banding is here for those interested: https://youtu.be/odcP9Grw6h0 A huge thanks to everyone who’s listened to the podcast over the years. It’s no lie to say we didn’t expect this sort of uptake when it first started, and we’ve just managed to tick over the 100k listens for the podcast, which is amazing support from the basketball community.  We will be back in the New Year with season 8, until then, please leave a rating, review, like, share, retweet and subscribe…

We asked, and like Postman Pat, you, the listeners, delivered. It’s Part 1 of the Talking Split Mailbag this week, with fresh off the plane Gold Medal winning Head Coach in Zoe Carr back on the podcast! We discuss questions like how to train your child who wants to get into rep, our most disliked drills, what should go into an Individual Performance Plan, what we can take from other sports to help basketball, and rebounding drills - valid or pointless? Part 2 of the Talking Split Mailbag next week!

After we went off on various tangents and ran out of time on the previous podcast, we thought we should head back into the senior coaching space and try and give some more information around it for the coaches out there. Turns out, we are going to need a Part 3! We look at preseason, team selection, how to progress players, and why we have senior programs to begin with.