I've been teaching a pre-season strength and conditioning class every morning at 7am. All of the basketball players freshman to seniors are in the class and I've been progressively making the workouts harder and harder each week. I use motivational quotes every day and I'm always looking for ways to push them. There are some great quotes to use from the clips below. The one I'm using on Monday:

"All men are created equal, some just work harder in the preseason." -- Emmitt Smith

If you haven't seen the original Eric Thomas, the hip hop preacher, secret to success motivational speech then take a look here,

Most recently, some people have put together a video montage of NBA players working out with Eric Thomas' words in the background,

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I know that it has been forever since my last post. It's been crazy since I was officially hired several weeks ago. Our football season has been in full swing and so far we are undefeated, picked to finish dead last in the entire province/state and we just went toe to toe with the number 4 ranked team and we came from behind to win the game.

Our basketball teams have been running open gyms the past several weeks and the topic of open gyms came up on the X's and O's forum the other day. Like many of you, open gyms are necessary to get players into the gym playing basketball. The first hour or so is generally pretty good, but then the second hour typically goes downhill and guys are mostly goofing off taking NBA 3-pointers and trying ridiculous circus shots.

Here is a summary of some of the ideas to add some more competitiveness to your open gyms and to make them more effective and relevant:

- play doubles, double the points for offensive board putbacks to emphasize rebounding (off and def).
- add points for taking charges, minus points for turnovers, etc...
- play to 3, but must win by 2 to emphasize defensive stops
- have a round-robin tournament, or king of the hill
- "validate" wins by having the player who scored the winning shot make a FT. Made FT winning team stays, missed FT and its live to next threshold. FTs again to validate, a made FT then winning team stays, a missed FT then both teams off.

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Coaches, just a quick update for you all. I haven't had a chance to put anything together this past week as I've been gearing up for my new teaching job at the school that I am coaching at. I just got the job earlier in the week and it has been quite the whirlwind of preparing our football team for our first game, helping organize open gyms with the basketball teams, and planing and preparing for 7 classes I have never taught before.

I had no idea after I left my previous teaching job in June when or if I would find myself a teaching job aligned to a coaching position at the same school, and 3 months later I am there. Coaches, I am here to tell you that if you are patient, and that if you put your head down and just take care of the things that are in your control, good things will happen.

So, the good news is, I can't imagine being anywhere else in the world, doing exactly what I love to do. The not so good news is, I'll be working harder than I could ever imagine over the next 8 months with football, school, then basketball, school. But I wouldn't have it any other way...

School is about to begin in a few days, cherish the last few days of summer, and I'll be sure to post something basketball related as I breakaway from the madness. I've watched a ton of videos over the summer that I've backlogged and been waiting to see, and I have a ton of fresh ideas in my head I'd like to hash out. Also, I will be going to the Basketball BC Superconference, where Alan Stein, the guru of basketball S+C will be one of the keynote speakers. I will be looking forward to meeting Coach Stein in person after following his stuff online for many years now.

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