By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
In his recent EuroLeague blog on Coaches’ Corner, Pablo Laso comments on the importance of fun in the sport.
“For all of us, our first involvement in basketball came when we were very young. You get a ball in your hands, and you just want to play: take a shot, dribble and have a good time with your friends. You’re not even thinking about what you’re doing, and you definitely don’t feel any pressure – you’re just having fun and enjoying yourself.
Many years later, if you continue to play and eventually reach a high level, you will have other objectives whenever you step on the court: you have to play as a team, think about your defensive responsibilities, analyze the opposition… all these things. But you should never lose track of the fact that basketball is a game, or lose that starting point that made you want to play in the beginning: it should be fun for people to play, and fun for people to watch.
As a coach this is a very difficult balance to achieve, because you obviously want your players to focus on their role and do everything possible to win, but it’s very important because players can only deliver their best if they are also enjoying what they’re doing.
Your best comes from those moments when you are just playing. And although every coach talks to players about the importance of the game and the pressure of the moment, at the end of the day it’s just basketball. Even in the biggest games, you have two baskets, your teammates, the opposition, and the ball. That’s all the game is, and that’s not going to change whether you are playing in the backyard with your friends or in a championship game in front of thousands of fans. The important thing to remember is that when you’re having fun and enjoying yourself, more often than not you are also able to give your best.
This is the same in every job. If you go into the office every morning feeling tense because you’ve got a boss who is on top of you all the time, you’re probably not going to do a great job, because your best comes when you can be creative and have the confidence to work from your own initiative.
In fact, a lot of the time it’s a coach’s job to keep your players calm. If you’re playing for a championship, you don’t need to motivate your players; they’re already motivated enough to win a title. So if you’re playing a big game and something goes wrong, it’s easy for players and coaches to start thinking too much and make the game too complicated. So sometimes you just have to take the pressure off your players and tell them, “Hey, it’s just a game! Relax, just play! You shoot this shot thousands of times in practice and now you’re too tight, you’re thinking too much.” But this doesn’t mean, of course, that players can be too relaxed. For anyone lucky enough to be playing or coaching at this level, it’s because you started with fun, and then followed that with hard work over many years and now you reach the moment when you have to show a lot of people what you can do. So players have to be focused and understand the pressure, but they also need to have the freedom to just play.”
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