I Can Plan for the Opponent

Why the hardest part of coaching isn’t the other team

I just spent three days at the Idaho Shootout. More than eighteen games, back to back to back. I went to watch basketball and I got plenty of it, the shooting, the pace, the coaching, all of it worth the trip. But the thing I kept coming back to, the thing that stood out most by the end of the weekend, was not on the floor at all. It was the parents.

You have an answer for the other team’s side pick and roll. You have prepared your team for it with film, a walk through, and live reps. You compete for one game, you shake hands, and it is over. The other team, for all the trouble they give you, is also doing you a favor, because competition is how your players get better.

The parents are the matchup you have no answer for.

In season you have these kids two or three hours a day, six days a week. Contact time is not the problem. What you do not own is the moments. You do not get the car ride home while the game is still fresh. You did not get the years before they reached you. You do not get the offseason. And a single reaction from the stands can destroy a week of what you built in the gym, because a kid plays for a coach but needs a parent. That is not a fair fight, and it never will be.

I want to be careful here. Most of these parents are good people who love their kid and would run through a wall for them. They are not trying to undo anything, and that is what makes it hard to talk about. The damage does not come from the loud parent everyone can already see. It comes from the well meaning one who is watching the wrong game and does not know it.

You can hear which game they are watching. It is in their hands.

Watch a parent during a stretch of good basketball that does not involve their kid. A teammate hits an open shot. A kid they have never spoken to makes the right decision and finds the cutter. If the hands do not come together, you have learned something. The clap is close to a reflex, which is exactly why it is honest. A parent who only claps when their own kid scores is telling you that everyone else on the floor barely registers. And the kid feels it. They learn to measure the night by their own line, not by the win, not by the teammate who hit the shot they kicked out of a double team.

The louder version is the parent who has a reaction ready for every other kid’s mistake. A turnover, an open miss, and the sigh comes before the ball hits the floor. Think about what that requires. They had been watching the other kids all game, not to root for them, but to score them against their own. The teammate stops being a teammate and becomes competition. A child raised on that math comes to welcome a teammate’s mistake, when the instinct should be to pick that kid up. You end up with a player who is quietly fine when the other guy struggles, and that is poison to the one thing that turns a roster into a team.

The version that is hardest to watch happens right in front of you. You spend a timeout drawing something up. The kid walks back onto the floor, and before the ball is even inbounded, they get a signal from the stands. A parent miming a jump shot. You just told the team what to run. The parent has already decided the answer. Now the kid has two voices, and they are not equal, because one of them drives them home. A young player settles that conflict the way you would expect. They stop playing what the defense gives them and start hunting the shot that satisfies the seats. And notice what the gesture always is. Shoot. Nobody has ever stood up and motioned their kid to go set a back screen.

If you want to see what this does to a kid, do not watch the parent. Watch the player after a mistake. A kid who grew up in a stat chasing home does something small, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it. Before they look at the next play, before they get back on defense, before they look at you, their eyes go to the stands. They are checking a face. In that half second, the most important thing in the gym to that child is not the game. It is one or two people in the bleachers. No kid is born doing that. It is the sum of a hundred car rides, and you are watching the cost of it in real time, on a player who never chose it.

And it does not end when the game does. It does not even wait for the car. The recap starts in the lobby, and the long walk to the parking lot is a steady stream of woulda, coulda, shoulda from Dad, every possession reopened before the kid has even taken off their jersey. By the time they reach the car the night has already been graded.

And the table is worse, because the table is every night. Most nights there is no game at all, just practice, and the interrogation runs the same. Were you with the first group today? How did you shoot? Did the coach say anything to you? Who did you guard? A kid who just spent two hours competing comes home and has to compete again, this time to give an account of it, scoreboard or no scoreboard. The parents want the play by play. Who ran with the starters, who the coach pulled aside, what any of it means for their kid. The child learns that the people who love them most are keeping a tally, and that dinner is when the tally gets read back to them. That is a heavy thing to carry to school the next morning. It is a heavier thing to carry back into your gym.

A player recovers from a bad game in a day. Some of them spend the rest of the season recovering from the car ride home.

So what do you do about the matchup you cannot scheme?

You do the only thing you can. You coach the parents too, once, on purpose, before the season starts. Not the usual meeting about team dinners, fund raisers, and the code of conduct nobody reads. A real session that teaches them how to watch. Tell them their job in the stands is the whole team, not their own line of sight. Tell them the kid next to theirs is not a measuring stick. Tell them the bench coaches and the stands do not, which means no signaling, not once. And tell them the truth about the car ride home and the dinner table, that those are the most important coaching windows in your program and they belong to them, not you, so they had better decide what they are teaching there. If they remember one thing from the whole meeting, make it this. John O’Sullivan says the only thing a parent should say after a game is, “I love watching you play.” Five words, and they cover the lobby, the walk, the car, and the dinner table all at once.

You cannot make a parent believe any of this. You can only put it in front of them, clearly, one time, with their name on the sign in sheet. It will not fix the parent who needs their kid’s stat line to feel okay. Nothing you say will. But it takes away the one thing they get to hide behind, which is that nobody ever told them. And it gives you something to refer back to in February, when it counts. Remember the meeting.

You are done with the other team when the final horn sounds. The parents are there all season, and the season after that. You can scout a pick and roll. You can build a coverage for anything the other bench throws at you.

I can plan for the opponent. I cannot plan for the parent.

🦴 over cones