The Work Before The Work

Every preseason starts with a plan. New players. Returning players. Different roles. Fresh challenges.

Like every coaching staff, we had ideas about how we wanted to play, what we wanted to establish and where we needed to get better.

But a plan and a team aren’t the same thing.

We can have systems, terminology, standards and ideas about how we want things to look. Eventually, though, the players on the court start teaching us what this particular group needs. That’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate more with experience.

As coaches, we spend a lot of time teaching. Sometimes we need to make sure we’re watching and listening too.

Preseason Is About Learning

We’re now nearing the end of preseason with the Hawks.

Our roster is together. We’ve spent countless hours on court at the Snake Pit, in the BaiMed weight room, watching film and having conversations. We’ve also had our first opportunity to compete against NBL opposition, including two games at the recent NBL Blitz versus Adelaide and Melbourne.

Those games matter. Not because preseason results tell us what will happen when the season starts. They don’t. They matter because competition gives us information.

There are things we can work on every day in practice that look completely different when another team is standing across from us. The speed changes. The physicality changes. Decisions happen faster. Mistakes get punished.

Sometimes we need to compete against someone else to learn something about ourselves.

Then we go back to work.

That cycle of teaching, competing, learning and adjusting is a massive part of the coaching process.

This Team Gets to Be This Team

One of the easiest traps in sport is comparison.

Two seasons ago, we won an NBL Championship. Last season, we missed the finals. There are lessons in both.

Success teaches you what’s possible. Disappointment forces you to ask questions you sometimes don’t ask when you’re winning. But neither season gets to define this one.

This group doesn’t need to recreate what we had two seasons ago, and it doesn’t need to carry the weight of what happened last season. This team deserves the opportunity to develop an identity of its own.

That doesn’t mean everything starts from zero. Standards, experience and lessons all carry forward.

But every team is different because the people inside it are different. Different personalities. Different strengths. Different relationships. Different voices. We can’t manufacture chemistry and we can’t copy culture from another group. It has to be built, and that takes time.

We Don't Need All the Answers Yet

Earlier in my coaching career, I probably wanted answers sooner.

Who are we? What are we great at? How exactly are we going to play?

Experience has taught me to become a little more comfortable allowing some of those answers to reveal themselves over the course of a season. That doesn’t mean lowering expectations or waiting around hoping things work themselves out. Far from it.

We coach. We teach. We challenge. But we also observe. We listen. We give players opportunities to show who they are and what they can bring to the group.

And sometimes we adjust.

Because our role as coaches isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to keep learning, contribute where we can and help give everyone in our locker room the best opportunity to succeed.

Now the Work Begins

On September 20, preseason ends and the real thing begins when we open our campaign in New Zealand against the Breakers.

There’s always excitement around that first game.

After two months of training against each other, meetings, film, conditioning, travel and preseason games, eventually you want the scoreboard to matter again.

Are we the finished version of what we can become? Of course not. We’re not supposed to be.

Good teams continue evolving throughout a season. Roles develop. Relationships strengthen. Systems become more instinctive. Challenges will arrive that we couldn’t possibly predict.

The past seven weeks have been the work before the work. Building foundations. Learning about each other. Teaching. Competing. Adjusting.

Now we get to find out what we can build from it.

Time to clock in.