Promoting your basketball program might not be front and center in the minds of coaches heading into a new season. However, this concept remains an integral part to the long-term health of your program. Developing a culture of excellence that produces results on the court stands obviously as the most difficult part of a coach’s job. But branding can often provide that promotional push to get your program to the next level.
So the question becomes: how to promote your basketball program? The answer stretches from your school community to social media.
Promote Your Basketball Program on Local News Outlets
One of the simplest, and most time-honored, ways to promote your basketball program comes from providing key information to local news outlets. Although traditional media continues to evolves, local newspapers often rely on high school content to fill out their sports sections. This can be as simple as sending a schedule and roster to start the season, in hopes of regular game coverage.
Once the season starts, send statistics and game recaps after every game. This will help establish a rapport with the local beat writer covering high school sports and make your program more likely to be featured. Consistent coverage could get your program’s names in front of more eyes. This can also help expose talented players for potential college recruitment.
You can pitch unique ideas for potential feature pieces to promote your basketball program. And should the news outlet provide an on-site reporter, make sure you and some of your players are available for comment.
Promote Your Basketball Program Through Community Involvement
Another way to promote your basketball program is to have your players and coaches engage within the school and local community. Many students need service hours helping charitable organizations as part of school or scholarship requirements. Some schools are encouraging their student athletes to average 15 to 20 hours per semester helping community organizations.
Getting your players involved benefits them in that regard and it can help with team-building. Some of the options for community involvement include:
clothing drives
food drives
holiday toy drives
volunteer hours at homeless shelters
basketball clinics for middle or elementary school players
Engaging in these activities will provide a boost to team morale and help those in need in your community. Be sure to notify local news outlets for coverage to extend the promotional reach of these activities. Any feature pieces that come from these events showcase your basketball program in a positive light.
Clinics also provide a platform to introduce local young talent to your program and your coaching style. It cultivates a beneficial relationships within the local basketball community and may give you an inside track for up-and-coming athletes.
When possible and appropriate, your players should wear their uniforms or other team paraphernalia to help promote the program and demonstrate unity.
Promote Your Basketball Program on Social Media
Perhaps the best way to promote your basketball program these days comes via social media. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, even Facebook, provide platforms where teenagers and some parents remain active. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, surveys show that 90 percent of teens between the ages of 13 and 17-years-old use social media.
The best way to promote your basketball program on social media comes with consistent fan engagement. Some of the best ways to do this include:
Posting season schedules
Reminding fans of game days and encouraging fans to attend
Showing some of your team’s game highlights
If you’re not tech or social media savvy enough, or lack a comfort level with this platform, there’s no doubt the players themselves will have ideas of what and how to post. Perhaps putting this responsibility on a team manager or young assistant coach would work.
With social media, it’s important to be consistent and engaging with fans and your school community. Never go extended periods without posting on some platform. This engagement can be a fun and exciting way to promote your basketball program, and to do so on platforms where students and the school community will undoubtedly see it.
Basketball team building can be a difficult task. Whether a coach is looking for bonding events or building morale through game awards, building a positive basketball culture remains integral.
Developing a Positive Basketball Culture
A positive basketball culture is the first thing you will need to build a winning basketball program. You will need to fight for this every single day in every thing you do–from the weightroom to your open gym sessions. When you face adversity your culture will be able to overcome any negativity if you have a strong foundation.
Jon Gordon is a master teacher on culture and I strongly recommend you check out some of my favorite books of his–The Energy Bus, The Power of a Positive Team, The Carpenter, and You Win In the Locker Room First.
When you start to establish your culture and identity as a positive team, you will then need to establish some core values for your program. We stole ours from Alabama and Nate Oats: Max Effort, Continuous Learning, and Selfless Love. We even tied Bible verses into these so we can reach our players spiritually.
Our program spent some money and put some cool signage up to improve our facilities with these words all around it for our players to see daily. The important thing is, you must fight for these values daily as a coach and hold your players accountable to them!
We talk about these values daily and what it means to live them out on and off the court to develop the entire individual. A few things we do is ask a player at the end of practice or a weight room session to name a core value. Then we will ask them to tell us how one player on our team lived it out today and why. This gets our kids thinking about the values constantly!
When you are building your culture, you have to have players buy into your culture. One way you can do this as a coach is to have your players have some input. We asked our players to create a vision statement and standards they would like to live out daily that correlate with our core values.
One tip I got from a few experts on culture was don’t limit yourself when setting goals. For example: we want to win districts, go undefeated at home, and go to the State Tournament.
While those are great things, oftentimes everyone has those same goals. And what happens when you lose that first game at home? What happens when you don’t win districts but you can still advance? Or an even better question: what if your players do get complacent when they accomplish winning districts and going undefeated at home?
You can get complacent and think you achieved enough and you fall short of going even further than what you were capable of doing. So we made a vision statement instead that has seemed to really motivate our players to the next level.
They came up with the following: The FCS basketball team is a united group of brothers here to glorify Jesus through the game of basketball while exceeding the expectations of others, with the expectation to win everytime we step on the floor.
A few standards our players came up with through guided discussion include: Accountability, Communication, Elevate, Grit, Selflessness, and Servanthood.
Avoiding Burnout
Kids have to have fun with the game of basketball and so do coaches! Basketball is a long season, and in a lot of ways it’s year round with post-season workouts, summer, pre-season, and in season. One way to avoid any burnout is to celebrate little things. Celebrate progress in the weight room. Celebrate winning two games in a row in season. And celebrate simple things like winning a situational segment in practice!
Another tip to have a positive basketball culture comes with making time for relationships with your players. Something I got from T.J. Rosene at Emmanuel College and PGC Basketball is to write out the names of three players on your practice plan and have a meaningful conversation with those players that day. Mix up the names each practice and you will be able to reach all of your players consistently.
Use Your Assistant Coaches
As coaches we have to trust our assistant coaches–we hired them for a reason! A tip I want to suggest is to delegate your work and let your assistant coaches lead in some areas of the program. For example, in the pre- and post-season, my assistant coaches lead all my weight room and skill development days. As the head coach I serve as the manager and see the big picture.
My assistants will run everything by me and make sure it is in alignment with what we are trying to accomplish. This allows your players to hear someone else’s voice and allows you to save yours more so for the season! You also are helping your assistant coaches who want to move on to become a head coach one day.
I would also encourage you to write out other areas of your program you can delegate to your assistants. I really like the defensive end of the floor, so I call one of my assistants the “offensive coordinator.” We run a read and react/dribble drive hybrid offense, so I give him free reign out of that to come up with ways to improve our offense, drills, small sided games, etc. This also limits my film, as he will watch everything on us offensively and I will watch everything defensively.
I hope you found some useful tips and strategies that have worked for our program. Best of luck this season!
Coaches are great thieves. Resources, materials and terminology are often swapped online, at clinics, and even during basketball games. But where coaches can introduce the most unique elements comes in the specific development of a program’s culture. Building a basketball program comes down to what commitments a coach wants to make.
Building a Basketball Program
Coach Collins sat down with Coach Burton Uwarow to discuss building a basketball program. In this video on the Teach Hoops YouTube channel, the two went through the ins and outs of establishing an identity. This establishment involved specific commitments and focuses coaches need to consider when starting their programs.
Coach Uwarow, from Greenville, South Carolina, said the coaches he played for growing up and coached with greatly influenced his coaching philosophy. Uwarow also listed resources from Bob Hurley, Mike Krzyzewski, Pat Summitt, John Wooden and Morgan Wootten as significant influences as well.
Uwarow called commitment and passion his driving forces. He also acknowledged building a program also involves gathering resources. Supplementing budgets from an athletic department through fundraisers stands as an unwelcome but important task for any program.
Among the most important elements he named, Uwarow stressed organization, player discipline and parent-coach relationships.
