EP153: The Gold Standard with Don Showalter

[MUSIC] This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball. Within this podcast, we unpack how an ecological dynamics framework impacts our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, this is the podcast for you. [MUSIC] All right, so welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Today's guest is Don Shawalter. Don has over four years of high school coaching experience. He has worked with the USA Basketball Program for over 20 years now and has never lost a game with USAB. Winning then gold medals as the head coach. He has coach NBA stars like Jason Tatum, Anthony Edward, and Jalen Suggs just to name a few. Coach Shaw also runs Snow Valley Basketball Camp, being recognized as one of the nation's best basketball camps for teaching fundamentals. Welcome to the show. Glad to be here. George Knight, you have a wide range of listeners, so I'm happy to be on your podcast Transforming Basketball. So first question I have for you, for coaches coming into maybe taking a new job. I know the high school seasons just starting at the time of recording anyway. How do you establish your standards over rules? How did you do that with USAB? And what is a practical step that coaches can take instead of being a dictator to more of a player led? That's a great question. First of all, standards to me, standards to rules are completely two different things. You know, standards are what you try to attain, what you try to reach for. Rules are put in place more for things that you really want to restrict. So rules always have a negative connotation to me. Standards have something that's very positive. For instance, you have a rule they'd be on time. Or you can't, don't be late. That's the thing. I might be your rule. A standard would be you show respect for everybody and everything. So the respect factor comes in, hey, I'm going to be there on time because I respect my coaches. I respect my fellow teammates. I'm not going to make them wait on me. So the standard is, you know, respect as opposed to don't be late type of thing. I think what happens too often is coaches and players too, but coaches sometimes give a standard and then don't hold players accountable to that standard. It's just like you run in a drill and you have to get maybe 50 layups in a minute. That's your standard. So you don't get 50 layups in a minute. What do you do? We do lower our standards. Our standards stay the same. What we're trying to do is we redo it and have the players raise their standard level to get to what we want done. So I think that's very, to me, that's a really important aspect of building your culture, trying to get your program to where you want it to is identify standards you think are important and then do everything that you can with your team to uphold those standards. What I'm here, you say, is that hold players accountable to those standards. Otherwise, they cease to be a standard essentially. Right. Exactly. You know, if you change your standards, that's more of a mood change. That's not a state, you know, okay? Yeah, I feel we want to have a big game last night. You know, maybe our standard is a little more lax today. No, your standards are the same regardless. Whether you're losing or whatever it is. Yeah, the importance of having that, you know, really good access. I want to talk about snow valley a little bit. Obviously I had the pleasure of being there for two of the sessions. You run four sessions every summer. And I loved it. It was incredibly intense. And you know, we're up at the break at dawn pretty much 5.45 am. I believe we have to kind of report. But my point is, you know, afterwards, everyone and not just myself, but just speaking with everyone, everyone's so charged up and they could go again. And my question is, how do you, you know, build this environment where there's fun? People are getting better, both coaches and players. But then everyone feels rejuvenated instead of burned out. You know, that's an interesting point because I generally don't ask players like all the last day, what do they like about snow valley? Because they're so tired and I'm not sure. So I always wait for about two or three days and then you get a lot of positive comments about everything. You know, I think part of it is, first of all, the staff who we hire, including yourself when you work, but the staff we hire is so important. You know, they provide the energy. And then we really try to emphasize bringing enthusiasm and passion every day to you. And that's not only true with snow valley. I think that's true there with your team every day. You know, you have to really come prepared to bring that enthusiasm, passion to your team just like you do snow valley basketball camp. And then your players feed off that. And then the players know you love the game. And if you love the game, that transfers over to their love of the game. You know, when we first started, we just finished our 30th season of snow valley basketball school last year. And it all skill development. You know, we play a lot of short-sighted games to emphasize our habits with our skills. But I think when we first started, many people said, "Ah, you know, this is just acting to fly. Kids that I want to get up early, you know, long nights." Some kids are done playing games. They'll 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night. Coaches won't want to work it. You know, we've got a lot of negative vibes coming before we ever started. So Jerry Slykowski and myself, we said, "Yeah, well, we're going to play." We think it's a really good Midwest camp. And 30 years later, we sell out 375 to 400 kids per session for four sessions. So I think the basis of snow valley basketball schools, first of all, the staff that we get, secondly, is how they perform, how they function with the kids. The kids know that the staff cares for them. And the kids know that the staff really cares about their getting better and their improvement. The kids feed into that. And they have tremendous enthusiasm as well. Yeah, and I remember, you know, a few of the coaches lost their voices just because they're cheering on the cab and it's just so much fun, so much excitement in all the games. And you know, mind you, we're up, you know, it's like 16, 15, 16 hour days. Two games, two small side of games that I love. One, I, you know, used already before going there, but that you guys do every year's cutthroat. I think that's an awesome game, you know, for coaches listening. Three on three, if players don't do something that is part of the rule of the game, like say they, you know, they, what was one of the, we always start with those three rules last year. Do you remember the kids who swept the basket? The second rule was you have to move after you pass. The third rule is you always turn to thank the pastor after a made basket. Yes, yes. So like they don't do that. It's a turnover in that teams off immediately. And that's a game you know, you can all, you know, coaches can change the constraints. And then another one that I learned while I was there was the brave heart one. And that one is just so much fun for a dynamic start. Typically it's just, you know, often starts on the baseline, defense starts at the half court line. And they have to sprint yelling as loud as they can, you know, to the opposite side. And then the ball gets passed into the offense at the half court. And it's playing from there. And that was just so much fun. I think that's where guys lost their voices. And you know, Kenny Spielbauer and Chris Kern do a great job with the other division too. So that's a fun way. You know, you talk about, you know, kids enjoying the game. Well, you know, they enjoy those kind of competitive aspects of the game as well. So you throw that in with your skill development stuff. I think it really makes a nice camp. But also then you talk about standards. You know, the standard that we have, we uphold is, you know, we have very, very few problems with the dorms. We have very few problems with anything really because we said, I standard. And if you don't come with the high standard or fulfill it, we let you go out of the camp. But we don't get very many out of all. Absolutely. I remember we had the pleasure of meeting when I was moving to Slovenia to learn about coaching at the time. And you were one of the mentors we had. And I remember, you know, coaches should be five things. They should be teachers. They should be authentic, organized, humble and adaptable. Why are these five keys so important to you? And it came up with these five different things several years ago after I would watch coaches perform. Or you know, I go to practices and react. Try to put in a bucket five different things that I thought good coaches really did well. And, you know, the organization, the humility, those kind of things suck out to me as well. But I think when you look at what great coaches do and the longevity that coaches have in the game, I think these five things really kind of tell the difference between being a good coach, great coach, and maybe just a coach who is dabbling in the coaching profession. I really, not really maybe serious about becoming a better coach. I think of those five you mentioned. I think humility is probably the one that I would say has the most impact on coaches. Because and players, Jay Wright, I always had a great example from Jay Wright watching many of his practices. He just kept saying, you know, if you are a humble, you're going to cheat or the ones that humility leaves, you're done. You're not going to learn anymore. And he might as well get out of the game. And he said that to players too as well as well as coaches. So I think that humility part is something that we all try to do, no matter how many years we've been at the game, we always want to learn more about the game. Because there's always more to learn. And so I think that's a huge factor in coaching and good coaches to be coming really good coaches. Absolutely. And in terms of humility, what does that actually look like? Is that when you're doing a game or a drill with a player and they say, "Coach, I don't like this. It's not fun. I'm not enjoying it." Is part of being humble also working with your players and saying, "You know what, that's fair enough. Let's see what else we can do with this to make sure that you're both having fun." And obviously still getting developed, putting the work in. Well, I think as a coach and you're an example, what does humility look like? I think from coach's standpoint, humility looks a lot or is a lot about asking your players, talking to your players, getting their viewpoint. Because we learn from our players, probably more than we learn from maybe other coaches. And every team is a little different. And so I always try and make a point of conversing with my players. And what Dad does, first of all, develops trust because your players trust you. That you're trying to do what's best for them. And you make a point of saying, "Hey, you give me some information, some ideas. And I may use it or I may not, but I'm willing to make sure that I can do it." I'm sure that I decide for what's best for our team. And so that builds that big trust factor between you and the players. Once you have the trust of your team, once you have the trust of your players, basically they will do anything for you as a team as a coach. So I think of many different standards we have. The trust is probably the most important. And then right after that is caring. When you learn from your players, which I try and do all the time, take advantage of what they think. Because they're out there on the court, really diagnosing the game as well. They have a sense of, "Hey, you know, coach, try and really do what's best for us. It's a team and to me personally." And I might venture on with this. When I started coaching international basketball, I think one of the things that made me a much better coach, coaching international basketball. Similarly because number one of the rules are different. And so I had to do a better job of coaching because our kids couldn't call time out. When I got down to 10 seconds, we had a 24 second shot clock. So the game was a much more of a fast paced players game than what we have here in the United States. And I just think that substitution, 24 second shot clock, are two things that made me a much better coach, coaching international basketball. I agree with that. The shot clock, I think, to me is such a big one. I want to move on, pivot a little bit. You said players never graduate from skills. And I remember, I think the example you gave me was, you know, a step just because Steph Curry is the best shooter, doesn't mean he gets to stop working on his shooting ability. If anything, he works harder than anybody else. Yeah, like, can you just speak about that? Yeah, first of all, I think, you know, to me, there are really two types of drills that are important in your coaching as you coach. First one is I do think you have to build habits with repetition, especially with young players, 79, 10 or less skilled. They got to develop their left hand. They got to develop shooting. And then as they get more proficient in their skills, they you had what I call decision making or constraint drills to find out really how much better are they getting in their skill, their skill work. So I think those are two types of drills that coach really need to make sure that they have with all their practices. So now you revert back to all right, for instance, I coached to Jaylen Green, great shooter. But Jaylen was always one that said, you know what kind of Steph Curry, I'm not going to be satisfied with just doing what I'm doing now. I want to get better with more practice on shooting. So I'm going to work on my one dribble pull ups. I'm going to work on my left hand dribble pull ups. So there's always something you could do to enhance your skill development. Not thinking that I'm good enough. I don't need to do it anymore. And so with players that are like I've been able to coach with USA basketball, we may do the same drill we did with my 10 year old team, but we do it for like a minute as opposed we do it for 10 minutes with my 10 year old team. So we may do a pivot drill. We'll just I call that, you know, we kind of refresh the drill, we fresh this skill. We get about it. We're, you know, we're working on that skill, whether it be rebounding shooting, passing, whatever. And then make sure we do that. I think one of the things that I really emphasize to coaches and I've learned through my own experiences. It seems like my team has always got better as a season one on. And you know, I talked a lot of my assistants and we kind of came to the conclusion that some of that was because we still worked on skill work throughout the whole year. But I just going to work on working on our team defense or team offense the whole time. But we're going to have some segment practice continue to work or refresh our skill work. And so that comes into play with, you know, you're never quite good enough that you say, I don't have to work on these skills anymore. You know, it's not like Steph Curry gets a deployments says, Steph, you graduated from the shooting work. So you never have to work on shooting anymore. You know, the peace to it is paying, you know, I still have to continue to work on shooting and keeping the habits that I've learned, Bob becoming a shooter, refreshing those every every time. So I really think that's an important piece that maybe coaches forget as a progress throughout the season. I remember you said one thirds like set the practice skill development off team offense team defense. And to this day, I still use that kind of tablet now structure my practice session. You said earlier, you put the third, let's see, have an hour practice. You have 20 minutes and skilled at the battle. You may not. You put five minutes to the beginning practice five minutes in the middle practice. So you just push skills skill development pieces to, you know, doesn't have to be like all in one chunk. So and specifically you mentioned, you know, a little bit of, you know, Jalen green more specifically when you're focusing on decision making in small side of games, let's say during the USA be training camp for pranks that you have. Do you have a go to drill that immediately reveals which players can make reads on the pressure. Well, I think the main go to read for us is our cut throat, you know, because you're doing those type of things in a game like situation under kind of intense situations where you got to make reads and you have to make good passes and you have to move after you pass and those kind of things. I think one of the things that is really good and I know Alex really, really well we talk about this from the these are restrained pieces of the game, but I think you keep adding restraints to like the cut so drill. In other words, all right, you have to shoot within 10 seconds or you add a fourth defender later. So in other words, you start out for on three and then you added fourth defender maybe after a pass. And so you're making, you know, sometimes basketball is not a pretty sport. It can be ugly, which is OK. I mean, that's what that's what happens in the game sometimes. The decision making drills to me are huge factors in developing your going from skill development into decision making restraint drills that you do in games. And so I think it's important to coach understand I have to have both types of drills or to make my team better and you do that with you are two dribble limit. You put two dribble limit with your cut road and you can put every player must touch the pass touch the ball before a shot stinking. You know, you must have a pay touch before you can shoot it. So you can add all different kinds of things to what you want done. And I think cut road is a great way to do that. Also three on three is a huge factor for that. And deal with our USA teams. We do we play some we play a lot of three on three and I would encourage coaches that are listening. If you don't have three on three is part of your practice session. You need to instill that fire 10 minutes in practice and not only does it give you great decision making skills. You can see exactly what skills you are deficient at. So let's say it can has trouble with this weekend left hand these views right hand is trouble left hand. I mean, that's you can pick that up immediately three on three. So now you go back and say, OK, we got to do a better job of working with our left hand because that's hurting us in our offense or three on three work. So I think you can evaluate really well your ability to skill development. How your skills are like you can really evaluate that in the three on three four or four situations. You know, three things that we emphasize in our half court offense, which is really our half court offense for my 10 year old team coach and my grandson and then also you will with our junior national teams. You have to have a great spacing and three on three four and four gives you great spacing. You can see that players can see great spacing. Secondly, I think that you really need to have paint touches. So we ever says get into the pain, kicking a ball out, put pressure on the defense that way in the third thing ball reversal. You get more reversals kind of interesting because we've charted a lot of stuff obviously coaches do, but you know, every time the ball gets reversed in the game. basketball on your offense, your shooting percentage goes up about 8%. If you just come down the floor, keep it on the same side and shoot the shot without ball reversal, we shot about 38%. We get to all swung one side, it goes up to 8%, about 46%. You get swung back to the original side, another 80%, about 54%. So that's, you know, we, and that goes with our U16, U17, U18, U19 teams that we, that I specifically work with. So you get a good picture of, hey, you know, we got to get this ball ball. You're, you can do it in a lot of different ways. You ball reversal to paint touches and kickouts, all by the sides of the post, you know, to baseline drives and hammer passes. But once that happens, you, you get a good feel for the shooting percentages that you get. And players, then they can buy into those things because they can see or resolve that. Yeah. That was great. That was a lot in there for coaches. I think it's a lot harder to hide in 3 on 3. I think since you, you know, since we kind of work together or you showed us, you showed us a lot of some presentations and a lot of different kind of what you could do with 3 on 3 that builds into your actual offense, given us a lot of different ideas. I remember. And it's, you know, I'm just a huge proponent because I just truly believe you can do anything that you're working on in 5.5 and a more simplified version in 3 on 3 into your point, you know, you can't hide. So players are going to have to be forced to dribble with their left hand, make the reverse pass and everyone's involved. Like in 5 on 5, you can get away and hide in the corner, maybe. You don't not sure. Oh, but that's not going to happen in 3 on 3. You know, you count of building of players in 3 on 3, holds your players accountable. You know, hey, can they pass? Can they use your left hand? You know, so I think it's a good way to have your players understand you. If I'm not a very good passer, it should've helped a lot. And then you as a coach can relate that to them. Hey, look what happens. We play 3 on 3. It's the same thing. And I want to ask you as well, you know, you work with young kids. You've had tremendous success doing that. And one of the things that I've read while doing research was the 7 second communication rule that you have. And I think this is partly because you don't want to talk too much. And then they just kind of stop listening to you. You know, what does this 7 second communication rule look like? I mean, 7 seconds is really quick. Like talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. You know, I think I read an article or somebody sent me an article that they did some tests with adolescents and compared it to goldfish. And they just found out that 7 seconds was about the max. The focus for adolescents was as compared at goldfish, this room around a bowl. They can focus on a room around a bowl. Finds that for 8 seconds. So it's almost like goldfish have a longer attention span than adolescents. So yeah, I took that and good friend of mine, Kevin Easton, who's a great friend of mine. But he and I have talked about this at a length. And he always talks about teaching sound bites and not paragraphs. So when he was working with the cellics, you would just give little sound bites as opposed to, hey, this is how you should do a blah, blah, blah. You know, so the players get used to hearing sound bites such as, you need to say, Lord, you need to look like a basketball player. Keep your knees bent. And you have different phrases that you remind players of, you know, all the time. Everybody knows what a basketball player looks like. They have their knees bent, you know, they're wide. So you get as a coach, I think that's one of the, that's one of the things that allowed me to become a better coach is my terminology got better. And so when I taught players, my terminology was much better. I could just teach in like sound bites. So, you know, for instance, Jay, Jay, Jason Tatum was, you know, he may not have been the best player I coached at 16 or 17, but he probably wanted to become the best player. He was very coachable. And so I would always tell him, Jason, you're not ever going to get much better unless you play with your knees bent. And when you catch the ball, you're standing straight up. So my terminology to him was, hey, catch the ball, look like a player, catch the ball, look like a player. So you're teaching in sound bites, not stopping him, not stopping the whole group to teach your teaching in short sound bites. I think to me, you know, I call out of Kevin Easton ism. But to me, that made me a much better player, is I progressed to my coaching career and work with really high level players. I agree. And I think just knowing the terminology from me anyway, from my perspective, helped me tremendously. So instead of having to, you know, a teleplayer to play off their man and be in the gap, right? Like me knowing now that I can just say gap, gap, it's so much easier for me as a coach to know where they should be, what it looks like with that one word. And it just helped me tremendously to even understand the game, you know, just adding terminology to things. Well, I think what that does to, and you raised a great point with it because I think what that does is it allows your practice to have a great pace to it. Not stopping practice all the time to correct. You know, there are times where you have to, but I think to me, the better coaches that I watched throughout the years, you know, and that's part of that, you know, organization, humility, adversity, you know, coming up with being who you are type of thing. But I think that really paces where you really want to keep your practice adding. So you don't stop it and you don't explain it because that really takes pace, takes time off the, you know, for your practice session. So to me, the best coaches do that really good. Yeah. And the game's not like that, right? The game has like that system pace, yeah. Exactly. I want to ask, how do you help coaches navigate this eight year old plant guard problem when comparing and coaches who are obsessed with position and rankings rather than just developing these young kids and making sure they're having fun and coming back to keep playing the game? Well, as long as there's people out there who rank kids, that's going to be a problem. And that's not going to go away because that's how people, that's how rapies, you know, that's how they make their money. And so you put that into it. But it's interesting because to me, and I think to a lot of our coaches that work with USC basketball, we have learned a lot from the international game. From a standpoint of, you know, I think we do a poor job, but I talk about this all the time. I go to coaching clinics, is we put our players in a box, your point guard, your your two guard, your three guard. And I still find myself doing that, but now it's more one of the things we look forward players when I go evaluate players, one of the main things I look forward is versatility. How versatile are the players? Can they play more than one position? Not only can they play more, but can they guard more than one position? So it's a big, can you guard in a switch? Can you guard a smaller player? So to me, international game has really influenced our game in a positive way, the standpoint of, you know, we're done putting players in boxes. And when I talk to a parent about that, and I have a lot, I say, the main thing is not that your player is a point guard, is he a basketball player? Can he play the game of basketball? And so that's my quarter of emphasis to anybody I talk to that comes to me and say, you know, I'm my, I got an eight-year-old kid. It's probably the best point guard in, you know, in our county, whatever. Well, you know, I always say, well, can he play basketball? And so I think that phrase itself has helped me as a coach relate to people that can easily understand the fact that, you know, it's not just a point guard, it's not just a post-player, it's not just a, you know, form and he can he's a, can he play now? And how you do that, and it's all right, let's play three on three. Let's see how I can play. There's no point guard in three on three. So you know, you go back to your constrained drills, your decision-making drills, and you don't have that situation as much. So I really think that's, you know, I look at Look at Don Chick, he's a point guard right now. He's doing everything, bringing about the court for Lakers, you know, type of thing. So I think our game in the States has kind of gotten hopefully a little bit away from putting people in boxes and where positions are in the court. Yeah, I remember my first coach Scott Galloway, he would always say, yeah, you know, you're playing the four, but you have to know all the positions because you never know today you're playing the four, but maybe next season you're at the one. So he made it a big emphasis to like, okay, you do have a role on this team. This is the position you'll be playing on this team, but your development is important. You have to know all the other positions. And of course, at practice, we would, you know, do everything so I was able to bring the ball up and dribble and just have fun with it. That goes back to the fact that, you know, T-Shall players all skills. As you could coach in a T-year-old team, you might have at that age, you're going to, you're going to have a player that's probably head shoulders about everybody else. Yeah, so what are coaches do the one-of-win games? You're going to put him in the middle of the zone. They're going to play a middle of defense playing zone. You know, he's not going to be so now let's go on three years later. He's still the same height everybody else caught up to. He has no skill. Yeah. Well, my point is you teach all players all skills from that point. That's a great point. Yeah. Coach, I want to thank you so much for your time. It's been great to just catch it up and talk until you again. I have one more question for you before we let you go. And then the transformative tip question we ask this to everyone. And it's, if you could leave coaches with one piece of advice that would instantly transform their practice environments. What would that be? - I don't know, but it instantly transformed their practice environment. But I always say, you know, you as a coach, you need to break two things to practice every day. I don't care what kind of day you've had, and you know, if you've had a tough day in the office, if you've had a tough day with administration, if whatever, but when it comes to practice, you better bring enthusiasm, and you better break passion to the court. If you don't do that, your practice probably will not be very good. And so I always say, I've said that in relationship to that, I've said, "Players really don't have bad practices. "Coaches do." And so if you come with that enthusiasm and passion for the game, your practice will be okay. You're gonna be good. If you don't bring those two things, if you just come with the bad attitude as a coach, or bad body language as a coach, and we talk about bad body language with players, but bad body language as a coach is the same. If you come with that, your practice will probably not be very good. No, excellent. Thank you so much, Don. Well, thank you. Appreciate, obviously, a lot of respect for what you do, and for what Alex does, so more than happy to be on any time, and continue to get luck with what you do, and your family there in Brazil, it's awesome. Thank you so much. (upbeat music) Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, head to transformingbeball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. You can also connect with us on Instagram, X or YouTube, with any questions that you have from the episode. See you next time on the Transforming Basketball Podcast. (upbeat music)