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For whom do you play? Simplify. Don’t play for a coach, your school, or your community. Play for the girls next to you. They deserve your best.
And that means asking hard questions of yourself.
- What are you good at?
- Where can you improve?
- What’s your plan?
Have a written plan. Monitor it. Adjust accordingly.
Skill Development (Technique)
- Creating your shot and separation
- Playing without and with the ball
- Ending possessions (stops and scores)
“What is your varsity skill? What gets you on the court and keeps you there?
Find your four ways to score. Making free throws should always be one of them.
Coaches seek players they can trust. Earn that trust with good decision-making.
Basketball IQ (Tactics)
- Creating and limiting advantage
- Film study
- Learning to adjust to opponents
A key part of BBIQ is knowing what to do, attention to details, knowing your job and others.
Impact the game as both a communicator and a connector. Adding value to the team is an intangible.
Real-time “reading plays” comes part of the “CARE package” – concentration-anticipation-reaction-execution.
Physicality (Strength and conditioning)
- Conditioning (ultimate measure is VO2max)
- Quickness to separate and to contain the ball
- Explosiveness
Don’t get in shape. Be in shape.
“Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a small, circular, double-stranded DNA molecule located in the mitochondria, responsible for encoding 13 essential proteins involved in oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), the process that generates cellular energy (ATP).”
There are invisible factors. Some people get more from training than others for a variety of reasons, including genetic variability. Maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) is the truest measure of fitness (not skill).
From Claude.ai, “The bottom line on heritability
“VO2 max is roughly 50% heritable. Of that genetic contribution, mtDNA explains an estimated 5–10% of variance in aerobic capacity — meaningful, but far from deterministic. The HERITAGE Family Study, the most rigorous human training response study ever conducted, found that trainability itself (the VO2 max response to a standardized 20-week endurance program) varied by a factor of nearly 10x between individuals, with substantial familial clustering. That clustering includes mtDNA effects but also nuclear genes, epigenetic factors, and everything else inherited through maternal and paternal lines.”
So mtDNA is a genuine contributor to aerobic capacity and superior endurance – but it’s one thread in a complex genetic and physiological tapestry, not the master switch.
Psychology (Resilience)
- Mental endurance
- Focus = attention to attention
- Adjustments in real time
Konrad Lorenz did experiments with goslings – imprinting behaviors with him (not geese) as the model. To an extent, coaching does the same.
From Claude.ai The Lorenzian insight applied to athletic development suggests a sequenced approach: early childhood should maximize unstructured movement richness (W1), middle childhood should cultivate genuine joy and intrinsic engagement with competition and physical challenge (W2), and early adolescence should allow competitive identity to crystallize through increasingly meaningful performance contexts — real stakes, real feedback, real wins and losses (W3). Each window’s “imprint” creates the substrate for the next.
Human athletes seem to need the experience during the sensitive window to be interpreted as meaningful, competence-building, and self-authored. Early sport experiences that are coercive, humiliating, or entirely externally driven appear to actively impede the development of the intrinsic motivational architecture — even when the motor skills are acquired. This is why pressure-driven early specialization programs sometimes produce technically skilled but psychologically fragile athletes who burn out precisely when they reach the competitive levels their training was designed for.
If you read about Roger Federer, see a story about a wide array of athletic development, later channeled into tennis. That’s an extreme example showing value for global athletic development early.
Lagniappe. Demanding not demeaning…
Kelvin Sampson shares what separates good programs from great ones.
It comes down to 3 things.
“The best teams come from the coaching staffs that are the best demanders. There are certain non-negotiables.”
“We’re not going to sit down and talk about this…This is the way it’s… pic.twitter.com/ZWxYInHGdS
— Coach AJ 🎯 Mental Fitness (@coachajkings) March 17, 2026