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Winning Without Your Star: How to Handle Key Player Injuries
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Shawn Jones
DIRECTOR, ATHLETICS
Shawn has 30 years of head basketball coaching experience combined with 11 years as an athletic director. He has coached in Colorado and Texas, and has taken teams to three Final Four tournaments and a state championship. He has seen numerous players of his continue on to compete at the college and professional level of the sport. He is also proud to have seen many of his athletes become high school and collegiate coaches themselves. As director of athletics, Shawn is a key member of Ballogy’s team, driving the company’s athletic strategy, partnerships, coach engagement, and product vision. He has been married to his high school sweetheart for 32 years and they have raised three wonderful children together. Shawn has a passion for player development and the desire to assist coaches with effective, time-saving tools of administering and assessing skill development drills.
How does a coach handle a key player injury, especially at a critical point in the season? The correct answer to this question has two parts, and they are likely executed 3-4 months apart from each other.
In order to effectively manage a key injury on the roster during crunch time—most likely at the end of the season heading into the playoffs—a wise coach will have already thought about and pseudo-prepared for this issue during the preseason by practicing different lineups together. Perhaps a coach might even experiment in early games, when winning big, by putting various lineups on the floor to instill confidence in the team that winning can be done with whoever is on the floor.
Communication is key. Selling the message to the team that we can win no matter who is on the floor is paramount to actually doing it. They need to know and believe that they can win no matter who is in or out. Effective coaches do this, in a different scenario, regularly by role-playing foul trouble in practice. The star is in foul trouble, so the team has to figure out how to play and win in their absence. Injury is really no different, except for the long-term sales job that has to come next.
In an injury situation, unlike foul trouble where the player will be back the next game, a salesman’s skill is needed to build confidence in the team. A coach must remind the team of those times they played with different lineups and had success. They also must sell the game plan of how the team will win with the injured player out. A wise coach will have a game plan that accounts for the absence. Once the team buys into the idea that they can win with the “next player up” and endorses that player with confidence, anything is possible.
The one thing I would caution against is employing false emotion or short-lived emotion by “trying to win one for the Gipper.” That rarely works. It seems almost degrading to the rest of the team to insinuate that their motivation and reason for playing all season was only for that one player. It wasn’t, and it won’t be. They are kids. They play for fun, for personal reasons and goals, as well as for each other—but usually in that order.
Injuries happen, and teams have to continue to play. Prepare your team in August for the unknowns and crises of February. Instill a mentality that you can win with whoever is on the floor. Have game plans for situations and lineups that are possible. Then sell it, sell it, sell it, and go fight like crazy!