5 Ways To Coach Your Best Player

Every team has one… a best player. How you get the most out of that player is critical to your team’s success this season.

Today, I want to dive into this idea of how to coach your best player.

The first thing to realize is that your best player is different from most, if not all of your other players.

Your Best Player ticks differently.

They’re the player who wants to stay late and come early.
They typically want to be coached and are looking for you to engage with them.
They do the little things to push themselves – lift weights, watch what they eat, work on their game at home, etc.
They get upset when they don’t perform well or lose.
They eat and sleep the game.
They are naturally good athletes.

Get My $97 FREE Program Building BluePrint Email Course

By completing this form you are signing up to receive the CMD Newsletter for Basketball Coaches and can unsubscribe at any time.

Now you may have an impact player that fills one or two of these criteria, but they aren’t your best player per se.

Most often it’s the player who is an exceptional athlete who lacks the skills or knowledge to truly be great at the game.

In your team’s mind the exceptional athlete can sometimes be thought of as the best player, but for the coach their game isn’t complete enough to hold this spot.

As the coach, you need to realize that your best player is motivated by success, being the best, and not taking a play off.

This means you have to be ready to step up and coach that player differently.

Notice I didn’t say, treat your best player differently.

Coaches will get themselves in trouble because they start to treat their best player with star treatment.

Star treatment is when they are…

Not showing up on time
Sitting out of conditioning
Speaking to teammates in a rude and disrespectful manner
Not paying attention during timeouts
Breaking team rules or expectations with no consequences
This is a great way to lose every other player on your team.

5 Ways To Step Up And Coach Your Best Player

Always have a challenge ready. Challenge your best player to be the best and take others along with them. This means encouraging teammates, making the extra pass, recognizing great plays by teammates.
Hold them to the standard you’ve set for the team. If the team sees that you won’t let player #1 get away with slacking off they’ll know you won’t let them get away with it either
Be ready for push back. The best player has probably gotten start treatment by their travel coach, youth coach, and even lower level coaches in your program. They won’t like being treated like everyone else. Stay true to the team’s rules and expectations. Invite the player to meet one-on-one so you can get on the same page as each other.
Keep the lines of communication wide open. Ask for feedback and their thoughts on how practice or the game went that day. Give them one thing to work on each week to make them a better player – focus on the extra pass, work on scoring at all three levels, and be more aggressive on rebounds.
Get them to speak up and lead.Teammates listen to each other, especially if the one talking is the best player. Pre-practice, pre-game, half-time, timeouts, etc. Ask your best player to use their voice more often. (Be careful not to call on them for everything. Asking them to use their voice should happen in a one-on-one meeting and then let the player be the one to use their voice more often.)

Notice that I didn’t say score more points or tell them that the team’s success relies on them (even if it does).

As a high school coach, kids should be challenged but they don’t need to be stressed out.

If you put everything on one player for the team to win they’ll feel like a failure if a game is lost or they don’t perform well.

Your best player will typically lead you in several statistical categories and you can challenge them to pick up production in an area, but not to do everything all the time.

Remember, there are still four other players on the court and eight other players on the bench.

You need to be able to challenge those players too.

It may just be a different type of challenge than you gave your best player.