The Basketball Podcast: EP219 with Carly Clarke on Winning with your Personnel

Carly Clarke Coach Quotes:

“We decided to . . dive into the mental performance side of things. And I think we really built a strong foundation and developed relationships to a deeper level that we were able to carry forward to this season.”

“I’m a big believer in the mental performance side of things even for myself as a coach . . often what gets lost is how to utilize those skills in a high-pressure moment.”

“One of the important roles of a mental performance coach is there’s a level of confidentiality and safety that the athletes have.”

“Every drill that we’re utilizing in practice, there’s a competition element, we’re keeping score . . there’s an outcome we’re trying to achieve. And we try to make sure we build that in with great clarity, but it’s also connected to our process . . there’s a lot of process elements to it, not just stop or score.”

“We built the defense by starting in playing a lot of one-on-one and getting players to understand angles and positioning.”

“We evaluated who our people are and what their strengths were and tried to build our offense around putting our players in positions to utilize their strengths.”

“We really try to celebrate the cut that created an open shot and recognize those little things. The shot going in is the easy thing to recognize, but how did we get that open shot?”

“Our effort is something that is a non-negotiable for us . . and along that same line is mistake response and understanding that you’re going to make a mistake, but we try not to compound mistakes.”

“We were reevaluating some of what we were doing technically and tactically and one of the scans we did was, ‘Okay, we know our team is pretty good and we’re on the cusp of competing [for a] national championship. What do we need to do to take ourselves over the top?’”

“We looked at three or four of the top teams in the country and said, ‘Who do they have? What are their strengths? What are we going to need to do to beat them?’ And that helped build our technical and tactical plan for the season.”

“A lot of our offense was built around specific spacing and a lot of our actions were set up with similar spacing or a couple of different base alignments. As the season went on, we were able to add one or two little wrinkles that were out of actions that we had been doing all year . . the freedom to play and make plays is so critical.”

“Our goal was to be the best at getting better. That is what we talked about every single day – how to find a way to get a little bit better every day.”

“Going through those leaner years really drove my focus on the process because the only way we could stick to it was recognizing the wins that we were having that weren’t necessarily showing up on the scoreboard every single day.”

Carly Clarke Breakdown:

1:00 – COVID Years
5:00 – Team Experience
8:00 – Psychological Safety
10:00 – Celebrating Errors
13:00 – Strong Hand, Weak Hand
17:00 – Building Defense
18:49 – 19:47 – JUST PLAY AD
20:00 – Off The Ball Cutting
22:30 – Defining Strengths
24:00 – Personnel
28:00 – Integration of a Sports Psychologist
32:00 – Defensive Decision Making
35:00 – Team Identity
35:32 – 36:15 – DR. DISH AD
39:00 – University Job
43:00 – Immerse in Learning
46:00 – Conclusion

Carly Clarke Links from the Podcast:

Basketball Canada Senior Women

Toronto/Toronto Metropolitan University