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The Basketball Podcast: EP407 with Burton Uwarow on Special Situations and Mentorship
In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, former Bob Jones University head coach Burton Uwarow joins the Basketball Podcast to share insights on special situations and mentorship.
Uwarow is currently the Director of Athletics at West Florida Baptist Academy. He became head coach at Bob Jones University in April of 2017 as the second head coach in program history. In his first year as head coach, he led the Bruins to an astounding 22-11 record to lead them to their second NCCAA DII national tournament and first NCCAA DII national championship game in program history.
In his eight seasons with the Bruins, Uwarow led the team to five winning seasons and four regional championship titles. Each regional title was paired with a South Region Coach of Year honor for Uwarow. Following the 2023-2024 season, he was named the NCCAA DII National Coach of the Year, the only Bruins basketball coach to ever receive that honor.
With Uwarow at the helm, the Bruins held a 114-90 overall record with an impressive 68-22 record against NCCAA opponents.
In his eight seasons at BJU, he saw 13 NCCAA Scholar-Athletes, 19 NCCAA DII South All-Region players, five NCCAA DII Region All-Freshman team players, one NCCAA DII South Region Freshman of the Year, five NCCAA DII South Region Players of the Year, and nine NCCAA DII All-American players.
Before coming to Bob Jones University, Uwarow coached the varsity basketball team at Creekside Christian Academy in McDonough, Georgia. In just seven seasons, he transformed the team from a first year program into state champions, winning three Division I-AA State Championships. He has also served in head coaching positions for public and private schools in South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia.
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Burton Uwarow Quotes:
“I have almost 30 people who’ve either been a player or an assistant or a manager for me that are head coaches right now. That’s been a rewarding facet of this aspect of my life.”
“Part of special situations . . when we would start talking about what we wanted to do . . it was not an X’s and O’s talk, it was a philosophy talk. We had five games come down to the last play. And it wasn’t what they ran, it was knowing what we wanted them to do.”
“So many conference games come down to five points or less . . [on defense] our whole idea was getting kills – three stops in a row and we’re scoring that. If you do that seven to nine times a game, you’re almost always going to win.”
“A lot of teams don’t like playing against a 1-3-1 which is the basic deep alignment . . your options are limited as an inbounder. You basically have about 75% of the court that you can work with and that 25% away from you is really difficult . . if you take away their hot options, their most obvious options in the first three seconds, you’re probably going to force a bad pass.”
“You’re eating into their practice time and don’t let them eat into yours. And so I think preseason preparation, knowing your team, knowing your opponents, which you’ve got a good opportunity to do in the preseason and the off-season, I think that’s a big part of it. Making your practices more effective is really knowing what is going to be difficult for the other teams to prepare for.”
“There are four phases that I’ve talked about that a coach goes through. The beginning phase. They’ve got a lot of passion and enthusiasm, but they don’t know what they don’t know. The development phase, the second phase, they know what they don’t know. Then they start to focus maybe on X’s and O’s and they don’t really realize their limitations too much. This should be the time when you’re reading books, going to clinics, working camps, all that other type of stuff. Then there’s a master coach, competent in most areas, but maybe an expert in two areas. And because of success though, the danger is that they can start to become complacent. And then the mentor coaches, where I feel like I’m at right now and where I’ve been at for the past few years, where you’re looking to what you can pass on to the next generation.”
“Legacy is really important and relationships are more important than wins and losses. That’s been my philosophy for a while.”
“I came across a quote, ‘Your future is shaped by the habits you repeat, not the goals you set.’ I don’t think that New Year’s resolutions are necessary, that’s not something I’ve ever looked at, but I have looked at this time as a time of evaluation. We are great at having goals and ideas and we are not so good at the follow through. And I think if we can shorten the distance between knowing and doing, we’re ahead of our peers.”
“The way that I start is that the parents are not the enemy. They are going to always be around. And so, I think the smart thing for a coach is not to complain about a situation that you don’t like. I think a smart person in any situation, I think any leader tries to figure out how to leverage the situation to benefit everybody. I think that starts with reframing and then another key thing is communication. What people are not up on, they’re down on.”
“I think if you talk to people who’ve known me, they would say special situations, defense, and good team culture have always been a part of those programs . . I do think it’s important to have a philosophy and have it written down. If you know why you coach, it helps guide your coaching decisions, it helps guide your personnel decisions. It helps all of that. And I do think you need to evaluate your coaching philosophy every year.”
“The coaches who I’ve always tried to emulate were coaches that were not on the refs all the time. And if they were on their players, they were on them in a way that made them want to do better. I think my one-on-one meetings with my players have been my secret sauce.”
Burton Uwarow Breakdown:
Burton Uwarow Selected Links from the Podcast:
Burton Uwarow
Tony Miller
Bruce Pearl
C.Y. Young
Lennie Acuff
Greg Neely
Morgan Wooten
Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask
Doug Novak
Johnny Tauer
Joe Wooten
Tobin Anderson
Mark Cascio
George Raveling
Tim Ferriss
Brad Stevens
Jay Wright
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