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The Basketball Podcast: EP408 with Coleman Ayers on Reengineering Player Development
In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, By Any Means Basketball founder Coleman Ayers joins the Basketball Podcast to share insights on reengineering player development.
Coleman Ayers is the founder of By Any Means Basketball, a global training and media organization dedicated to player development. Launching the brand as a high schooler in Washington, D.C., Coleman turned his passion for skill acquisition and research-backed training into a worldwide movement. After finishing his playing career at St. John’s College High School, he chose to forgo college basketball opportunities and moved to Miami, studied exercise physiology, and began working with players of all levels while building a reputation for blending science, creativity, and culture into modern basketball development.
Coleman’s approach emphasizes holistic development—integrating psychology, movement science, and global basketball philosophies to create adaptable, high-IQ players. His DETAIL Miami facility serves as a hub for elite training, while his educational platforms, including the Attention to Detail podcast, share insights with coaches and players worldwide. Having worked with athletes in over 35 countries and collaborated with NBA talent, Coleman continues to push boundaries in player development. He is also the co-founder of ADAPT Academy.
Both of his books, Deep Skill and the Modern Basketball Blueprint, reached number one in Amazon’s basketball category.
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Coleman Ayers Quotes:
“It’s been a constant journey of looking into the science and the research and then getting onto the court for thousands and thousands of hours purposefully, with different types of athletes in different settings, different constraints on myself as a coach to allow that creativity to emerge . . You need the art to really see the science creatively and practically, and then you need the science to best inform your art.”
“The vastness of experiences that I’ve had as a coach have really shaped how I view and do things. And a lot of that is being able to experiment, not only with one team, not only with one setting, not only in one country, but across a variety of different settings.”
“Representative practice is the starting point of everything. That’s the bulk of everything. That does not mean that on air practice is bad; it’s just a supplement to what we do with the game. From a coaching standpoint, I start almost everything live unless I really know a player. It’s so difficult to pick up on whether a player has mastery or what a player is struggling with if you do not see it in the context of a game.”
“You cannot get away anymore with just being skilled with the basketball. Now the separator needs to be something more. Perceptual is the one that I’ve identified to be the strongest separator. If you take 15 players at any level, the worst one and the best one are probably going to be able to do pretty similar things on air. What separates them are those micro-adjustments they make in the game, those little changes that they make tactically to respond to the defense. It’s how, how they manipulate the floor . . These things are driven by perception.”
“Whether this is in your relationships with your business, with your personal relationships or with athletes, finding the balance between being direct, being transparent, being honest, but also doing so in a thoughtful way is extremely important.”
“When you don’t consider all the emotional baggage that athletes are carrying into every given day and if you’re just delivering it based on your personal communication style, you are doing them a disservice. It’s not something that I’m perfect at yet . . but I think if you find that balance where you’re honest but do it in a thoughtful way, and that thoughtful way is different for every athlete, that’s where you can find quality communication as coach.”
“People don’t realize the effects of the constraints that they actually do put on it. There are a lot of indirect effects of the constraints. A common one is people like to restrict dribbles significantly because we think less dribbles, more efficiency. Great. But if we want to work on finishing at the rim and there’s no advantage, and we say two dribbles to finish at the rim, now they’re going to be approaching it out of control. They don’t keep their dribble alive and that’s something maybe we wanted to work on.”
“A lot of coaches add four or five constraints to every drill. Then, for the athlete, all of their attentional currency is going towards remembering the constraints versus actually hooping and executing the game.”
“I consider there to be three general categories of advantages. You have half, full, and none. All of them are useful for different types of focus . . In a game situation, this could be you come off of a ball screen. You have a full advantage if you are holding off your defender who went over that screen. Half-advantage is hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder; maybe you beat someone off the dribble, they’re still in the picture, but you do have a little bit of clear space in front of you. If we’re working on finishing, create maybe a half advantage or a full advantage, depending on what the athlete needs and what the task is. If there’s no help defense, a half advantage may be better.”
“I’ve been asked the question over and over again, ‘What are the most important qualities of players?’ It is important to have a base of anything. Like even psychologically, having core values that hold strong to and having a shooting technique that doesn’t vary significantly from shot to shot. However, past that initial level, adaptability is the most important. And we have a few different types of adaptability like movement adaptability, like defensively, can you get a little bit off balance and then regain balance and be explosive from there. And we have skill adaptability, which comes down to things that you can do with the ball in the context of the defense.”
“We have tactical adaptability, which is being able to read the defense and all the different coverages that they may provide you, all the different problems that they may provide and then the ability to solve those in different ways. We’ve got role adaptability, which is being able to play one role on one team, maybe your high school team, and then switch it over and play one role with an AAU team or if you’re a professional, going from one team to another and being able to mold yourself to that system. And then social and psychological adaptability as well, where you’re able to interact with new people, where you’re able to deal with the ups and downs of every game and every year in a way that again isn’t just super rigid. When you take all of that and put it into a bucket, that bucket being adaptability, it’s hard to say that that is not the most important skill or quality in basketball.”
“That has big implications in how you coach. And again, it’s not an easy thing to do. But you need to start taking pride in setting up environments over delivering teaching points that you think are going to be applied because they are not. And if they are applied, it’s only being applied when they see that problem next and when they’re able to solve the problem at some point by themselves.”
“So, my goal is to never make them feel as if I gave them the answer. I want them to feel as though they came up with the answer. And doing that is a delicate process. And you don’t learn how to do that as a coach in a couple days, it comes with a lot of trial and error.”
“You continue to ask questions, you continue to ask, ‘Why?’ Sometimes the questions can essentially be you telling them something, but rephrasing it as a question if you need to get there. Don’t need to overcomplicate it and sit there and interview them or interrogate them for an hour. But you can start to make them feel as though they are the leaders of their own learning versus they are dependent on you to teach them everything.”
“My biggest advice, I would say, is to allow learning to drive your process. And then on top of that, as you start to build, grow a team around you. Having a bigger reach allows you to reach more people, but you can also be impacted by more people and have more of these conversations where people can challenge you and where you guys can innovate and come up with ideas.”
Coleman Ayers Breakdown:
Coleman Ayers Selected Links from the Podcast:
Coleman Ayers
Gary Vaynerchuk
Deep Skill: The Basketball Coaches’ and Players’ Guide to Understanding and Developing True Skill
The Modern Basketball Blueprint: A Holistic Guide to Building Adaptable Players From the Ground Up
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