The Basketball Podcast: EP430 with Bryan Rooney on Playing Complementary Basketball

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Bryan Rooney Quotes:

“To be able to see what it means to succeed at a high level, certainly on the court, but also who they are in the community with community service, and who they are as students as well . . it’s one of the greatest gifts our players give us is their example to our children.”

“If our relationship from player to coach is solely based on your shooting percentage or assist-to-turnover ratio, or how well you execute our scouting report or ball screen defense, we’re literally just in business together. That’s just a transaction. That’s not why I got into coaching. That’s not who impacted me in terms of the mentors that I played for and coached for. And so the opposite end of the spectrum and what we’re really trying to drive towards on a consistent basis is the idea of being transformative.”

“We do an exercise at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year and we talk about exactly what that [being transformative] means. And then, at the of the year, every player, coach, and manager, leaves a word or a phrase on what it means to them to be transformative. We only give out one award within our program . . it’s our Transformer of the Year. It’s that individual that best embodies the idea to take somebody from good to a great. Not just in terms of on the court production, but in terms of how they invest in one another.”

“When we’re on the defensive end, we want to speed teams up in a very intentional manner. We want our players to understand that what type of shots we take have to complement not only what we’re trying to do offensively, but have to complement what we want defensively as well.”

“You have to have a defensive rebounding identity, but you also have to have an offensive rebounding identity. And so, we talked about complementary basketball and our guys not picking and choosing on a shot goes up. We don’t have the luxury, no matter what position you are, to take a break rebounding-wise. That shot goes up, you cannot run all the way back, you cannot be in that no man’s land. You have to engage within our tagging philosophy.”

“If we’re playing three minutes straight and very few whistles, can we be the team that’s more equipped physically conditioning-wise, but also mentally to continue to go from one play to the next? . . we’re always talking about, ‘Hey, next play.’  Are we modeling that? And so, I probably err at the beginning of the year of we’re going to have fewer interventions than we are going to have maybe in the middle and later in the year.”

“The metric that we used is how close to 100% of the time could we have all five guys engaged in their tagging or rebounding responsibilities? And then what ended up happening  was we said, ‘Okay, we need to be between that 12 to 15 offensive rebounds in a game . . there’s no way to tag rebound without full effort.”

“The practice film was so important and one of the things that we’ll do is we’ll have a folder after every practice for our guy and we’ll code it out and put specific times in . . if we can get a common measurable, like this is what it looks like from an effort standpoint. If you are doing this, then you have the opportunity to impact us in a positive way.”

“[We ask], ‘What are the two clips that you really learn from?’ without me giving them that input but having them be part of their own learning process. Is it time intensive? There’s no doubt about that. And we talk to them about that. We say ‘If we practice for two hours, how long does it take to clip out all of those practice and put those times down there?’  But what is that? That’s an investment in you. It’s important you make an investment in you as well.”

“We track transitions and one of the easiest ones for us to do are the corner touches . . we’re not really a scripted in terms of your two has to go to the right, your three has to go to the left . . But are you getting all the way down to the corner?”

“This year’s group was the best group I’ve ever had in terms of the role acceptance . . We don’t want them to feel like it’s only the coaches who are defining them. We want them to, to feel like they are part of that defining process that has to do with their production.”

“I’ll always ask them at the end of our conversation, ‘How can I help you better?’  We do that for a couple different reasons. Number one, our most important core value is servant leadership. So, I need to model that for them. But they’ll have question of, ‘What is my role?’  Well, if they still are having those questions and it’s the middle or it’s the latter part of the year, then I haven’t done a good enough job of really clarifying what that is. At the same time, it’s really important for them to understand and for me to verbalize that roles are not a fixed state. Who you are in your role in game one does not have to be who it is in game 15 or in game 30.”

“We have to tell our guys the truth of where they are right now. But we also have to tell them the truth of where we believe that they can get to. And that can’t just be a line. That can’t just be I’m just telling you this to kind of appease you and make you happy. But along with telling them where they can get to, we have to have a plan for them to get there. And I think that’s one of the things that can get lost, especially when the season is going because there’s so much going on and we can lose sight of that.”

“We have our players commit to something specific, tangible of what they’re committing to that year. But part of their commitment, is they have to commit to their accountability. So they have to choose one player that they’re going to hold accountable and how specifically they’re going to hold them accountable. Is that getting into them four times a week outside of practice? Is that they’re going to do study hall together? . . Because I think sometimes what happens is when players are unhappy with their roles, is that they feel like they’re in a vacuum.”

“I think the beauty of it was living in the moment and not looking at the totality of 33 games in a row. Each game was its own life and to be able to really celebrate that. We have a sign right as you go out into the hallway that goes down the gym, and it reads, ‘Have more fun than anybody in America.’ And we wanted to live that out every day, certainly with practice, but we wanted to celebrate each win. And so we didn’t look at, ‘Hey, this win was more important than the win that was coming up.’  What each win did was it create an opportunity for another great moment in that way.”

“One of the best things that I really try to center myself and center our program around is that we have a responsibility. We have responsibility that when these guys and guys that have played in the program previously come back, they feel like the program is consistently moving forward  . . I don’t care when you played at Cal State East Bay, whether you played for me the past nine years or you played decades ago. We want this always to be your home.”

“If this is going to be your home, this has to be a place that’s consistently moving and getting better. And so, as we had our final meeting of the spring, we all have responsibility. We have responsibility as a player and as a coach, whether you’re new, whether you’re returning, that there’s a constant improvement that goes into play.”

“As head coaches, we have to give our assistant coaches the opportunity to impact at a high level. Empowering them and giving them the opportunity to truly invest in it is something that was very, very impactful for us this year and something that I will continue for as long as they allow me to coach.”

Bryan Rooney Breakdown:

Bryan Rooney Selected Links from the Podcast: