Jerome Tang's Blueprint for Building Better Players & Teams - Perfecting the 'Old, Boring Habits'

Coach Tang has achieved this level of success through a strong, unwavering focus on player and team development implemented in his first year but developed and refined over a very productive, successful career at Baylor that included a NCAA National Championship in 2021. 

In this on-the-court, instructional video, Coach Tang takes you through a system of development drills to build individual players and  provides a positive end-result of overall team improvement. Tang places a strong focus and heavy emphasis on forward play and a development plan for improving a player’s ability to finish at the rim.  

Ball Handling, Shooting

Coach Tang begins with a strong dribbling warm-up routine that you can do daily to build the overall ball-handling skills of your guards and forwards – going through and explaining multiple ball-handling drills including a highly valuable dribbling drill called, ‘The Black-Line Drill.’

Next, Coach Tang showcases an excellent daily shooting drill, he calls, ‘The K-State Shooting Drill’ – a staple for Coach Tang - as it provides a high volume of mid-range shots, shots at the rim and 3-point shots. Emphasized within the shooting drills is an explanation on the importance of footwork when shooting the basketball and the continued development of an essential skill in Coach Tang’s offensive philosophy - the ability to shoot off while coming off screens.  

Forward Development

Coach Tang spends time covering the importance of developing the skill sets of your team’s forwards. Tang goes through a wide range of drills that detail the improvement process for passing and finishing at the rim. 

All of the drills shown in Coach Tang’s demonstrations can be built into your daily practice plan and include skills work that helps maximize your player and team performance. Tang emphasizes that a critical component to your overall team improvement plan must be to continually maintain a mindset that a coach’s primary goal must focus on building better players by the end of the year – rather than simply implementing new plays to try to win games during the season. Coach Tang states it clearly - “your team will have more success and win more games in the long run if your players continue to improve during the season.”  

Closing out his presentation with a segment on team development, Coach Tang provides a terrific demonstration of the ‘Protect-The-Rim Drill,’ which focuses on defending on ball, while also maintaining complete player-awareness of your post presence.  

Coach Tang is extremely active and intense during this defensive segment and provides critical details on how to implement this type of work into practices every day to become a better defensive team.  

This must-see video details Coach Tang’s unique insight into the philosophy of it being better to improve your players during a season, rather than just focusing on the Xs and Os found within the pages of your playbook.

Coach Tang offers explanations on why an emphasis on player improvement is an approach that pays positive dividends for your program, but he also stresses that it’s an approach that relies on “perfecting old, boring habits,” – which ultimately, is a winning path toward building a championship program!

67 minutes. 2023.