Sherri Coale: Getting the Most Out of Your Team

with Sherri Coale,
University of Oklahoma Head Women's Basketball Coach;
Back-to-Back NCAA Final Four appearances (2009-2010);
10x Big 12 Championship Coach;
Head Coach for the Women's 2013 USA World University Games (Gold Medal)

Sherri Coale has taken the Oklahoma Sooners' women's basketball team to 18 straight NCAA Tournament appearances and been named Big 12 Coach of the Year 10 times. Over the years, she's developed 13 players who have gone on to be drafted by the WNBA and has had 58 players who have earned Academic All-Big 12 honors.

This video is a chance for you to learn how one of the most successful teams in the nation keeps its edge and continues to improve on a yearly basis. Coale details an intense and ongoing review of best practices that she and her staff have used to create a program that achieves high levels of success in terms of both winning and player development.

In this video, Coale discusses what's going on in her program and some of the revelations she's had recently that have led her to examine what she does more closely. Coale discusses what she's learned and how she changed her approach to allow her players and team to become more successful.

Meshing Your Coaching Philosophy with Your Team

Using the secondary fast break as a template, Coale emphasizes the importance of meshing your coaching philosophy with your team's strengths. She shows how her teams:

• Determine what they do best and build around those traits.
• Improve coaching and player development by focusing on the coaching staff's statement to question ratio.
• Teach players to recognize the optimal threshold to shoot or drive.

Decision Making

Coale places an emphasis on players being put in a position to make decisions. Learn to ask players why they're doing what they're doing instead of telling them what to do. Additionally, learn to ask the questions in such a way that the players teach themselves. On the court, Coale demonstrates how you can teach players to make decisions by using a simple pick & roll.

By breaking down pick & roll options in the secondary break and emphasizing making the ball "hard to guard," Coale demonstrates how to get players to focus on an attack-first mentality and maximize the pressure on the defense.

Make it a Game

Coaches tend to structure practices around the traditional 5-on-5 setup, as that's how the game is officially played. However, players are limited in the number of times they touch the ball per trip, and as a result, this hampers skill acquisition. Coale argues that coaches need to turn everything into a game as much as possible.

On the court, Coale demonstrates various ways to have players play 1-on-1 in a way that they learn to attack the defender. A 3-on-3 scenario is used to add on to the attack mentality and teaches players how to make reads immediately off the catch coming off a down screen or using the pick & roll.

Looking at Yourself

The only way your practices will get better is if you get better as a coach, so Coale encourages you to learn to examine what you do. Look at the teams that succeed playing the style you want and find out what they do. What do you value in regard to how the team plays? How do you play? How do your players think they play? Coale explains what she values and how important it is to get the players' perspective on how they play and practice.

This video is delivered in the engaging, yet intense style that has made Sherri Coale one of the most successful basketball coaches in the country. Coaches at all levels will find valuable insights into coaching, practice design, communication and how to raise the level of your program in this jam-packed video.

Produced at the Fall 2016 Tulsa (OK) clinic.

66 minutes. 2017.