I have spent my last year in an individual development basketball academy, integrating myself into the culture of the island and taking the chance to work with basketball players from different backgrounds, with different goals and more importantly with different realities.

Here’s how it’s been different from working with a team: every athlete here has been working toward their own goal, at their own stage of development. Personalities impacted the work far more than they would have on a team. In a team, cohesion, synergy, a common goal and trust in the coach’s decisions do most of the work. In the academy, understanding yourself and becoming someone who can adapt to any team and fight for your own opportunity was the key role instead.

Not perfect, but constantly teaching

The setting hasn’t been perfect, but it has been a constant education. How players treat each other in the residence when they don’t share a common goal and aren’t playing for that same team, isn’t automatic. It takes patience with different individuals and it takes learning to listen for what’s said and what isn’t.

The mindset shift

From a performance point of view, I think the biggest development happened in the players’ mindset. Most of them started to understand that consistency meant progress, that tracking results changes the game and that you can collect a hundred ‘no’s’ but the one ‘yes’ you eventually earn through hard work is the one that matters.

The environment affected this mindset too and not always in a good way. Some players had a local league to test their hard training against in real games. Others got occasional tournaments to compete in and see their improvement but some players had no competition at all and for them showing progress was harder, so we adapted. We started running simple skill and physical conditioning tests through the season to show them their improvement in black and white. For the young players especially developing through their teenage years, seeing that proof was a real reinforcing factor to stay motivated: “you got this much better in 2 months, imagine the whole year“.

The coaching challenge

From the coaching side, this brought its own mix of challenges and opportunities. One opportunity was seeing how individually talented players train and work outside of a team structure where the head coach could be patient with a player who didn’t want to focus on defence while still enforcing consistent training.

The biggest challenge for the coaching staff and for me was rhetorical gap in level between athletes sometimes very large gaps. How do you make practice challenging but achievable for everyone without dropping the level for some or decreasing motivation for others? The staff split training into two groups, older and younger but gaps remained even within those groups. Because these players weren’t working toward a shared goal, that showed up sometimes as frustration, arrogance and intolerance.

I worked on helping players redirect that energy back toward their own development instead of comparing themselves to others. The coach and I also ran a workshop on how we wanted mistakes in training to be seen not as failure but as evidence that you’re pushing your existing ability toward something better. In 1-on-1 sessions, I talked with players about how challenging yourself was the whole reason they’re there, that even if a training partner isn’t on your level, your own actions matter more for your development than anyone else’s. Training with players below your level can help them, but the risk was it pulls you down toward their level too and the fix was making sure you’re still challenging yourself regardless of who’s next to you.

The coaches got more creative with practice design over the year, adjusting difficulty by level but the basics of the sport can always be made harder through your own effort even when that’s not the comfortable choice.

“Lose the ball in training 100 times, so you don’t lose it in the game.”

Coexisting without a shared goal

Coexisting with people you share a house and a court with but nothing else can be difficult for teenagers. There was more than one instance where adults needed to step in, my job was to understand why these clashes were happening. Most of the time it came down to frustration over behaviour or sometimes a clash between different approaches to competition, trash talk versus a more supportive environment.

For players without ongoing competition, there was often frustration around feeling like they were wasting their time and jealousy toward those who got to play games and show themselves on weekends. These are very normal human feelings for a teenager to have and they apply just as much in a team environment. For players not getting playing time or getting relegated to a lower team while their teammates chased championships, emotional regulation and goal setting were needed here. It’s easy for a teenager to forget they aren’t finished improving yet and that a clear goal with clear actions toward it can change a lot over the long run or even the short run.

What I’m taking from this

Working with individuals and trying to improve their performance through psychological tools taught me something school never did. Every athlete is different and even though breathing techniques, emotional regulation, visualisation and locus of control are essentially the same tools, they can’t be delivered to every athlete the same way even when they’re struggling with the same block. Some players are open to sport psychology from the start and trust comes quickly but most, the first time will tell you: “I think I’m mentally strong, there’s noting going on in my head.”

This is the first in a series unpacking what this year actually taught me, about athletes, about coaching and about myself. Next up: the goal-setting framework that ended up caring almost everything I did this season.