Like most careers, coaching is a profession that requires continuing education. Just about any philosophy that you think is perfect can be changed by the addition or subtraction of a 6’8” post player with great footwork or a shooting guard that can really light it up. I think that is what makes this job so much fun. No matter how bad it seems in February, we are all 0-0 when October rolls around.
Yair Schiff
I’ve coached at Beren Academy for the past six years and we have averaged about thirty boys and 30 girls in our school per year. Coaching at a small school can be a challenging job at times. We find ourselves trying to make a post out of any stocky kid walking the halls, a shooter out of any kid willing to spend more than five minutes in the gym practicing and a defender out of any kid who can bend their knees. My first year, I had a team of really talented athletes who didn’t know that they could use their left hand as well as their right. My third year, I had a 6’7” talented post player walk in our school in November, but quickly realized we didn’t have any guards to dribble down the court and throw him the ball. Last year was the first year that I had anyone that even resembled a true point guard on the boy’s team. But through it all, the teams have had one thing in common: they have all given 100%.
Building a basketball program at Beren has taught me more than I ever expected. I realized players at this level will feed off of a coach’s attitude. If you don’t expect to win as a coach, then your players won’t expect to win. If you blame a referee for the loss, your players will blame the referee for the loss. I often think back to a few games when we were fortunate enough to score as the clock ran out to tie a game at the end of regulation. Our players and fans went crazy and start jumping up and down. It’s at these times that I would herd my team back to the bench as soon as possible and really chew them out. They hadn’t done anything wrong, but our goal is not to get to overtime, it is to win it. As a coach, I think that if you show them that you’re not satisfied, then they won’t be satisfied.
I also learned that leadership is priceless. When you have a guy on the team that is willing to not only lead verbally, but also by example, your entire team can turn it up a notch. A player can be a great example of a leader, whether it is in basketball, studies or davening. One of my players that just graduated, Yair Schiff, was not only a very good player; he was a GREAT leader. I always felt that if he was asked to run through the wall, he would have. He just wanted to win and didn’t care who scored or who received the credit. If at the end of the game, his team had more points, he was happy. Unfortunately, this is a quality that seems to be unable to be taught. It amazes me how many kids I see every year that only care about their stats. As long as they got their points, they are satisfied. I have coached many good players in my life; good leaders are much harder to find.
One of the best things that I have been fortunate to do was hire a very good assistant coach. Being at such a small school, I coached both the boys and girls because it was hard to find someone that would do that much work for the pay. I coached both teams by myself for the first three years that I was the athletic director. Two years ago, I was lucky enough to find Coach Michael Stribling to join me and create an actual “coaching staff”. His work with our JV team has been, and will be, instrumental to our past and future success. The thing that I love about Coach Stribling is that he always gets on our kids for not working hard. He has taken over a practice by putting the team on the line when he didn’t feel like the effort was at the proper level. Mistakes will always happen, but a poor work ethic will not happen in our gym.
When you only have 30 boys or girls in your school, not everyone wants to play basketball. I try to make the season exciting so that the students will want to play. Fortunately, we have an administration team that supports our program by allowing us to do things very few programs get to do every year. We try to get each team to travel to a tournament somewhere out of town along with having an annual faculty game that the teams get to play in, that has proved to be quite the rivalry. The kids have really enjoyed playing for the last three years in the Toyota Center before a Rockets game. We have also hosted our own tournament, The David A. Yaffee z’l Tournament, for the last four years. It has been a great event that brings six boys’ and six girls’ teams together for four days of playing and programming. The event has been fantastic for the teams, the school and the community.
I have had many opportunities to move on to a public school program, but I think that the thing that keeps me coming back is the chance to do something special at Beren. Prior to arriving at Beren, I was the assistant coach at Lee College in Baytown. The head coach, Roy Champagne, once told me that good coaches leave the program in better shape than they received it. I feel like we have come a long way to make the program at Beren something special. We might always be the underdog, but that’s the fun part. I’m very proud of what and who we are.
Chris Cole
