Explore an Uncommon
Approach to Leadership!
What Does Your Instinct Tell You?
Whoever asks the most questions wins. Asking the right questions is a great leadership tool.
Phil Jackson used to say, “When in doubt, do nothing.”
As coaches we are expected to have the answers, and in general there is a lot of pressure in our business. So it’s natural to try and find a solution right away. First of all, that doesn’t necessarily give you the time you need to think the problem through. And secondly, you aren’t teaching your players to solve the problem. You are just giving them solutions. That leads to a compliant team - one where they always look to you to provide the answers. The problem with that is, in the heat of a game, they need to solve the problems. They need to find the answers.
By asking “What does your instinct tell you?” or a similar question, you force your team to think. You ask them to solve the problem. You get them away from relying on someone else to provide a solution. It also allows you to learn more about their mindset, what the root of the problem is, and how you can go about helping them.
Whoever asks the most questions wins. Asking the right questions is a great leadership tool.
Thought-provoking stuff from Admired Leaders:
Immediate answers to questions don’t allow those team members to develop their own insights and wisdom. To develop fully, team members need to wrestle with the issue before they listen to the advice of others.
After fielding an inquiry or request for feedback, good leaders start the conversation with a simple but effective question that asks the other party to think through the issue on their own: What advice would you give yourself?
This temporary pause doesn’t derail the discussion, nor does it suggest the leader doesn’t want to help.
What it does is to ask the other party to be their own source of insight for just a moment. This also tells them that the leader won’t always be around, and they need to think through issues on their own to develop and grow.
Other questions like, “What does your instinct tell you?”, “What has worked in the past?”, and “What have you seen others do?” are equally powerful.
Such questions slow things down and also allow the leader to gain more context before they offer their view. Interestingly, in many cases, the advice they would give themselves is exactly what the leader would offer, further cementing their confidence and insight.
Is it possible that you respond to questions and requests for advice too quickly?
You can help others, including children and those who are highly inexperienced, by asking them to share their own insights first before you respond.
Leaders develop people. They won’t always be there to guide them. Investing in others has a bigger payoff when team members have already invested in thinking through issues for themselves.
Their Voices
The best leaders listen more than they talk.
The Nuggets made the bold decision to fire Mike Malone with 3 games left in the season and the team holding a top 4 seed in the Western Conference. Assistant David Adelman took over. I really liked this from his first game as their head coach.
The best leaders listen more than they talk.
Wednesday night was a palate cleanser for everyone. The Nuggets jumped to a 10-3 lead and only trailed briefly early in the second quarter before cruising to an eight-point win in Sacramento.
Adelman said he made a point of encouraging the players to speak up in huddles and on the court. He wanted to hear their voices, not his.
"I think as far as communication goes, it was probably our best game of the year," Braun said. "Everybody was into it. We had players communicating to each other instead of relying on a coach to tell us everything."
Trust Yourself
“That’s what makes you walk into a room different for the rest of your life.”
Really good stuff here from Mark Pope.
“A bird can rest peacefully on a branch, not because of its trust in the branch, but because of its trust in its ability to fly.”
https://x.com/MVP_Mindset/status/1904908011405271415
“That’s what makes you walk into a room different for the rest of your life.”
Delivering A Tough Message
Far too often, leaders “think” their way through a tough message and create a mess in the process.
Get right to it. It’s never easy delivering tough news. But the best way to do it is to know what you want to say and get right to the point.
I’m not saying it’s easy. But it’s your job. Leadership isn’t easy.
Far too often, leaders “think” their way through a tough message and create a mess in the process.
From Admired Leaders:
Delivering a message others don’t want to hear isn’t easy for any leader, but it comes with the territory.
Good leaders deliver tough messages because it is inherent in their role as decision-makers.
Decisions and actions come with consequences. It is the leader’s job to communicate those choices and outcomes even when they know they will be unpopular for those negatively impacted.
If there is good advice about delivering a tough message, it goes like this: The bad news must come up front — in the first two sentences.
The first sentence explains the why, and the second sentence states the action or outcome.
This helps to keep tough messages simple, clear, and crisp. The idea is to create perfect clarity, not to get the message over with.
Stating the “Why” or reason behind the decision and then the action that follows doesn’t allow room for misinterpretation or a weakening of the decision.
This approach also requires the leader to know exactly what they want to say before they engage in the conversation. This clarity is essential for a resolution to whatever issue is involved.
Here are some examples of the “Why” followed by an action or outcome:
“We have found a better price and a more agreeable contract, so we are not going to re-order your product.”
“You’ve made some critical errors that have placed the project in jeopardy. As a result, we are taking you off the assignment.”
“Your skills are not a good fit for our team, so we are going to make a change and find someone else.”
“The coach doesn’t believe you are 100 percent committed to improving. That’s why you will be asked to sit on the bench this game.”
Far too often, leaders “think” their way through a tough message and create a mess in the process.
By knowing exactly what they want to say and communicating the heart of the message right away, the remainder of the conversation can be focused on how to implement the action or outcome.
In fact, good leaders move the conversation toward future implementation as quickly as they can.
After hearing of this strategy of stating the “why” and outcome in the first two sentences, some leaders believe this makes delivering the tough message even harder.
They claim it is better to “ease” into the message and allow people the room to debate or argue about the issue before landing on a decision.
This is true if a decision hasn’t been made or an action has yet to be formulated.
In that case, exploring the issue by listening intently to what the other party believes about the issue and what has occurred is the best course by far.
But that suggests a tough message is not required yet, although the conversation may portend one.
When an unpopular decision has been made for known and rational reasons, putting the message upfront projects integrity, candidness, and firmness.
It produces the clarity and deep respect that the other party requires.
Waiting to get to the point is akin to ripping off the band-aid slowly. It is usually much more painful for both parties.
Placing the bad news up front with the “why” followed by an action doesn’t prevent a leader from setting the stage for the message and helping others get prepared to hear something uncomfortable.
Telling others that this will be a difficult conversation before entering it is a wise approach. But then, good leaders get right to the point.
If the decision or action can’t be negotiated, then a leader’s integrity won’t let it unfold any other way.
Houston BLOB
“Joe's personal trainer was a blacktop court and a double rim."
What a great instinctive play by Houston’s Jo Jo Tuggler to go back to the inbounder with 2.8 seconds left.
"Nobody on our team has played on outdoor courts more than Jo," Kellen Sampson said. "And so the fact that was an instinctive play, that's him. We got a lot of guys that have personal trainers. Joe's personal trainer was a blacktop court and a double rim."
Great Minds
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
“Championship Level Effort”
“Eventually… it evolved to where everything mattered.”
Ben McCollum on what he learned as they started to win on a high level.
“Eventually… it evolved to where everything mattered.”
Wise People Are Present
“There is no finish line. The finish line is we need to be a little better tomorrow than we are today.”
Buzz Williams with a great approach.
“There is no finish line. The finish line is we need to be a little better tomorrow than we are today.”
Josh Schertz - Success
“The way the world defines success for you is like cotton candy. It evaporates quickly.”
“The way the world defines success for you is like cotton candy,” he says. “It evaporates quickly. Leaves you wanting more. You’ll never be fulfilled chasing those things. Your peace and contentment in life always comes from the relationships and the things in your life that are completely unconditional, that won’t be moved by who you are or how you did or how much money you make.”
Josh Schertz - St. Louis
Conflict
Conflict is an essential part of high-performing teams.
Conflict is an essential part of high-performing teams. Trying to avoid or ignore conflict will undermine your culture. What we do is competitive, it’s intense, and it’s hard. To be great, we have to confront the wrong behavior. It’s a natural part of developing an elite team.
Accept and embrace conflict and learn how to deal with it.
Kara Lawson on conflict:
Steve Sarkisian on Culture
“Culture is organic. It’s not a sign up in your building. It’s not a t-shirt that you wear.”
“Culture is organic. It’s not a sign up in your building. It’s not a t-shirt that you wear.”
https://x.com/TheHoopHerald/status/1861773660324803020
Culture is behavior. It’s not stuff you talk about. It’s what you do.
Geno on Game Day
Interesting thoughts from Geno Auriemma on the difference between coaching in practice and on game day.
Interesting thoughts from Geno Auriemma on the difference between coaching in practice and on game day.
Focus and Eliminating The Noise
Every team has to deal with outside noise and distractions. Not dealing with them will not be productive. Address the situation directly. You won’t be able to eliminate the noise, but you can minimize the impact.
From Admired Leaders on Focus:
Where we focus our attention significantly shapes our experience. Focus is a limited resource. Our perceptions and experiences are largely dictated by what we choose to pay attention to and focus on.
People achieve more when they focus on where they want to go and not on the noise that surrounds them. Both short- and long-term goals benefit from this forward focus.
Losing focus on the prize is what derails accomplishment and success. Distractions impede progress. While it is not always possible to block out the peripheral noise, the better we do at concentrating on the endpoint, the more we achieve.
Our actions follow our attention and focus.
When we concentrate on where we want to go and not on the obstacles and traps along the route, we unconsciously align our behaviors to move us forward and toward that goal.
We begin to see opportunities that might help us in our journey. Our heightened awareness reinforces the need to zero in on the details and milestones critical to success. Good things begin to happen.
As the impact of distractions lessens, our confidence rises. With a narrow scope aimed at a specific target, our execution becomes more fluid. With each passing milestone, the momentum of success builds and increases our commitment. All because we refused to direct our attention to anywhere else but on the end goal.
Focusing forward is a skill and a discipline, and the most productive and highly accomplished performers and leaders have mastered it.
The question for coaches is how do you teach your team to focus? How do you lessen the distractions?
I don’t think it’s productive to simply say “eliminate the noise” and ignore the distractions. The noise is there. The distractions are real. Trying to ignore them doesn’t allow you to address the impact they might be having on your team. I think it’s important that you talk about them with your team. You connect on the impact that outside influences can have if you let them. And then you talk about how to deal with them.
Every team has to deal with outside noise and distractions. Not dealing with them will not be productive. Address the situation directly. You won’t be able to eliminate the noise, but you can minimize the impact.
Jim Crutchfield
“He’s not swayed by conventional wisdom,” Spoelstra said. “He’s just a really unique, innovative thinker. He can get to a conclusion in such a more simple way than the majority of us would.”
Great stuff from CJ Moore in The Athletic about Jim Crutchfield and his system at Nova Southeastern.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Erik Spoelstra is always seeking out original thinkers. Four years ago, the NBA’s fourth-winningest active coach found one a 45-minute drive north of the Miami Heat’s facilities. Since then, Spoelstra has visited Nova Southeastern University regularly for an up-close look at the unique stylings of Jim Crutchfield, the Division II school’s 69-year-old basketball coach.
Nova Southeastern plays faster than anyone in college basketball — the Sharks’ 85.8 possessions per game this season are nearly 10 more than the fastest-playing Division I team — applies a full-court press constantly and plays every possession like it’s game point, while the man calling the shots is as quiet as a librarian on the sideline. Crutchfield, a former math teacher who never played college basketball and coached tennis before getting his big D-II break at West Liberty University, sees the game like a math problem and has created his own calculations.
“He’s not swayed by conventional wisdom,” Spoelstra said. “He’s just a really unique, innovative thinker. He can get to a conclusion in such a more simple way than the majority of us would.”
Crutchfield has won 86.4 percent of his games, the highest winning percentage of any coach with at least 10 seasons of experience at any level in NCAA history. He has turned two programs with no winning history into juggernauts. Spoelstra hoped Crutchfield could take him through his blueprints from those builds. But when Crutchfield makes as much as a practice plan — usually on graphing paper — he crumples it up and throws it in the trash after it’s used. Every belief he has about coaching and style of play lives only in his head. It’s what he considers basketball common sense.
“He just cuts to the obvious,” Spoelstra said. “Always just questioning, like, why? Why would people do it this way? And then when he explains it and says it, you’re like, yeah, why didn’t I think of that?”
Crutchfield doesn’t understand why big-name basketball folks — from Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla and GM Brad Stevens to recently-retired Miami coach Jim Larranaga and Michigan coach Dusty May — have met with him to hear about his methods. Whenever Spoelstra visits, Crutchfield asks him, “Why don’t we just go golf or play pickleball? I can teach you how to play pickleball. Pick my brain about that.”
But the results suggest Crutchfield has cracked a higher-stakes code.
In the last four seasons, Nova Southeastern is 112-4. The Sharks went undefeated and won the national championship in 2023.
With five new starters in 2024, they went 32-3 and lost on a buzzer beater in the title game. West Liberty had two 20-win seasons in its entire history, which began in 1924, before Crutchfield introduced his system. The Hilltoppers have averaged 27.3 wins per year since.
In a sport full of copycats, it’s hard to find anything that looks completely different. If you spend time in Fort Lauderdale, as most of those basketball luminaries have, you start to see how a coach most fans have never heard of is winning at historic levels.
“I’ve had the opportunity to coach against the best coaches in the country,” said Chaminade coach Eric Bovaird, who was Crutchfield’s first assistant at West Liberty. “We played Gonzaga three times. We played North Carolina. We have played against just about everybody. I’ve been around these guys. I’ve seen their practices. I’ve prepared for them. And, deep down, I’m thinking the best coach in the country is Jim Crutchfield from Nova Southeastern.”
Crutchfield’s Sharks are No. 1 in Division II and off to a 13-0 start. (Courtesy of Nova Southeastern Athletics)
The world of an average college basketball coach is foreign to Crutchfield. He barely watches any other basketball, and when he does, he caps out at about five minutes. He’s currently binge-watching “The West Wing”. His favorite show is “Dateline”.
Monday night in January: Big Monday on ESPN or “Dateline”?
“‘Dateline’. By far. Not even close.”
That approach can lead to some gaps in basketball cultural literacy. A few years ago Mazzulla and Stevens invited Crutchfield to a coaches retreat. When Crutchfield got back to Fort Lauderdale, lead assistant Jordan Fee asked him who had been there. Crutchfield went down the list of the attendees he knew and then mentioned there was one guy the group kept asking about defense. He described his appearance.
“It sounds like he’s some kind of defensive guru,” Crutchfield said.
“Coach, it’s Tom Thibodeau,” Fee responded.
Years earlier, Fee recalled, Crutchfield relayed that some “random guy” with the Spurs kept emailing him about trying to get Rudy Gay time in the Nova Southeastern gym: “He doesn’t have an email signature. It’s so strange. He doesn’t even put his full name. He just puts his initials.”
It was R.C. Buford, the architect of the Spurs dynasty and a five-time NBA champion.
“He loves basketball,” Fee said. ”But he’s not a basketball guy. He’s not trying to network. He doesn’t necessarily care to meet people. He just doesn’t care about that.”
When he graduated from West Virginia in 1978, Crutchfield wanted to be a high school basketball coach. A year later, he had given up, returning to his alma mater to go to law school. “Too big a dream,” he thought. He passed the LSAT and rented an apartment in Morgantown. Then he got a call out of nowhere, offering him the boys basketball coaching position at a small school in the state’s northern panhandle. He’s not even sure who recommended him. Crutchfield sold his law books, lost the deposit on his apartment and moved to Cameron, W.V.
Sometime during his 10 years as a high school coach, he went to a clinic in Wheeling where legendary DeMatha High coach Morgan Wooten was presenting. Wooten placed one player with the ball at half court near the sideline and another under the basket. When Wooten blew the whistle, the ballhandler was to go shoot a layup as fast as he could, and the other player was to take off sprinting the length of the floor and catch the ball when it went through the net without allowing it to hit the ground. Crutchfield thought there could be no way, but the sprinting player got there. He ran the same drill with his players, and they all caught the ball, too.
Crutchfield had no idea the point Wooten was trying to make, but it completely changed how he viewed the game. How much of the floor could his team cover if no one ever loped back on defense and gave the other team space to breathe? He wanted no emotion, just hustle.
As a high school coach, Crutchfield employed a zone press, with specific rules on where to send the ball and trap. Then he watched the 1987 NCAA Tournament. Rick Pitino’s Providence Friars made a run to the Final Four using a different kind of press, more helter skelter. Random. They forced teams to play at a different pace, and they racked up steals chasing ball handlers from behind.
Crutchfield tried it for himself playing pickup games at the high school. He told his teammates to play a box zone, waited for the offense to pass half court and then pounced, chasing the ball like a game of tag.
His experiment played out as he expected. He blocked some shots from behind. He got some steals that led to layups because he could leak out as soon as he tapped the ball to one of his teammates. But most importantly, his opponents were constantly looking behind themselves on offense.
“People are uncomfortable with people chasing them,” he said.
Two years later, Crutchfield landed a spot as an assistant coach at West Liberty, and he wanted to try out his helter skelter press. Problem was, he didn’t have the pull. The Hilltoppers were mediocre, and outside-the-box ideas were ignored. “Let’s try to lose by less than 10 and be happy,” is his description of the mentality.
After three seasons on staff, the head coach was fired. Crutchfield wanted the job, but the other assistant got it. He wasn’t going to press, either. So Crutchfield stepped down and kept his full-time job at the school, teaching racket sports and coaching the men’s and women’s tennis teams. He won 11 league titles over 15 seasons, but he was always thinking about basketball, even workshopping his system with his tennis team’s pickup squad, which made the intramural championship game.
In 2004, West Liberty’s basketball team won four games and fired its coach again. Crutchfield had rejoined the staff two years prior when the coach asked for his help, but the Hilltoppers still weren’t pressing. Crutchfield wanted the job, but…
Who elevates the coach who worked for the guy who just got fired?
“I wouldn’t have hired me either,” he said.
Crutchfield wasn’t even asked to share his vision with the administration. He was just the next warm body. His first order of business was driving to South Carolina to recruit Bovaird to be his assistant coach. Bovaird had played at West Liberty in the years when Crutchfield was just coaching tennis.
“He just totally believed in his style and his system, and he just knew that it was going to work,” Bovaird said. “He just knew it. And he transferred that belief to the players.”
West Liberty didn’t return one starter and was picked to finish last in its league. The Hilltoppers went 21-10. At first, Crutchfield would press the teams he thought had inferior talent and only sprinkle it in against better opponents. In his seventh season, convinced he had the personnel perfect for his system, he went all-in, pressing every single possession. West Liberty went undefeated in the regular season and made the Final Four. That started a streak of seven straight NCAA Tournament appearances.
At the height of that run, Crutchfield told his agent to start looking for a new job for him. This is when most look to move upward. Crutchfield wanted to go to a place that had never won before.
“I thought, was it a fluke?” he recalled. “Was I lucky? Were the stars all aligned? And I kept telling my wife, before I retire, I want to try to do it again.”
Nova Southeastern went 6-20 the year before Crutchfield was hired. He went 17-10 in his first year — the worst record of his career — and then 29-4 the next season.
“He knows how to build a program,” Spoelstra said. “He knows how to get people rallying around his vision that’s not documented and only he can explain it. But he’s like the pied piper. You just seem drawn to it. And then ultimately, he’s able to get that program to win. And he does it over and over and over.”
Crutchfield’s D-II success has not earned him many calls from higher levels, but Nova Southeastern itself may one day be a candidate for promotion. (Courtesy of Nova Southeastern Athletics)
Long before Mazzulla was an NBA champion, he was a young assistant at Fairmont State, studying West Liberty because Crutchfield was dominating the league. Mazzulla had read Dean Oliver’s book “Basketball on Paper” that highlights the four factors to success — effective field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding percentage and free throw rate — and realized Crutchfield had mastered every single one. He was light-years ahead of the modern analytics curve. “He thinks the game differently,” Mazzulla said. “He doesn’t get caught up in all the fluff.”
One of Crutchfield’s former players used to compare their style of play to breaking a horse. At some point in the game, his player would come over and say he could feel it; the opponent was about to break.
On the first Sunday in October, before they got off to a 13-0 start to this season, Crutchfield’s team played a scrimmage against Florida Southwestern. The game was tied at 25 with 7:22 left in the first half, but Florida Southwestern was clearly annoyed by the constant pressure. The Sharks even pressed after missed shots, trapping the defensive rebounder. The first sign of fatigue was Florida Southwestern’s point guard’s calf cramping. The Buccaneers started complaining to the officials about fouls.
With a minute left in the second half, Nova Southeastern led 100-60. And was still pressing.
Crutchfield watched quietly from the sideline. Occasionally he pointed to where he wanted someone to move in the press, but in a 40-minute game, he shouted out instructions twice. “He knows you’ve got to coach with a revolver and not an uzi,” Fee said. “He’s only got so many bullets in his chamber.”
Crutchfield also knows the numbers will eventually work in his favor. Before games, he typically writes two goals on the board: plus-10 on the boards and plus-10 in turnover margin. Every year the Sharks dominate in both. Last season, they got back 38.5 percent of their misses and turned opponents over on 26.8 percent of possessions. That led to 14.6 more shots per game than their opponent.
Film sessions are when Crutchfield gets his players to see what he sees; habits are formed. And there was one moment in particular he wanted to pinpoint the afternoon after the scrimmage.
Early in the first half, forward Tyler Eberhart trapped the ball in the far corner of the floor with his hands above his head. Weeks earlier Eberhart had been clocked to see how fast he could spin out of a trap from that exact spot, sprint to the middle of half court between two cones and proceed to the opposite free throw line. Every player does this drill twice, recorded by two stopwatches at each station, and the times are averaged together. Eberhart’s time, from trapping to half court, was 2.44 seconds. Crutchfield had clocked Eberhart on film that morning getting to mid-court in 3.41 seconds. Nearly a second slower.
“One second is 28 feet on the other end,” Crutchfield told Eberhart, which he already knew; it’s written on the white board in the back of the room.
“You could have gone all the way down here,” the coach continued, pointing at the paint.
A half-second pause could be the difference between blocking a layup at the rim and watching at the free-throw line as your opponent scores an uncontested layup.
“That wasn’t just a message to him; that’s a message to the whole team,” Crutchfield said. “‘(Coach) notices that stuff, and if I don’t run, he’s charting that and timing us.’ I’m not timing every guy, but I want the players to think I’m timing every detail.”
The white board at the front of the film room depicts what Crutchfield wants from his players.
“We call it the brainwashing process of trying to get guys closer and closer to what they’re capable of,” Crutchfield said. “You say things as a coach like, ‘Play harder.’ Everybody hears it, but I don’t know if it affects them. And I thought I need to prove it to them and come up with math.”
(C.J. Moore for The Athletic)
During the pandemic, Fee was asked to do a Zoom with a group of coaches who operate like Grinnell, the Division III team that gained notoriety when guard Jack Taylor scored 138 points in a game in 2012. Grinnell’s approach, like Crutchfield’s, is called “the system,” and the coaches assumed there’d be similarities.
“I feel like the biggest jerk in the world,” Fee remembered telling his audience. “But I’ve got to be honest with you, we’re nothing alike. Everything that you’re saying that you guys are doing is the antithesis of what we’re about.”
“There’s times when they’re giving up layups and they’re putting a time clock up offensively,” Fee explained. “They want to shoot X number of 3s. They’re so analytically driven, whereas we’re not as analytically driven and more about a mentality. We don’t care if it takes the entire shot clock as long as we get a good shot with guys in rebounding position.”
At a Nova Southeastern practice, you’ll see drills you won’t see anywhere else. One has a defender deny in the press with a coach inbounding. After five seconds, the coach tosses the ball toward half court. The denier must go retrieve it, score a layup, then deny again. This goes on for about 35 seconds, and it’s so exhausting that when Crutchfield put a Florida manager through it a few years ago at Larry Shyatt’s annual coaches clinic in Gainesville, the manager collapsed to the ground.
“Shyatt called it the transfer drill,” Crutchfield said, laughing. “Want a kid to transfer? Make him do that drill.”
Crutchfield’s secret is not simply “brainwashing”; he picks the right players who can endure what he asks of them.
“C’mon! We gotta be maniacs!” sophomore Eli Allen yelled at his teammates following a water break. “I need to hear you!”
“If you don’t play that way,” said David Dennis, who played for Crutchfield at both West Liberty and Nova Southeastern, “your teammates are going to look at you like, ‘What are you doing? Do you see how many games we win every year? Why are you going to be the one guy that comes in here and doesn’t play this hard?’”
Crutchfield is constantly evaluating how he can get the most out of his group. Every day he writes out his players’ names, ranks them and calculates out how many minutes each would get if they played that day. The data that helps inform his decisions initially comes from preseason open gyms.
The rules of those pickup games are simple. If it’s 7-on-7 — meaning two subs — the teams play to 140. If it’s 6-on-6, they play to 120; if 5-on-5, to 100. The players are divided differently every day, but one side is always pressing, the teams taking turns throughout. A chart with every player’s win-loss record and plus-minus from the pickup games hangs in the Nova Southeastern locker room. Dallas Graziani, a 5-foot-8 point guard who had just one other scholarship offer out of high school, was at the top of the chart with an 11-3 record and plus-147. He’s averaging 34.8 minutes this season, the only player on the roster playing more than 30 minutes per game.
By the time practice starts, the Sharks are the best-conditioned team in the country.
Why the system works is more psychological than anything else.
“People live by habits and basketball players live by habits,” Crutchfield said. “And there’s a certain amount of time you relax your mind during the course of a game, whether it’s walking the ball down the court to play against a zone or the other team’s not pushing it.”
As one coach told him years ago, “You wear people down mentally more than physically. You don’t let people relax their minds enough. And these kids, eventually it wears their minds down.”
Now for the obvious question: Would this system work at a higher level?
Crutchfield hasn’t had a ton of interest but says he was a finalist for a Division I job 12 years ago. He had one request: Instead of hiring three assistants, like every other D-I program in the country, Crutchfield wanted only two, with the salary of the third assistant spot to be split between those two.
That killed his chances.
“They said that showed them I didn’t understand the landscape of Division I basketball,” Crutchfield said. “Now keep in mind in 2011, we were 33-0 when we lost the national semifinals and averaging 112 points a game and no Division I would play us. (That school) was awful. We would have beat them by 30 points, and I’m in a rural, Division II school with one assistant coach.”
Crutchfield knows he’s a little unconventional. He wakes up most mornings and goes to the gym to get in a short lift and a swim, then sundries outside. He has an office at Nova Southeastern, but he never visits it. Instead, he works out of his townhouse across the street.
Breaks for pickleball and tennis — he estimates he plays five days a week — are a necessity. “The Japanese proved that when they started playing games and exercising in the middle of a workday, saying it refreshes your mind and body,” he said.
Spoelstra tells him he should never leave this place. He gets to play pickleball — soon, on courts he’s helping design on campus — and people love his program. It keeps him young.
Crutchfield doesn’t have any plans of stopping soon, but the window for taking over a D-I program may have passed. One possible wrinkle: Nova Southeastern moving to Division I and joining the Atlantic Sun has been discussed. Those in Crutchfield’s tree think Fee might be the one to test “the system” at the D-I ranks. He took over at Gannon after Nova’s 2023 title and led a team that won three games the previous season to a 32-3 record and the D-II Elite Eight, the largest year-to-year turnaround in NCAA history. Fee joined Florida Atlantic’s staff as an assistant this spring.
Crutchfield is content with finishing his career where he is, but what’s left? What still drives him?
It’s not winning championships. The only thing he ever wanted to prove was that his system worked. The thrill of this job, he explained, is seeing everything come together — when his guys are playing hard, sharing the ball offensively and exuding great chemistry and taking joy in each other’s success.
“It’s that capable line up there (on the board) that I’m never going to get to, because no one gets to that line,” he said. “It’s just how close you can get to it.”
Ben McCollum at Drake
“It’s not really what you know,” McCollum said. “It’s what they can comprehend and then execute.”
A great article in The Athletic about how Ben McCollum is winning at Drake with 4 Division II transfers he brought with him from Northwest Missouri State.
By CJ Moore
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Drake head coach Ben McCollum paced in the coaches’ locker room before speed-walking in to address his team.
His assistants had told him the players were a little quiet during warmups for the Wildcat Classic, a mid-December game against Kansas State in downtown Kansas City. Star point guard Bennett Stirtz attended the event they were about to play in as a fan a year ago. Isaiah Jackson, whose childhood home is 15 minutes from T-Mobile Center, had watched many games in the building but never stepped on the floor. When he walked through the tunnel for the first time, he took out his phone and captured the moment, then FaceTimed his parents after practice so they could see.
Stirtz and Jackson are two of the four starters who followed McCollum from Division II Northwest Missouri State when he was hired by Drake this offseason. They’d played in big games, but no environment like this. So McCollum decided to recycle a speech he’d given before the 2021 Division II national title game when he’d had a similar feeling.
“It’s always fascinating in these kinds of environments, what some people can do and what some people quite frankly can’t do, that they can do in a regular environment,” McCollum said.
He told his players to imagine there was a balance beam on the floor — four inches wide, five meters long. Could they walk across it? “Hell yeah you can,” he said.
Now raise it 10 feet in the air. You may think twice, but most could still make it.
Now what if it was 150 feet in the air?
“The same balance beam that you just told me you could walk across when it was on the ground because there was no repercussions to it, all of a sudden it lifts a little bit and you can’t walk across it anymore? Why?” McCollum asked. “Because you lost the ability to walk? No. You can still do that. Because you’re distracted by everything else around you.”
McCollum’s point: Block it out — the crowd, the noise — and just put one foot in front of the other.
A few hours later, the Bulldogs sprinted back into that locker room, knocking off a Big 12 team on a shot by Stirtz with 3.4 seconds left in overtime.
Drake opened 2025 as one of the final four undefeated teams in Division I, playing with a confidence reinforced by the results its leaders brought from the D-II ranks. The Bulldogs faced their first setback Wednesday, dropping their Missouri Valley Conference road opener 74-70 to UIC, but they’re off to a 12-1 start that no one saw coming, with three wins over high-major programs.
“They look good on film, but when you watch them in person, they’re even better,” said Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington, who called McCollum after Drake beat Vandy in November to ask if he’d get on a Zoom and talk through how he did it. “And what they’re better at in person is some details that you might not catch by watching film. And then when you see them in person, they hit every single detail.”
In 15 seasons at Northwest Missouri State, McCollum won 12 regular-season conference titles and four national titles. Long before he was coaching at their level, Division I coaches would mention that they’d been studying Northwest Missouri State’s offense. They expected McCollum to succeed in D-I, but not this much and this fast.
Meanwhile, McCollum’s players expect to win because they know McCollum is going to put them in the right places and always know exactly what to say.
“They’re a well-tuned machine,” Byington said. “I shook his hand after our game and told him this group can make a deep run in the (NCAA) Tournament. Not just win a game; they can make a run.”
McCollum won four D-II national championships at Northwest Missouri State, including three in a row. (Cody Scanlan / The Register / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
Why did it take so long for McCollum to get a Division I job?
“I’m a slow trigger by nature,” McCollum said, “because I evaluate every decision quite a bit.”
In the last few years, McCollum was in the mix for several low- and mid-major openings, but he was always hesitant to move his family. Drake was a job he’d always eyed — he’s originally from Iowa, and it’s a program with a winning history in a strong league — but it still took him five days to accept after it was offered. “We had a good setup,” McCollum said. “And, you know, your culture doesn’t necessarily travel.”
That wasn’t necessarily true, because all it took to get three of his returning starters to go with him was one visit each to his office. If he were to go, would they come along? Stirtz, Jackson and Daniel Abreu said yes immediately.
Stirtz and Jackson both wanted their shot at D-I, too. They had the same two offers out of high school: William Jewell College and Northwest Missouri State.
Abreu, who did have two D-I offers in high school (Abilene Christian and Jacksonville), was ready for a challenge. “I was getting bored of the scouts after year two, playing the same teams over and over again,” Abreu said. “I can’t believe (McCollum) did it for that long.”
Those three yeses got McCollum off to a head start building the lineup he needed. Stirtz is the point guard who can do a little of everything; Jackson is the distributor and lockdown defender; the 6-6 Abreu plays with a physicality that allows him to guard up. McCollum had a big on the way in Cam Manyawu, a Wyoming transfer who followed assistant Bryston Williams to Drake.
The final piece needed was a shooter. McCollum had one at Northwest Missouri State but thought he was finished playing. Mitch Mascari had his MBA after five years in Maryville and had accepted a job as a credit analyst in asset management at First Trust Portfolios in Wheaton, Ill. He was supposed to start in two weeks, but after McCollum accepted the Drake job, Mascari started thinking maybe he too wanted his shot at D-I and put his name in the transfer portal on the final day it was open. McCollum called him right away, and Mascari asked McCollum what he thought he should do.
“Naturally, when you coach somebody for five years, you build up a level of trust and whatever probably opinion that I would have given him, he probably would have done it and listened,” McCollum said. “And so I couldn’t give him my opinion. I could just give him the positives and negatives of both. And then it was ultimately his decision to make and he chose to come and play.”
The one starter McCollum could not bring with him was Wes Dreamer, the conference player of the year who is now the leading scorer for a professional team in Germany. That meant McCollum had to do more teaching than his former Bearcats had witnessed before, and he had to rethink the team’s style of play.
Making this hot start even more unlikely is the possibility that McCollum may have as little depth as he’s ever had. Mascari has played every minute in five of the 13 games. Stirtz has come off the floor twice in the 11 games against D-I opponents — both in the final minute of comfortable wins over Stephen F. Austin and Belmont.
The offense is built around getting Mascari 3s and Stirtz a gap to drive, with Abreu making the occasional 3 and always looking for openings to cut. Whichever big is on the floor is a roller/cutter, and Jackson distributes while also providing timely drives or cuts to the basket. The former Bearcats have found in D-I that sometimes it takes more time to find a quality look, but they will exhaust every opportunity to get a great shot.
“We have to move it,” McCollum said. “All five guys have to connect to be able to create windows and avenues, to be able to get to the paint and get below the defense. We’ve had to invest in five or six different ways, where it’s just like if they guard this, then we have to go to this and this and that.”
Jackson says the difference between Division II and Division I is that these big schools play at a quicker pace and take “early, average shots.” McCollum has always believed that to beat good teams, you’re going to have to score against a set defense.
“We play a slower tempo because we don’t take bad shots, and we won’t take bad shots,” McCollum said. “We refuse to take them. And so it naturally slows the game down.”
McCollum’s players always feel like they have the answers to the test, and the coach has always been willing to scrap plans if the opponent throws a curveball. The offense is like a decision tree.
“A lot of our offense is predicated on how the defense reacts,” Mascari said. “So if a defense is reacting in a different way than we anticipated, we’re just going to do something else. Sometimes we’re walking down the floor, and we have no idea what we’re about to do. So how is the defense supposed to?”
Drake may lead the country in shot clock violations, which is part of the reason Drake is turning the ball over at one of the worst rates in college basketball — 20.5 percent of its possessions against D-I competition. The Bulldogs would rather run out the clock than take a mediocre shot, and they stay composed when the seconds tick away late in a possession. Against Vandy, they had three shot clock violations. “That never fazed them,” Byington said, noting Drake also made three late-clock 3s.
Defensively, the Bulldogs seem to rarely ever make a mistake, and McCollum is meticulous in demonstrating how to guard every action they will see, from the footwork to body position to where to be on the floor. He gives his players easy cues to remember.
“It’s not really what you know,” McCollum said. “It’s what they can comprehend and then execute.”
This may be the most impressive stat for Drake this season: Without one player taller than 6-8 in the rotation, Drake ranks 15th nationally in defensive rebounding rate and 17th in offensive rebounding rate. After getting out-rebounded by Stephen F. Austin in its first game against a Division I opponent, the Bulldogs have won the battle of the boards every game since. That aspect of this start astonishes even McCollum.
“They’re just destroying people on the boards,” McCollum said. “Defensive rebounding, we’ve always been No. 1 in the country (in Division II). Offensive rebounding, we’ve just been physical. We just go get the ball. Little chip on our shoulder.”
Three years ago Northwest Missouri State entered the season as the defending national champs with four starters returning. The Bearcats had gone 97-3 the previous three seasons. It was star guard Trevor Hudgins’ senior season.
And McCollum wanted them to fail.
Every preseason he puts his team through an exhausting conditioning test. Every player has to run 20 line drills and 20 down-and-backs in 20 minutes. You have to do both in one-minute windows and can’t start again until the beginning of each minute. If you don’t pass, you try again the next day. Before the test three years ago, the Bearcats had a hard lift — squats and resistance bands. They were being set up to fail. “Our legs were done,” Jackson said.
Jackson was the only player who made time, but McCollum still made him run the next day with all of his teammates because he wanted to see them all pass it together.
“They need to teach themselves to respond,” McCollum said. “You don’t just respond to failure well. You’ve got to develop that habit through failing and then figuring out the response to it.”
Against K-State, Drake found failure. After leading 29-9 early, K-State started to chip away late in the first half, going on a 14-2 run. “That crowd popped,” Stirtz leaned over to tell Mascari at halftime.
Mascari had been on fire, making all six of his 3s in the first half. But K-State mostly took him away in the second half, face-guarding him and Stirtz. Midway through the half, K-State sharpshooter Brendan Hausen got a clean look for the first time and buried it to tie the game. It felt like K-State was in control, with Drake looking tired and hopeless in the half court.
With 23.9 seconds left, Abreu went to the free-throw line, the Bulldogs’ first loss looming if he missed. During the under-16 timeout of the second half, Drake had broken its huddle early, and Abreu was joking with a security lady stationed at the free-throw line. McCollum affectionately calls him Buddy the Elf because he’s always in a good mood. A day earlier, Abreu said that he never watches basketball — he prefers movies — and his ignorance of the basketball world is a gift. “The nerves aren’t there because I just don’t know,” he said.
He buried both free throws to force overtime.
“They’re tough. I mean they’ll outlast ya,” McCollum said. “That’s the thing, like there’s a level of toughness. There’s a level of outlast. There’s a level of, you know, who’s going to take it further? And we’ve just tried to train them to be able to create those habits to take it a little bit further and fight a little bit more.”
In overtime, Stirtz found the little bit more.
He scored five of Drake’s first seven points in OT, and after K-State’s Coleman Hawkins buried a 3 with 12.3 seconds left to tie the game, Stirtz got the inbound pass and calmly jogged the ball up the floor. Drake set up with all four teammates lined up on the baseline and let Stirtz go to work. Stirtz crossed over, got Hausen on his heels and buried the game-winner.
That was a response.
Stirtz and the Bulldogs have been undaunted by high-major competition so far. (Jay Biggerstaff / Imagn Images)
The hero returned to his locker stall and sat. He leaned back, hands on his lap and stared straight ahead in a daze.
Stirtz is a K-State fan. His grandparents are football season-ticket holders. Both his older brothers went to K-State, and his younger brother plans to enroll there next year. His mom wore a K-State shirt under her Drake shirt in support of Stirtz’s girlfriend, a K-State dancer who watched his game winner from the opposite baseline. In high school, Stirtz sent his film to K-State coaches. Once he got his Northwest Missouri State offer, the only ones he would have considered were Division I offers. Those never came. When Stirtz committed to the Bearcats, McCollum told friends he thought he’d stolen one.
Byington marveled at how Stirtz and the three other former Bearcats ever ended up at that level: “Those guys are probably starters on most SEC teams.”
Hyperbole? Maybe. But not with Stirtz. He’s so good that NBA scouts are starting to take notice. And college basketball is taking notice of the Bulldogs. They were picked fifth in the Missouri Valley in the preseason coaches’ poll. They were projected to win the league before Wednesday’s loss at UIC, according to Ken Pomeroy’s metrics, and nationally they’ve been on the verge of getting ranked. In this week’s Associated Press poll, they received the second-most votes among teams outside the Top 25.
Stirtz is as unassuming a star as you’ll find. He never celebrates a made bucket. He’s quiet off the floor. But in that overtime, Stirtz wanted the ball and he wasn’t going to let the Bulldogs lose. Against the school he had dreamed of playing for, Stirtz realized the fact that he was being face-guarded meant the Wildcats didn’t think they could guard him, and he started to believe it himself.
“I ain’t one for individual s—,” McCollum told his team once he got to the celebratory locker room, “but damn, that’s a big shot.”
Then McCollum reminded his players of the satisfaction of what they’d just accomplished. He nearly went into the next challenge, before catching himself, “I’m not even going to ruin the moment,” he said. “Let’s just get our prayer and get out of here.”
The Bulldogs knelt, and Abreu delivered the perfect line. “Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for Bennett.”
Stirtz then headed to the news conference, where he informed the media that his game winner was the first buzzer beater of his life. Technically, there were still those 3.4 seconds on the clock, but that’s just about the only flaw in this script, which somehow keeps getting better.
The Responsibility of Leadership
Sue Bird on how Geno Auriemma shaped her approach to leadership.
Dan Quinn - Reinvention
"I wasn't going to just rinse and repeat," Quinn said. "I didn't get fired because it was going great. So I said, 'OK, that's a call to order for me. What needs to change?' It wasn't about an ultimatum to myself, 'I have to do it.' It would've been easy not to do it for sure."
A really good inside look at Washington Commanders coach Dan Quinn and how he self-evaluated after he was fired by the Falcons.
It takes a high level of self-awareness and intentionality to improve after losing a dream job, especially one where you have experienced success. Quinn isn’t afraid to be honest with himself.
"I wasn't going to just rinse and repeat," Quinn said. "I didn't get fired because it was going great. So I said, 'OK, that's a call to order for me. What needs to change?' It wasn't about an ultimatum to myself, 'I have to do it.' It would've been easy not to do it for sure."
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/42335070/how-commanders-coach-dan-quinn-reinvented-himself
Billy Donovan - Teammates
“Your legacy is your relationship with each other.”
“Your legacy is your relationship with each other.”