Adjust To Your Talent
In my second year at Maine, we had the most athletic team in the America East. We started three freshmen and two sophomores and we played at the fourth fastest pace in the country. We had a chance to be a top three team in our league the next year. But our young talent didn't return, with four of our best players and athletes transferring up, while another of our athletes graduated.
We scrambled to replace them that spring and summer, but we didn't get nearly the same level of athlete we had on the roster my first two years. We went from being the most athletic team in the league to being the least, or at least close to it.
The biggest mistake I made as a coach at Maine was going into that third year. We didn't change our approach to playing the game fast, even though we didn't have the athletes. I had always coached a fast, athletic team and we were always in attack mode, playing aggressively. I didn't re-think my approach, given that we weren't very athletic at all. I realized about halfway through the year that I hadn't put my team in the best position to win. I was asking them to do things that didn't fit their ability.
When I became a head coach at Rhode Island College I had an idea about how we were going to play: fast. I wanted to attack on both ends of the floor, and I wanted to play a lot of guys, with a relentless style. Fortunately I took over a really athletic, deep team, and RIC was a place where we could continue to recruit athletes. The style I wanted to play fit perfectly with the talent in the gym.
We were good every year at RIC, so I never had to really adjust my approach. We did tweak some things on offense to fit our personnel better, but as far as style of play went the team you played against at RIC in 2005 was pretty similar to the one you played against in 2014. We wanted the game moving fast at both ends of the floor, and we had the athletes and talent to play that way.
The question gets asked a lot across all sports - do you adjust your style of play to your team, or do you ask your team to adjust to you? I think it's a pretty simple answer. Your job as a coach is to put your team in the best position to be successful. You have to evaluate the talent you have in the gym and figure out how to get the most out of them. You can take pride in being a "man to man coach" but if your team is slow but has some length, you may be better off playing zone. You might want to play up-tempo on offense, but if you don't have guards that are quick and can play at speed, that style isn't really going to work.
A lot of coaches aren't willing or able to re-think their approach. This doesn't mean you have to make major changes or lower your standards. You might adjust your man to man defense so that you don't pressure the ball as much, or introduce a more structured fast break so that your guards can see two or three options, rather than just making plays in the open floor. But I see a lot of teams that don't necessarily have the personnel to fit the way they are playing, but they are playing to the coach's approach and they struggle to win. The default for the coach becomes blaming the players, saying they just couldn't figure it out.
The best coaches know when it's time to adjust, and how to implement the change. Evaluate your team thoroughly each year to really dissect their strengths and weaknesses. Figure out what changes you need to make to give your team the best chance. The adjustments might be minor, or some year they might be major. But it's your job to adjust your approach to the talent in the room to give your team the best chance to win.