Basketball Leadership- Foresight Servant Leadership Series

Servant Leadership Series: Foresight
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features that constitute the endless repetition of history. -Winston Churchill

NBC Basketball continues its focus on the qualities of servant leaders. These are the leaders who make those around them better. The sixth quality necessary to be a servant leader is foresight. Foresight is the ability to accurately predict the future. Foresight combines the lessons of the past with the best practice of today for the wisest plans laid for building a strong future.

Synonyms: Prudence, Farsighted

Examples of Foresightedness:

• Building and practicing an emergency plan
• Saving for an emergency fund
• Investing in education to become a valuable hire and a well-read leader
• Laying a foundation of infrastructure for future programs

What is a lack of foresight?
Winston Churchill does a masterful job of laying out the list. Let’s look at each one.

Unwillingness to act when action is simple and effective: There are many examples in history when there was a failure to act. The two biggest reasons tend to be fear (don’t know what to do) or apathy (not a big deal). Each person, family, or community tends to gravitate toward one or the other. Either way, there is blindness to what needs to take place and the person has his/her head in the sand.

Consider...when have you been blind to the action steps because of fear or apathy? This often leads to us kicking the problem down the road prolonging having to deal with it.

The best way to move out of unwillingness is to write down action steps you can take right now. For example, if you find you are out of shape from COVID 19, start taking simple action steps. Drink more water for three days, put your fork down between bites, get one thousand more steps per day, stop eating candy for one week. These first steps could help you march quickly toward your goal.

Lack of clear thinking: Have you ever wondered, “What were they thinking!?” They weren’t. Quality problem solving and clear thinking require two key qualities: peace and self-responsibility. If there is a loss of common sense, there was first a loss of one of these two. Lack of responsibility is apparent in excuse-making. Statements or thoughts such as, “I just did what I was told, I didn’t know what to do, someone else was in charge, I was going along with it,” become the norm. Another loss of clarity emerges from a lack of peace. An increase in fear, anxiety and depression creates muddled thinking and an inability to focus. Peace contributes to our ability to think react wisely, problem-solve, and select the best option as a solution.

Confusion of counsel: Have you been in a situation where there are multiple experts and counselors in your life-giving you different advice? There is wisdom from a multitude of counselors and points of view that allow you to discern the best path forward but there can also be too many choices on the table. Decision fatigue from too many options wears us down and we can make a reactionary choice based on emotion or impulse. Wise counsel is a key piece of the ability to develop foresight. You cannot do what you do not know. Select mentors who educate you in your areas of blindness. What are your weaknesses, deficits in personality, temperament, and family background? Who is a mentor worthy of imitation in the areas you are weak? This counselor is crucial because he or she will help you make the wisest choice that wouldn’t come to you naturally.

Basketball Foresight
Foresight takes the lessons of the past, with the knowledge of the present, to build the best foundations and decisions to step into the future. Basketball is a perfect example of the importance of foresight. For example, consider this family. Their son is in fifth grade. They place him on a select team. His team dominates everyone in the city. They wear awesome gear and fly around to tournaments. He shoots during practice and gets a few shots up during the games. In fifth grade, he is one of the better shooters in the city. His dad brags that he will play for Gonzaga. As time continues, the boy’s shooting doesn’t really improve. He develops some mechanical unhealthy habits that impair his shot. He keeps shooting but his accuracy is lower. He gets less and less playing time on his “elite” team.

Meanwhile, consider another fifth-grader. His dad is a coach, and they head to the gym for workouts every day, they play tournaments occasionally, but the foundation of their practice is the development of muscle memory, accurate skills, bedrock fundamentals, and of course excellent shooting mechanics and hundreds of hours of practice. His shooting isn’t based on comparison to other students but on his own future development. This player’s shooting becomes rock solid.

What can players learn about basketball foresight? First, you can’t do what you don’t know. If you don’t come from a coaching background, you may be mesmerized by the AAU scene and the glamor of flying to tournaments and games. This could also be a huge mistake. The foundation of great basketball comes from 10,000 hours of real work in the gym or home court. This can’t be built playing 5-on-5. You simply do not get enough touches with the ball.

Next, a player must transcend mere fundamentals and develop the mental vision, strategy, and intuition of the game. This training comes through education experientially, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

Experientially, you need to get games in a variety of settings. Go somewhere you are the best player, and you learn to maximize your dominance. Go to settings where you are the role player or experience a different angle on the court. Officiating games, coaching, playing various positions, 1-on-1, 3-on-3, all these add to your experience and perspective of the game.

Intellectually, you need to understand the game, the flow, the importance of leverage, fakes, spacing, flow, tempo, and motion. Your basketball IQ works in tandem with your experience and muscle memory to build your intuition and court savvy.

Emotions are important to the game and require wisdom to use to your advantage. One player could only have a peak performance when he got angry. This helped him play with aggression but then when he went to the NBA, he struggled because he couldn’t sustain this emotion through the course of a long season. Some athletes get ruled by their emotions and some cut it out entirely which cuts off their passion and heart. Emotionally intelligent athletes are crucial because they combine poise with grit, and calm with aggression. This paradox is vital for a skillful player.

Spirituality is the final and most bypassed aspect of the game because it is complex and controversial. Faith is the bedrock for a person’s beliefs whether as an atheist, agnostic, or believer. Faith resides in the heart and the heart dictates the thoughts, the words, and the actions. Heartless lives make us inhuman. Our faith connects us to the heart. In scripture, it says, “I will take from you your heart of stone and give you a living heart.” Stony hearts keep us from connecting with teammates, from our mission, and with what matters most in life. A heart of stone cannot love, and love is crucial for great basketball.

A Message to Coaches About Foresight

Think of coaching like farming. You have fields for preparation, sowing, and harvesting. Preparation includes imagining your role in encouraging the youngest populations to build talent for the future. At NBC Basketball, our elementary focus is habit building. Habits are crucial for basketball success. This includes, footwork, pivoting, shooting, offensive moves, passing, defensive positioning, and developing a winner’s mindset. In middle school, our focus shifts to solidifying fundaments and introducing pattern recognition, decision making, and beginning to recognize the strategy and intuition of the game. As the players elevate into high school and college, NBC Basketball looks to build athletes coaches must have on the court. This transformational player makes the team better through high percentage shooting, tenacious defense, wise decisions, vocal and inspirational leadership, and service to the team. This framework provides coaches the emphasis necessary for basketball education. All too often, however, a coach in the elementary levels is robbing students of the fundamental platform, kids come through the system with noticeable fundamental deficits. As seen in so many of the teams in the men’s NCAA tournament, fundamental skills such as dribbling in traffic, converting on the block, accurate shooting, and free throws are glaringly lacking. These college players are athletic, they are quick, powerful, assertive but many of them can’t efficiently score which leads to a tournament game with only four points after ten minutes of game time. This is a lack of foresight and comes from a breakdown in coaching mission and philosophy. Coaches failed to develop the shooting skills of these students because as a bottom line, free throw shooting isn’t learned in a game, it’s revealed in a game. Get committed to the foresight of building successful future players and do all you can to move the needle toward rock-solid fundamentals.

A Message to Parents on Foresight

A set of young parents sat down with their daughter and wrote out all the character qualities they wanted to see in her life: a deep meaningful faith, respect, and appreciation for diversity, quality thinking and decision making, compassion as well as tough-mindedness, to name a few. After writing down these qualities, the parents put action steps to help this happen in their own lives. Compassion is difficult to teach if there is none in the home. Self-discipline is difficult to cultivate if no one has it. Parenting is tough because the best practice of it lives within the crucible. Being too strict is ineffective parenting just like being too soft is ineffective parenting. In the paraphrased words of the inimitable Martin Luther King Jr., power without love is abusive, love without power is anemic and ineffectual. Foresight takes the lessons of the past. Foresight also learns from the present, each child is unique and requires wisdom to parent with nuance, sensitivity, and intuition. Some kids are easier to parent in some situations. Foresight provides parents with tools to help build qualities a child needs for his or her future.

Quick questionnaire

What qualities would you like your son or daughter to develop?
What deficits frustrate you about your son or daughter and how can you recognize this in your life? (Remember the comparison will not be one-to-one but there will be a link.)
Kids pick up more than we say. What are you saying to your kids through your body language, interest levels, and interactions?
What is foresight as a parent and how can you help build the strongest future for your son and/or daughter?