Coach Culbertson Interview Part 2

As promised here is the second question from my short interview with Coach Jodi Culbertson;

2.) As a player what would you say were the top 3 things that made you a top level basketball player?

1 - I was very determined and driven to be successful. I was not very athletic so I worked extremely hard on my skills (shooting, ballhandling, passing) so that I would be an asset to the team. I didn't need someone in the gym with me to work on my skills - I did it on my own.

2 - I was a team player. I did all the "little things" to help my team - dove on loose balls, brought energy each day to practice, got my teammates involved, etc.

3 - I LOVED the game - I had a deep love for the game of basketball and truly enjoyed being on the court

Once again coach gave me more than I expected in her answer to my question. Her answers are self explanatory for the most part but I do want to expand on one point she brought up, about how she worked on her skills. When coach said, “I didn’t need someone in the gym with me to work on my skills- I did it on my own” I smiled, because that is an attitude that I can fully relate to. I was the same type of player when I was young and trying to improve my game. I was constantly at the local YMCA, running myself thorough drills like the Mikan Drill, ball handling drills or even simple free throw shooting. I feel that in this time when players are coached from a young age a lot of them grow up feeling that they need a coach with them to improve their game, which is simply not true. Pick up almost any biography on a famous basketball player and you will read about the countless hours they spent alone in the gym perfecting the tiniest aspects of their game while their friends were out having fun. While it obviously is important to be coached and learn from those who have years of experience with the game, players must not forget that putting in the hard work day in and day out is what gets you to the top. There are no secrets, no shortcuts just plain and simple effort, repetition and self-discipline.

I will close this blog entry with a quick story about the exact point in my life when I learned just how much sacrifice it took to become a college level basketball player. I was attending Duke University basketball camp in the summer after my freshman year of high school. One afternoon we were sitting in Cameron Indoor Stadium listening to Steve Wojciechowski give a lecture (For those who don’t know who Wojo is here is the link to his Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wojciechowski) Coach Wojo told us that when he was in high school he knew he wanted to play at the highest level of college basketball, and that he worked his butt off to get there. He told us of countless weekends spent in the gym working on his game while passing on the chance to joing all his at the movies or the mall. The lesson I learned from Coach Wojo’s lecture was simple but profound; Greatness takes sacrifice. There are no short cuts to the top and I think most would agree that’s the way it should be .

In closing here is a quote that I feel sums up what Coach Cublertson, Coach Wojo and I are talking about;

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

-Sir Winston Churchill

Coach Culbertson Interview

Well once again I was unable to go see any live Maine girl’s high school hoops, but I do think you will really enjoy this blog entry anyways. I was able to get in contact with former UMass and Cornell Assistant Coach, former Central Michigan University women’s basketball player and my old boss, Jodi Culbertson. I emailed coach Culbertson a list of 5 questions to get some information on what it takes to be a Division I college level women’s basketball player and she responded quickly with some really great stuff. I am pressed for time currently so I will make separate blog entries for each question. In these entries I will show you both my questions and Coach Culbertson’s full answers and then I will quickly discuss some of the things I found interesting from her answers.

1.) You played at the DI level, could you briefly describe what your recruiting process was like and what factors most influenced you choosing Central Michigan?

I was not a "highly" recruited student-athlete out of high school and the recruiting process was very different back then than it is now. AAU wasn't that big back in the early 1990's so I didn't have the exposure that so many of the athletes have today. However, my parents were terrific during the process and let me do unofficial visits to all the schools that I was interested in attending to meet the coaches and see the school before I made my final decision. My final two choices were Georgetown University and Central Michigan - ultimately, I chose CMU because of it's proximity to home and for the fact that I knew I could be successful in the MAC and was not sure how successful I would be as a player in the Big East. I wanted to make sure I could contribute to the team and I knew I could do that at CMU.

There were two parts of Coach’s answer that really stood out to me, Coach and her parent’s aggressive actions in her recruitment, and her decision to go to a less competitive conference. First I think it is important to understand that as a high school player that not every good player gets recruited but this doesn’t mean that you can not play college ball. Coach knew she was a good enough player to play at the college level, so coach and her parents made the rounds to schools that she wanted to play at and got her name out there with those coaches. I feel many players and their parents make the mistake of waiting for the coaches and colleges to come to them. If you want to be a college basketball player don’t be afraid to get out there and chase down your dream. Email coaches; fill out recruiting interest forms, go visit schools see if you can set up an appointment with one of the coaches. People often think they come across as desperate if they do these things when really most coaches will applaud a player’s enthusiasm even if they do not end up recruiting them.

Coach’s decision to go to CMU over Georgetown was difficult I have no doubt but more than that it was extremely mature and well reasoned. She knew what she wanted to do at the college level and was also realistic about where she could best do this. I think this is a valuable lesson for many Maine hoopsters to learn, just because a school is bigger, in a better division or conference or in a big city doesn’t mean that your playing experience will be any better. As most of you know the state of Maine features only one DI school, UMO, but what many young athletes are not aware of is how many wonderful DIII schools Maine has. Schools like Bowdoin and USM have women’s teams that are almost always competing for the DIII national championships, yet are often overlooked as possible destinations by players because they are small and close to home. Now I am not saying go to a Maine school just because it is close to home, but I am saying do not dismiss these schools by that same logic. It is important as a player to be honest with yourself about your talent and what level you can realistically play at. That is not to say stop improving or working to be a better player who could compete at a higher level, only that when the time comes to make your choice be honest with yourself and trust your own assessment.

That’s all for this entry I hope you find coach’s insight as interesting as I do. I will try and post the second question tomorrow night. If I may be permitted I need to do a little shameless begging of my readers, please click on the ads when you are finished reading my blog entries as each click earns me a few cents. My hope is that someday I will have enough readers clicking on my ads to be able to fully dedicate my time to this site and the promotion of girls basketball in Maine. Thanks Shawn

No tourney, so here is a rant on youth sports

Today is Monday July 26, 2010 and this in not the blog entry I had hoped to be writing after this past weekend. I was scheduled to watch a weekend full of hoops and then come home to write about all that I witnessed. Unfortunately the tourney I was going to attend was canceled because of low numbers. As I said in my last post I had emailed Mike Jeffferds who is the basketball director at the Southern Maine SportsZone with the hopes of attaining a team list. I did hear from Mike and he informed me that the numbers were looking very low and that he didn’t think they would be able to pull off the tournament. It was a bit disappointing but I decided that I was still going to do a post today it just is going to be one of a different nature. This post will be about the low numbers of athletes that many Maine schools are dealing with these days, and possible reasons why this is happening.

Many people want to blame technological things like television, video games and computers exclusively for kid’s lack of interest in sports. I do acknowledge that those things have had some effect on the sports scene but in my opinion one of the biggest reason kids stop playing sports as they get older is because they stop having fun. I found a short article about this at; http://life.familyeducation.com/sports/behavior/29512.html i also witnessed how this happens first hand. The article states,

“Twenty million kids register each year for youth hockey, football, baseball, soccer, and other competitive sports. The National Alliance for Sports reports that 70 percent of these kids quit playing these league sports by age 13 -- and never play them again”.

Yes that does say 70 percent! Clearly something is drastically wrong with out youth sports leagues across the country if almost three quarters of kids who start playing a sport stop be their teenage years. I stated this earlier and the article seconds my sentiment, kids quit sports because they are not fun. The blame often gets transferred to television, video games or computers because that is usually what the kids spend their time doing once they are done with sports. Why do they turn to those types of things? I believe the answer is simply because they are fun and pressure free activities. In other words they are activities that are completely opposite of the experiences most kids have when playing youth sports. When athletes are young the goal of coaches, parents and organizers should be to instill a joy and love of the game in every kid. When people forget what youth sports should be about things often turn ugly.

A prime example of how things can go so wrong and the effects even something as small as one junior high game can have on athletes happened to my own sister. She was an 8^th grader playing on her junior high varsity team, which at this time had great numbers of athletes. Their team was not ripe with basketball talent but it was full of good kids who were benefiting from all the great things basketball has to offer. They played a regular season game against a far more talented team and lost 74-1! In my opinion it doesn’t matter how much better your team is than the other there is NO excuse for a score like that in junior high basketball. The opposing teams coach played his starters for almost the entire game and had several players on his bench that did not get a chance to play. In a 73 point win mind you! My sister went on to high school and continued playing basketball but by her sophomore year she was the only girl from her grade that was still playing the sport. That can not simply be a coincidence, a whole year of girls decided that playing basketball was not worth being embarrassed in front of their friends and family so they just quit.

I am sure many of you readers (If there is anybody actually reading these posts?) are thinking that I am one of those winning doesn’t matter types; nothing could be further from the truth. I am one of the most competitive people around and absolutely hate to lose but with youth sports I have a different mentality. I have coached kids from 2^nd grade through high school and I have learned this one simple fact; you can not coach a team full of 6 year olds the same way you would a team of 16 year olds. The mistake many coaches and parents make is not being able to separate their own competitive drive from what is best for the kids they are working with. The younger the athletes the less winning, rules and restrictions matter. At that age its all about having fun and instilling a life long love of basketball in the kids. As they get older you can begin to add more structure and competition into the mix but not until the high school age should winning become a concern.

Ok well I feel better now that I have that off my chest and will gladly step down from my soap box now. I am still hoping to watch some basketball this upcoming weekend up in Lewiston so that you won’t have to endure another rant like this post. As usual I will leave you with a quote that I either enjoy thinking about or perhaps motivates me.

“I think some parents now look at a youngster failing as the final thing. It's a process, and failure is part of the process. I would like it if the teacher and the parents would connect more. I think that used to be, but we're losing a little bit of that right now.
Mike Krzyzewski”

End of summer plans

Today is July 20, 2010 and I this is my second blog entry for mainegirlsbasketballreport.blogspot.com. I am enjoying this sunny warm weather on my last day of vacation before heading back to the real world tomorrow. Though I can not say I am looking forward to getting back to my job I can say that I am excited to start watching and writing about some basketball!!! I have three major events on my schedule over the next few weeks, first there is the By the Beach End of Summer tourney on July 24^th and 25^th, after that I will be at the Lewiston Summer Conclusion tourney on July 30^th and 31^st and finally I will attend the Class A Summer showcase on August 7^th. These three events will be my first opportunity to see first hand what teams and players are looking like for the upcoming season, I am ready to get to work.

The first of these events, the By the Beach End of Summer tourney starts this upcoming weekend. Here is a link to the tourney site

http://www.mbrbasketball.com/July%2024%20&%2025%20girls%20HS%20tourney.htm .

I am working on getting a list of the teams that are going to be playing and I will share that on here as soon as I get it. I am extra psyched for this event because it is a high school team event so it will be a great early chance to see some of the teams before the season. I am hoping to do some live blogging on both Saturday and Sunday while watching the games (Got to love smart phones). I also will try to talk to a few coaches or players if I can and with their permission recap the interviews for my readers.

This blogging will be difficult and possibly boring at first because I don’t have anybody who is reading me on a consistent basis and because it is the off season. With that being said as my readership level increases and the season gets closer I should be able to make things more interesting. More readers should mean more comments which will lead to good conversations about basketball. The season getting closer means fall AAU and more games to attend live, ergo more material to blog about and in theory better reading for you. I hope to have built up a decent reader base by the time the fall AAU season is over so that we can kick things up during the high school season. For now I will do my best to get the most mileage out of the few remaining summer events as well as commenting on articles I find interesting online. I hope this will be enough to garner some interest in mainegirlsbasketballreport.com. Please feel free to comment on any of my posts with ideas for the blog or ways to make things more interesting or user friendly.

I think that’s about as far as I can stretch this entry. Hopefully I will be writing again soon with info about what teams will be playing in this weekends tourney. I will leave you with a quote that I really enjoy from my childhood hero,

“The game is my life. It demands loyalty and responsibility, and it gives me back fulfillment and peace.” – Michael Jordan

First Blog Entry:

Today is ____ and this will be the first of hopefully many entries on my blog, mainegirlsbasketballreport.Blogspot.com. I guess I should start off by telling you a bit about myself and why I have decided to write this particular blog (If you don’t really want to know about me I understand just skip down a bit to get to the good stuff). My name is Shawn Wyman. I am 26 years old and live in Portland, Maine. Basketball has been in my life basically since birth. My grandfather was a coach in Massachusetts for almost 40 years. I actually have a photo of him handing me a basketball when I was maybe 2 years old. Naturally I played basketball my whole life straight through high school at Lincoln Academy where I was a team captain my senior year. From there I attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and my freshman year was the first year in my life that I didn’t play basketball. It was difficult and I knew I had to change that before the start of my next semester. Thankfully I found a work study job as the team manager for the UMass Women’s basketball team which I held for the next 3 and ½ years (Yes I had a super senior year for those counting at home, Amherst was too much fun to leave in only 4 years). I returned home to Maine with my degree in Sports Management to realize that I was again faced with the same dilemma as freshman year, no basketball. I played in some men’s leagues and at any open gym I could find and also spent one year coaching middle school girl’s basketball. That coaching ended around 3 and 1/2 years ago and was the last direct involvement I have had with basketball.

I recently decided that it has been long enough and I need to get basketball back into my life. I tossed around multiple ideas in my head before settling on this one, coaching, adult leagues, I even tried taking a course on NBA scouting, but somehow writing a blog came out as the winner. I have never done anything like this before and really never enjoyed writing when I was in school, but I figure if there is anything I can enjoy writing about everyday it has to be basketball. Perhaps it is because I am tall (6’6”) but to me the sport of basketball is simply the best sport ever invented. Firstly it is fair, everybody plays both offense and defense, and it forces you to be complete. Some sports you can be an amazing offensive player and that is enough but not basketball, no matter how great you are on offense if you stink on defense the other team will make you pay. Secondly basketball has great flow, things just transition so well, one team scores and then are immediately on defense and the defensive team now goes on the offensive. Then there are the sounds of basketball, a ball being dribbled, the chirp of a sneaker on the wood floor, the painful clang of a missed shot and the sweet sound of the net as a perfect shot swishes through.

With that being said it should be clear why writing a blog about basketball was so intriguing to me, but you might be asking why girls basketball? Good question, and there is a simple answer, as I have gotten older I have grown to respect girl’s basketball more and more. I also feel that in the sports world and especially in the state of Maine girl’s basketball is not given the attention it deserves. I plan to do my part in changing this by writing about girl’s high school basketball in a way that hopefully shows others the beauty I see in the game. While the dunking and above the rim play might not be the same as the boy’s game all the things that I love about basketball are still there (And as players like Candice Parker have shown the above the rim part of the game no longer belongs solely to the male gender).

While I don’t know all the specifics I do have a general idea of how I would like this blog to work. My first goal will be to see first hand as much girl’s basketball in the state of Maine as possible so that I can write about it with an informed opinion. That should be easy during the season with games almost every night across the state. Things get a bit harder in the off season but I still believe I can provide interesting reporting and opinions from AAU and summer league games as well as summer camps and tourneys. I want to bring light to girl’s basketball in all corners of the state. If you feel your region, conference or even team is not getting a fair amount of attention please let me know so I can get out to your area and see what it has to offer.

I plan on attending as many summer basketball games, camps, tournaments and other events as my work schedule will allow so don’t be surprised to read comments about you on my blog soon! I look forward to providing some much needed publicity to girl’s basketball in the state of Maine. Until next time, remember, all the work you put in during the summer pays off in the winter.