Brett Currah

Tell yourself a story of confidence. Something that is going to motivate you every single day and will keep you in peak state. Trust this process. It will pay off but it won’t be easy. The sacrifices you are going to have to make are going to be frustrating but they will be necessary.

Playing on a team with great morale is one of the very best experiences life has to offer. And playing on a team racked with dissension is one of the worst. There are a lot of ways to build team morale but the methods are not as important as the desire.

Spirit is noise. A successful team must practice in a noisy, spirited atmosphere; otherwise, the players won’t work up to their potential, they won’t inspire each other, they won’t energize each other. Given the natural ebb and flow of anyone’s personality, feelings, and energy, you can expect every individual to experience some down time or at least some not-exactly-at-your-best time during the course of a practice. But this is much less likely to happen in an atmosphere where special efforts are being made to uplift each other.

There are several basketball skills that are hard to measure including ball-handling, passing, rebounding and defense. But in order to track improvement, some method of measurement is necessary.

For the first six weeks of the 2008-09 basketball season, many expected Laval Lucas-Perry would become eligible and be named Michigan’s starting point guard. As a freshman, however, even with his year of experience on the bench as a transfer, that was more difficult than he expected, and it became a position ceded to other players as Lucas-Perry played off-guard, primarily as a shooter.

Golfers especially talk about “grooving” their swing, and in almost every sport a player strives for that feeling of “getting in the groove,” the feeling that everything is going just right. In basketball, there is one quick, specific way to practice shooting that is very effective for putting your shot-off-the-dribble in the groove.

This blog post is specifically for those athletes who want to be the best they can be as players and leaders. If you want to be an effective leader it is crucial to first lead yourself. Learning the following five habits to lead yourself in practice will not only earn the trust of your teammates and coaches but it also will give you confidence in yourself.

A 1992 study of 8,000 youth athletes found that “having fun” was their primary reason for participating in a sport and yet more and more frequently, we see this primary reason slowly begin to fade. In many cases, the fun factor of a sport will take a backseat to factors such as getting a college scholarship, winning, pleasing parents or coaches; the list can go on and on. In the worst cases, the fun factor of a sport is replaced by stress inducing factors that eliminate the fun altogether.