Top Stories
USA Basketball has new program for youth coache - including background checks
March 09, 2015 posted by Steve Brownstein
USA Basketball was working on its new national coaching certification program before Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant made his remarks in January about the lack of fundamentals among U.S. players, but that didn’t mean his comments didn’t resonate.
To improve the caliber of play, USA Basketball decided it needs to take a more direct approach to improving and screening youth coaches.
While other groups have offered coaching certification, USA Basketball is hoping its program will provide a uniformity of coaching techniques through instruction and a consistency of safety standards with a background check for all coaches.
“Since we’ve been the national governing body for basketball since 1974, we had delegated those responsibilities to other grassroots organizations,” said USA Basketball chief executive officer Jim Tooley. “Now, that has gotten so splintered and unstructured. We were delegating too much of that and we want to take a hands-on approach to coaching, not just for the elite level, but for the other 99 percent of people in the sport.”
Organizations can become accredited if all their coaches and administrators obtain their USA Basketball coaches licenses. Licensed coaches will receive a license card, be listed in USA Basketball’s database and receive age-appropriate teaching techniques from the USA Basketball Youth Development Guidebook.
In January, Bryant said American players don’t have the skill level of European players because the European players are “taught the game the right way at an early age. … They’re more skillful. It’s something we really have to fix.”
Chris Keller, a junior varsity girls basketball coach and assistant girls varsity coach at Barrington High (Barrington, R.I.), was among the first people to take the certification program. As a teacher at Barrington, which finished 21-2 after a loss in the state quarterfinals Saturday, he’s already had to undergo a background check. He said he wishes the USA Basketball certification could have come along sooner.
“I started coaching middle school basketball when I was 16,” Keller said. “It was something I did for community service in high school. After that, I coached with the Rhode Island Breakers AAU team and the BABC program in Boston. Then, this opportunity came up at Barrington.
“The USA Basketball certification is a big step forward as a resource. It raises the bar. When I was 16, I didn’t know where to go. I was certified through a church organization. This (certification) gives new coaches a common resource, a foundation where everybody can grow.”
Former Alabama and professional player Nathalie Reshard helped coach U16 girls basketball last year in Denmark with SISU Copenhagen and was part of the pilot program for USA Basketball’s coaching certification. She was impressed by the uniformity of teaching throughout Denmark in youth basketball, something she thinks the USA Basketball program could bring here.
“The Danish basketball foundation had such a well thought-out program,” Reshard said. “You know if you have players from a certain age group, that they’ve learned this skill or that skill. You don’t have four-year-olds playing full-court defense. In the U.S., the instruction is so disjointed.”
Reshard also said that background checks would help alleviate parents’ concerns about safety.
“When I was growing up, I remember you could be playing at the Rec center and there would be a drug deal going on,” Reshard said. “You need to have people with integrity coaching at the youth level.”
Tooley stresses that by introducing standards for coaching, USA Basketball is hoping to ensure the game is enjoyable.
“This is to make sure it’s fun, not just for the sliver of elite players, for 99% of the players,” Tooley said. “Eight-year-old teams shouldn’t be running 10 different plays and learning all the different sets. They should be learning the proper way to shoot the ball. Quite often, people get caught up in winning and kids never get to develop. Part of what we’ve created is a player development model that’s age appropriate.”
Tooley said there was concern that background checks could eliminate too many people, but the safety issues solved showed there was a need for background checks.
“When we went to the test program, we had a couple of coaches who came back with red flags. One turned out to be a case of mistaken identity with somebody who had a record, so he was OK. But the other had something that was not OK,” he said. “We want to make sure the people who get our licenses don’t have something in their background that should disqualify them as a coach. Plus, that is updated every month. If a current coach does something bad in February, we’re not going to wait a month (to rescind his certification.”
