Her question was (paraphrased), "how hard do I push my daughter and after being here at this camp, I'm beginning to wonder if she even likes basketball"
Her daughter was a rising Freshman and seemed to only give noticeable effort when playing defense while scrimmaging. On offense, her daughter was clearly not engaged. The second thing that I noticed, her daughter didn't give the same level of effort while working on individual ball handling drills, she would only give minimal effort.
Was she lazy? Probably not.
Coaches do not have the time to push every athlete to reach their full potential. As bad as that may sound, think about it for just a second... ever had an athlete that just doesn't seem to care? How many times have you wasted a lot of time and energy into trying to motivate them and show them the right way to do things, only to have them remain in that state of giving only 70% on drills?
In this particular situation, I began to watch her daughter and quickly noticed that every time she was put into the spotlight on individual ball handling drills, her effort immediately dropped as if she didn't really care one way or another. My guess is, that it wasn't that she didn't care... it was more than likely that she felt exposed and insecure in her skills and abilities when compared to the other athletes at the camp (there were some die-hard ballers there).
As coaches, we often overlook that simple explanation and tag that type of player as being lazy and we give up on trying to motivate them.
After discussing this with her mom (and coach), it became evident that more ball handling skill work was needed to get her daughter over the confidence hump and to a point where she felt like she could compete with others.
Rather than label players as lazy, coaches need to look at the circumstances before giving up on a player.
4:13
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