WILL POPE PAPILLION LA VISTA (NE) HIGH SCHOOL BOYS’ BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 919

Website – https://sites.google.com/plcschools.org/monarchmbb

Email – will.pope@plcschools.org

Twitter – @coachwpope

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Will Pope has been the Boys Basketball Head Coach at Papillion LaVista High School since 2022.  Prior to that, he spent 5 years as an Assistant Boys Basketball Coach at Skutt Catholic High School. Coach Pope has over 13 years of experience coaching basketball at multiple levels. Prior to Skutt Catholic, he spent 1 year at Mount Michael HS and 2 years at Sidney HS. Before joining the high school ranks, he was the assistant coach for the Men’s Basketball program at NCAA Division II Chadron State College. Pope also has multiple years coaching football and soccer at the high school level.

Coach Pope graduated from Doane College in 2011 where he was a member of the Men’s Basketball team.

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Have your notebook handy as you listen to this episode with Will Pope, Boys Basketball Head Coach at Papillion LaVista High School in the state of Nebraska.

What We Discuss with Will Pope

• Growing up with two older brothers and a father who was a high school & college coach
• “I think the greatest thing about high school basketball is the community aspect of it.”
• “Like a lot of college freshmen, I had a rude awakening and I had to go through that learning and growth process in order to make that jump to the next level.”
• “I just wasn’t a very good college basketball player. And through that process, it forced me to evaluate a lot about myself and it forced me to think about maybe getting into coaching earlier than I had anticipated probably going into college.”
• “A lot of basketball is just role definition of here’s what your strengths are. Here’s how you help the team. And also, honest conversations.”
• “Honesty is the best policy. And even if they’re hard conversations, even if they’re difficult conversations to have with kids it’s going to help them navigate the things that they’re going through way easier than if you handle them with kid gloves or you don’t tell them the whole truth.”
• “You can have a pretty blunt conversation sometimes with kids and they don’t always hear what you think you’re telling them.”
• “You’re going to experience a lot of failures. And sometimes the successes are few and far between, but that can’t impact the process and your desire to keep working and trying to get to that ultimate goal.”
• His experience as a volunteer high school coach during his final two years of college
• Coaching at D2 Chadron State following his college graduation
• “I think a really, really big part of being an assistant coach is you have a different relationshipwith the kids than the head coach.”
• “When you become a head coach, you have to give your assistants ownership over things because that’s ultimately what makes it fun as an assistant is to actually get to coach.”
• “As a head coach, you have to recognize what the strengths of your staff are and give and take and make sure that people do have the opportunities to show their strengths.”
• “I tell our guys this all the time, like you’re never going to come into the gym with more energy than me when it’s practice time.”
• “I challenge our guys to practice at a high level every day. And if I’m going to hold them to that standard it starts with me.”
• Problem solving and adaptability as a coach
• “Tricking the defense into your pattern and then just completely throwing that pattern out the door and trying to let your offensive players attack those spaces.”
• “I think decision based basketball is the most fun basketball to play.”
• Designing practice around live 5 on 5 play
• “We preach to our guys constantly about handling adversity, handling situations that are outside of your control. And so it’s kind of our responsibility to throw that at them once in a while and just see how they deal with it.”
• Taking notes during practice to use for the next day’s plan
• “Putting that practice plan together, it gets me in the frame of mind where one, it gets me excited for practice. Two, it forces me to think about what our deficiencies are and what we need to truly work on so that we can get better that day in practice.”
• “Our focus is always on us more than it is about our opponents.”
• “The simpler you can make it, the better. Most groups can’t handle too much complexity with game planning.”
• Parent communication
• Designing a off-season program for your team
• Getting kids to take risks, be vulnerable and put themselves out there

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THANKS, WILL POPE

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TRANSCRIPT FOR WILL POPE PAPILLION LA VISTA (NE) HIGH SCHOOL BOYS’ BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 919

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here with my co-host Jason Sunkle tonight and we are pleased to welcome from the state of Nebraska, the Head Boys Basketball Coach at Papillion La Vista High School, Will Pope. Will, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:18] Will Pope: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:00:21] Mike Klinzing: Thrilled to have you on. Looking forward to diving into all the things that you’ve been able to do in your career. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about some of your first experiences with the game.

[00:00:31] Will Pope: Well, I grew up a coach’s kid. My dad was a high school coach.

And for the majority of my life was actually a D2 assistant coach. So I always grew up around the game. Every day we were in the gym in some capacity, I was usually just kind of hanging around as a shooting on the side basket while practice was going on. But that’s where the love of the game started.

And when you’re around it all the time, it just kind of becomes part of what you do. And so I grew up playing all the time. We spent summer vacation going to basketball camps. It was just that was what we did. And I had no problem with it, got competitive pretty early on in my life, I had two older brothers, so that as a younger sibling, you always just kind of follow what your older brothers do.  So it was always part of what we did.

[00:01:27] Mike Klinzing: You know how lucky you were to have all that gym access? Did you appreciate it at the time?

[00:01:32] Will Pope: At the time, no, but it definitely looking back at it I had access to so much stuff and so much resources that I’m thankful for it now. But as a kid, I probably just thought that that’s how it was for everybody.

[00:01:48] Mike Klinzing: Just how it was, right? Everybody can get in the gym whenever they want.

[00:01:52] Will Pope: So even just like those college guys that treated me like their little brother and had that kind of back and forth relationship with them. Just being appreciated, appreciative of that now that, that I’m an adult and.  Those guys were great role models for me.

[00:02:10] Mike Klinzing: How much of your brothers beating on you helped you to become a better player?

[00:02:13] Will Pope: A lot of it. I always say I became the most competitive of the three of us because I just had to be. And so I definitely earlier than they did probably started taking basketball a lot more serious just because I had to in order to try and keep up with them.

[00:02:34] Mike Klinzing: Did you play anything else besides hoops?

[00:02:35] Will Pope: Yeah, so I grew up in a small town in Western Nebraska called Chadron. About 6,000 people. I, I did everything. I was football, track played baseball for a little bit. I was in the student council, the choir.

You know, that’s just how life in a small town works. You’re part of everything or else it kind of ceases to exist. For Well, somebody’s going to be recruiting

[00:03:00] Mike Klinzing: Well, somebody’s going to be recruiting you, right? Doesn’t matter. Some coach or some director of something’s going to be like, Hey, Will, how come you’re not doing this?  You need to be on this team. We’re in this group.

[00:03:08] Will Pope: Yep. Exactly. Or your buddies are involved in something and you just end up somehow getting recruited to it.

[00:03:15] Mike Klinzing: So as you get into high school and you’re taking basketball more seriously and you’re starting to work on your game. What do you remember about sort of your plan for improvement, get better?

Obviously the basketball landscape at that time is different from what it’s like today where kids have trainers and AAU has completely sort of overtaken. the summer basketball scene, but just how did you go about getting better as a high school player?

[00:03:43] Will Pope: I’m a little jealous of kids today just because they have so many resources and their access to things is so much different.

I was just in the gym all the time. I always tried to find an opportunity to get in the gym. During football season, I’d go in before school to get shots up and I always had access to college facilities. I was able to be around college guys when I was in high school. Just the shoot away shooting gun, they seem like they’re everywhere now.

But I had an opportunity to get on those when I was in high school and it was a pretty new thing at that time. And I was always looking for an opportunity to be in the gym. And that’s really where a lot of that time was spent by myself in the gym. But that’s also where I kind of started to figure out that it was really important to me and it was something that I wanted to continue being around and working on so that I could achieve the highest level possible. You have

[00:04:40] Mike Klinzing: Did you have a plan every day when you went into the gym and how organized were you in terms of putting together a workout for yourself or were you going in and kind of making it up on the fly?

[00:04:50] Will Pope: Again, I wish I would have had some of these resources that these guys have, like trainers and YouTube and all this stuff, because honestly, I would go in the gym and it was always a big part of it to get shots up. But I came up with some ball handling exercises that I would work on. If there were people in the gym with me we’d maybe play some ones once in a while, but yeah, it was kind of on the fly and I wish I would have been a little bit more deliberate in preparation and some of the things that I worked on.

[00:05:22] Mike Klinzing: because I’m a lot older than you and I graduated from college in 1992. And I say this all the time that I basically, when I was working on my game in high school and college, I pretty much did the same workout.

If it was me by myself in the gym, I had my routine of what I did every single day. And I guess I really just wasn’t very creative. So I just did the same thing. And then if I was lucky enough to have somebody that wanted to shoot with me, I’d do a workout that I had with sort of a partner workout. And if I can convince the person that wanted to shoot with me to do that workout, that’s what we do.

And now I look at all the creative things that you can do. And just, I think about, man, if I would’ve had some of this stuff back when I was playing, how much better of a player could I have been if I had worked on This and this and this and this and just had the variety instead of me doing the same like eight drills for basically for like eight years in the summer.

I did this. I did the same thing. I must have got pretty good at those drills, but I’m not sure how much of that was translating into improving me as a basketball player at a certain point. I feel like I needed variety. But again, to your point, that just wasn’t you. It certainly wasn’t the way it was when I was growing up for sure.

[00:06:36] Will Pope: Yeah. And I feel like you’re a little bit of, it’s, you’re limited by what you have visibility to and you know, in a small town with a system, we all had like a specific style of play that we were trying to mold into and you didn’t really have any choice in the matter. I look at kids now and I see just how skilled they are or how different all of their footwork is.

And I’m like, I didn’t even know there was another way to get on balance other than a jump stop. And that’s just that’s what we had visibility and access to.

[00:07:10] Mike Klinzing: A lot of the footwork that I see today would have been a travel when I was playing. I can almost guarantee. What cracks me up, Will, is when I was playing, I remember.

I would get in arguments with coaches and I guess arguments is too strong of a word with officials, but I would try to explain. So I would just do a move where I would just dribble down the court and I’d do a normal layup and I would just do a pickup where instead of just picking the ball up off my hip, I’d bring the ball up with one hand kind of above my head and swing it.

So if you want to envision, so here I’m going to put my camera on. So I’m coming down and you just pick the ball up like this so you’re just picking it up. If somebody reaches in, you’re picking up over the top. And I used to get called for that. That move got called a travel every single time I did it.

And I would explain to the ref, like, My feet are doing the exact same thing. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing with the ball up above. It doesn’t matter if that ball is above my head or if it’s at my waist, it’s still the same move. And then I look at what guys do today. I mean, forget about the NBA level, but at the college level and the high school level and the different type of footwork, as you said, and none of that stuff, none of that stuff was even available to me to your point.

And so I guess. From that standpoint, it’s like I worked on what I knew. There was no such thing as a step back. I was always just stepping into it. There really wasn’t much, not very many people were shooting off the hop. Everybody was shooting off a one two. And it was just completely a different way of you just, to your point, you have to learn in the environment that you’re in.

And if you’re not exposed to it, you can’t really work on it. What’s your favorite memory of playing high school basketball?

[00:08:45] Will Pope: I mean, I think the greatest thing about high school basketball is the community aspect of it. You know, like I said, I grew up in a, in a rural town in Western Nebraska.

Grew up playing basketball with the same guys I graduated with. We were together from fourth grade on. And just that community support and being able to play in front of crowds that are towns that are an hour away, but there’s some intense rivalries with it. And we were fortunate.  We had a pretty nice group. When I was in high school and we were fortunate to have a lot of success and just to experience that with the same group of guys the whole time. It’s a little bit the culture of basketball is changing a little bit in that regard where You know, especially in a bigger place like Omaha, where I coach now some of these guys are coming into high school and they’ve, they’ve never played together before that, or you get kids that are going from place to place every year.

And it’s just a different experience for them. And so I am, am very grateful that, that those are the memories I have from growing up playing high school basketball.

[00:09:54] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think that community part of it is something that it’s completely underestimated in terms of how much high school basketball means in some communities.

And as you said, one of the things that I think is cool is when you are in a community where you know who those kids are that are going to be part of your team, whether that’s the baseball team, the football team, the basketball team, to have grown up with those kids and be able to experience it and kind of go through that whole thing with them.

To me, that’s something that’s really special. And I think in a lot of places, unfortunately around the country, because of the way kids jump schools and sort of that AAU culture of switching and looking for the grass being greener on the other side, you don’t see that nearly as much as I think you did 15, 20 years ago, where I always tell people like when I was growing up, I knew who my high school teammates were going to be back in the fourth or fifth grade.

I mean, there’s pictures of us playing in a community travel program. It’s basically the same team. You could take the varsity picture and the picture from fourth grade, and it’s almost the same kids. The ones who didn’t end up on the basketball team, those are the kids who ended up being the best football players or the best baseball players or whatever it is.

And now it feels like you can go from one year to the next, just within a high school team. And it’s. completely different because guys are going all over the place. And I don’t know how much of that you see in Nebraska, but we definitely see it here in Cleveland, Ohio.

[00:11:19] Will Pope: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s part of things everywhere.

You know, at Papio, we’re pretty fortunate that we still have a lot of multi sport athletes too. And I think that’s the other dimension of it is those multi sport athletes are still super important because they represent their community all season long in multiple different sports. And those guys feel that community aspect probably more than anybody else of just going season to season and being able to represent our school and our programs no matter what they are currently competing in.

[00:11:54] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I know that makes sense. And it’s just, again, when you get an opportunity to play with your friends, to me, that’s, as you said, that’s what makes high school sports special. Are you at all, as a high school player, are you thinking about coaching as a potential profession at this point?

Are you still focused on being a player? Where’s your head at as you head off to college?

[00:12:17] Will Pope: I think it was always part of what I knew I was going to do just kind of be in the family trade a little bit of that’s what my dad did. And that’s what I was most connected to my whole life, or at least most passionate about.

But I was pretty focused on trying to achieve the goal of playing college basketball as well. Yeah. Being able to be around college coaches, college players a little bit it kind of felt like something that not inevitable, I don’t want to say that, but a goal that was always kind of there in front of me that I wanted to try to achieve.

[00:12:54] Mike Klinzing: When you get to college, talk a little bit about the college decision and how you determined where you were going to go.

[00:12:59] Will Pope: Yeah, so Nebraska, a lot of NAIA schools, private schools and so. Went on a bunch of different visits to those four year schools and ultimately ended up at Doane University.

It was Doane College back when I went there. But NAIA school, private school, it was just a good fit for me. It was something that I was, yeah, I got on campus and I kind of knew right away. was the right program, the right coach, the right guys in the program and again, kind of fortunate to have maybe a different background than a lot of guys that are going through the college process of having a lot of resources around me that can help me make a good decision.

But like, like lots of college players, you make a choice and then It’s not always what you think it’s going to be. For me, I went in thinking it was just going to be a continuation of high school. I was going to play a bunch. I was going to do all these things. And like a lot of college freshmen, I had a rude awakening and I had to go through that learning and growth process in order to make that jump to the next level.

[00:14:11] Mike Klinzing: What did that look like for you in terms of how you dealt with that? Because I went through a similar experience when I went to Kent State where I played, and my freshman year I played maybe, I don’t know, I might have played five minutes a game, and there were a lot of games where I didn’t play at all.

And I always tell people that was by far the most difficult year of my career, simply because you still had to go through the grind of practice every day and put your best out on the practice floor. And yet, at a certain point in the season, you kind of knew that the carrot of playing time at the end of that practice probably wasn’t going to be there.

Like, yeah, maybe if things worked out, you’d play six minutes or seven minutes in a game, but you weren’t, you weren’t cracking the lineup. And so you had to figure out a way mentally to get through that. So just how did you deal with that? What do you remember about that time and how you kind of coped with it?

[00:15:08] Will Pope: I think I dealt like it dealt with it like a lot of 18 year old kids, not very well. Because it’s a new experience. And for me I grew up in a small area and the players that I saw once I got to the college level were much different than what I was used to playing with on a daily basis.

And so that learning curve of the physics, I knew I had to get stronger almost immediately. I knew I had to just improve completely. And as a freshman, I played JV basketball. We played a lot of junior college teams. And as you know about junior college, like those dudes are really, really good.

And we took a lot of lumps and I had a lot of growing experience I had to take as a player. And ultimately, what it clued me into, and it wasn’t an easy thing to deal with at the time, was I just wasn’t a very good college basketball player. And through that process, it forced me to evaluate a lot about myself and it forced me to think about maybe getting into coaching earlier than I had anticipated probably going into college.

And I probably didn’t handle it great at the time, but looking back, it’s probably one of the things that helped me become a better coach is dealing with those struggles and ultimately having to face the fact that I’m probably not going to be a super effective college basketball player which ultimately ended up being the truth.

[00:16:41] Mike Klinzing: I think what you are describing there and how you can relate that to your coaching career clearly is you now have an opportunity where, as a high school player, you’re on the floor all the time, you’re an important part of the team, and then suddenly you go to college and now you’re having to adjust to a completely different role.

And so I would assume that in your coaching career, that’s enabled you to be able to sort of relate to players who are at all different, Types of positions within your team so you can relate to the kid who’s one of the top players on the team and then you can relate to the kid who’s maybe not playing as much as they would like to.

And obviously building those relationships and being able to have those conversations is clearly, to me, especially as a high school coach, where it’s one thing and college kids are fragile too, but high school kids are even more fragile when it comes to being able to figure out what their role is and where they fit.

All the things that go along with that. And I think being able to have those honest conversations as a coach to me is so important. So I’m guessing that those experiences that you had, the diversity of how you played as a high school player versus your experience as a college player, I’m sure that’s helped you as a coach to be able to have those kinds of conversations with your players.

[00:17:52] Will Pope: Yeah, absolutely. And I a lot of basketball is just role definition of here’s what your strengths are. Here’s how you help the team. And Also, honest conversations. I was, they weren’t great conversations at the time, I didn’t feel like, because they were hard to have, but as a player I appreciate that my coaches, like Ian Brown at Doane, he was super honest with me and all that helped me do was kind of navigate some of those difficult things that I was going through.

That if people aren’t honest with you, it maybe warps your sense of reality. And so as a coach, I’ve taken those mentorships that I’ve been fortunate to have. And just always kind of had that stance of honesty is the best policy. And even if they’re hard conversations, even if they’re difficult conversations to have with kids it’s going to help them navigate the things that they’re going through way easier than if you handle them with kid gloves or you don’t tell them the whole truth. Those are the things that as coaches it’s probably sometimes the hardest part of it. Is telling people that you really care about things that they probably don’t want to hear. But it also is a necessary part of the process.

Some kids come through it better, some kids can’t handle it and sometimes don’t make it through those situations.

[00:19:23] Mike Klinzing: Ultimately though, no matter what happens, whether the outcome is positive or negative, I still feel like the outcome by telling the truth up front in the moment, right when that conversation needs to be had, is better than the result when you drag it out and as you said, you kind of tell half truths and put kid gloves on it.

I’ve never In my own life, I experienced something in coaching where putting off that conversation was beneficial and I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a coach who said, well, yeah, I knew this kid wasn’t good enough, but I told him, well, maybe this, that, and, and then that ends up working out well, because ultimately you’re just leading someone down a road where they think something is going to happen and It’s not.

And then that leads to the player being disappointed. And then especially on the high school level, that leads to the parent being disappointed. And now that opens up a whole nother can of worms when you don’t have that honest conversation up front. And so I think having those, those blunt and honest conversations as difficult as it is, you got to do it.

[00:20:29] Will Pope: You have to do it. Yeah. And I think we’ve probably all been in a situation where we maybe didn’t tell the full truth and then those miscommunications happen. And I know It’s been a growing process for me tto become a more effective communicator. Cause you can have a pretty blunt conversation sometimes with kids and they don’t always hear what you think you’re telling them.

And so that’s just always been the policy of people I’ve been around in the coaching business is try and be as upfront and honest and transparent as you can because the kids that want to hear the truth they’re going to improve and they’re going to get better because of the truth. And the ones that can’t handle the truth, they’re going to look for those answers elsewhere to be just upfront and honest.

[00:21:18] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. When you think about the influence of your dad and him as a coach, what are some things that you think directly translated from him into your coaching style? What are one or two things that you’ve picked up that you feel are a part of you because of how much influence he had on you?

[00:21:44] Will Pope: Well, I think there’s two big ones. One is in this business that we’re in, you’re going to experience a lot of failures. And sometimes the successes are few and far between, but that can’t impact the process and your desire to keep working and trying to get to that ultimate goal. And I just know, just seeing him through his career, navigate all those failures and still show up with intensity and competition.

That same work ethic, regardless of the result, that’s definitely something that I’ve picked up on. And then the other thing is we have to make a lot of decisions sometimes that aren’t super popular. And I was able to see just up close and personal. I wouldn’t say he always made the right choice, but he always made the choice of what he truly believed in.

And I think we all have to have convictions and non negotiables and in those types of things that guide us. And I just was able to have a great role model of somebody that, that always trusted those principles and always made those decisions based around those principles.

[00:23:01] Mike Klinzing: Well, that makes total sense.  When you graduated from school, what’s the first job search look like for you?

[00:23:09] Will Pope: So I knew I wanted to get into coaching. I had been fortunate while I played two years at Doane College decided that it was probably the end of my college career, coached high school for two years while I was in college.

I was able to be a volunteer assistant at a local high school. Wasn’t a very good coach that year. Obviously thinking I was 21 year old kid thinking out a lot of answers and probably wasn’t always a ton of help. The second year I was able to be a freshman head coach.

That was a great experience for me having to kind of be a decision maker, not just an ideas guy. And as I graduated college, I kind of started thinking about now trying to maybe get into the college game a little bit.  My dad being connected as he was, I was able to find a grad assistant job at Chadron State College in my hometown.

And that was really my first full time entry into coaching was as a D2 GA grad assistant.

[00:24:18] Mike Klinzing: So obviously, you end up back in the high school ranks. What did you like about that year at the college level, and what was something maybe about it that made you rethink, hey, maybe high school is a better spot, or did it just happen that the way the job, the way that it went, you ended up in high school, maybe it was just by happenstance rather than by choice, if that question makes any sense.

[00:24:40] Will Pope: Well, I spent three years, actually, at Chadron State as an assistant. And I was a coach for an awesome, awesome human being Brent Bargan gave me a chance, taught me a lot, taught me a lot about just being a man, taking care of your business, being a good family man those types of things.

But man, we struggled a lot. My first year there, we were pretty good. We had a heavy senior group. And then we had to reload. And I did not know anything about recruiting had no connections. And so we hit the road and to be honest, we didn’t do a great job of bringing guys in.

My second year there, we went three and 23. There’s not a lot of successes to take away in that year. And it was a hard year, but it taught me a lot about handling adversity. And then the third year we started to improve a little bit. Some things that I definitely take away from the college game, my experience up there is, is I love the 24/7 competition of it.

I love teaching. But the 24/7 nature of, of you just have to focus on, on hoops. You just have to focus on relationships with the guys, doing the day to day things like checking academics and stuff like that. It was easy because you cared a lot about the guys. Some of those things though, I wasn’t a great recruiter.

It wasn’t something that I had a strong suit with. And when we didn’t do a very good job like year two you felt like you were on some pretty thin ice that your job might be on the line. And so there is a little bit more safety and at least room to experiment a little bit at the high school level a little bit more time to maybe get your feet under you and build a culture and build a program.

And honestly, I feel like my personality is a much better fit with high school aged athletes. I’ve carried a lot on from that college level of just the competitive side of it, the game planning side of it, the X’s and O’s. But the high school aged kids in that competition and in that level of it it’s fun to get in the gym every day with those guys and It’s not necessarily that job nature of it, like it is at the college level.

Most of these kids are doing it because they want to represent their community. And it’s what they’ve been looking to forward to their whole lives. And they just want to compete and play for their school.

[00:27:15] Mike Klinzing: Various stops that you had as an assistant coach at the high school level. What are some lessons that you learned as an assistant that have helped you once you became a head coach?

[00:27:28] Will Pope: I think a really, really big part of being an assistant coach is you have a different relationship with the kids than the head coach.

Just by the nature of it, there’s a good cop, bad cop relationship that kind of exists a little bit in most programs where assistants, a lot of times have to be the guy that puts their arm around a kid and maybe gives them the message in the way it was intended, not necessarily the way it was delivered.

And I learned pretty early on that the kids will really, with you as an assistant if you’re there every day and they know that you care about them. The other things that I took away is I was fortunate to work for some really, really good head coaches that gave me ownership over a lot of things and allowed me to run drills, to help with the practice plan, to do a scout, to break down film.

And it showed me a couple of things. One it helped me kind of find my voice as a coach and maybe how to deliver things in a way that’s effective. But two, it also helped me understand that when you become a head coach, you have to give your assistants ownership over things because that’s ultimately what makes it fun as an assistant is to actually get to coach.

And so the fact that I was able to have those experiences definitely made me a better coach, made me more intentional about the things I was doing. And, and definitely those mentors gave me a lot of responsibilities that made me. want to continue coaching.

[00:29:07] Mike Klinzing: So when you get that head coaching job, was it then easier or harder than you thought to delegate that type of, I don’t know, freedom’s the right word, but responsibility to your assistants?

[00:29:19] Will Pope: I was the, my previous job before I became a head coach I was very, very fortunate to work with a, a really good friend a really, really good coach Kyle Juergens at, at Skutt Catholic High School. He gave me a lot of responsibility and I think that definitely prepared me to be a head coach as well as one could be but his willingness to be able to do that showed me just that trust was really important to me.

It’s not always easy to hand over things because it’s your program. And at the end of the day, you are responsible for everything that’s involved in the program. And I don’t think it’s a situation where you just freely give over all the responsibilities and split them up. But I do think as a head coach, you have to recognize what the strengths of your staff are and give and take and make sure that people do have the opportunities to show their strengths. And not just that, but to put your assistants in situations where they can get better at the things that you need them to get better at. And it’s not always easy, but I’ve always been a believer in coaching that you got to give a little bit away in order to get to where you want to get to.

And if you’re going to control every aspect of the program. That doesn’t really do justice to the fact that you have a lot of people that are working with you and that might have different ideas of how to get those goals accomplished.

[00:30:59] Mike Klinzing: What’s interesting is, is that I’ve talked to a bunch of different coaches, obviously on the podcast.

And this has been something that we’ve talked about before, where a lot of coaches feel like when They first got their head coaching job, right? They’re young and they’re full of energy and they don’t really necessarily know 100 percent what they’re doing as a head coach, that they kind of want to have control over everything and delegating is really difficult because as you said, you that ultimately it’s your name that’s on the program and regardless of whatever else is going on or whoever else did what or did this, ultimately it comes back to you.

And yet so many coaches have told me that the longer I’ve been in the job, the more I delegate to other people. And not necessarily that it’s the less I do, but it’s just I’m giving more responsibility to more people. And that frees me up to focus either on the things that I’m best at or gives me an opportunity to sort of act as the CEO of the program where I’m not hands on in every single thing.

I’ve delegated it. I’ve taught the person that I’ve delegated to how to do it right. That person has added their own flair and ability to it. And now, because I’ve let everybody use their strengths. Our program is even better. And I think that’s what I hear you saying is that you have to utilize the people that you brought in to be part of your staff and part of your program.

And when you do that, ultimately everybody brings their strengths to the table and that’s what makes your program stronger. I think that’s what I hear you saying? Is that right?

[00:32:37] Will Pope: saying. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we all have strengths and weaknesses or even what we perceived to be our strengths and weaknesses.

As an assistant I had experiences where didn’t feel like you had very much say or control over or what the decisions were being made or the style of play or the specials or what happens in practice. And I look back on those things as those weren’t necessarily super enjoyable coaching experiences.

You didn’t really feel like you had a voice. And I would never want any coaches in our program to feel like that’s how things are run. And now I do, I have non negotiables of this is how we’re going to do certain things. Absolutely. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat and people have strengths and weaknesses that I don’t have.

And I think it’s in this business of coaching, you definitely want to surround yourself with people that you can lean on one another when things are rough, but also if someone’s got a strength, let them use that strength as long as it fits in with what you’re trying to accomplish and the way that you’re trying to get things done.

[00:33:59] Mike Klinzing: What do you think when you first started was your greatest strength as a head coach right from the beginning and then I’ll follow up with the question of what do you think you’ve improved on in the time that you’ve been a head coach? Let’s start with what was your strength right out of the gate?

[00:34:15] Will Pope: Honestly, probably organization of having a plan every day, every week of what we needed to step in the gym and trying to get done.

And not only that, but be able to adjust and be flexible about, well, that maybe didn’t go to plan. We probably need to spend more time in this category of things to try and get better at this. I’m in my second year as a head coach. And so you always have a plan of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Whether or not that actually works out the way that you intended to it usually doesn’t. And so that was definitely a big thing as we got this thing rolling was you maybe have a plan for what practice needs to look like that day, but then practice starts and you maybe don’t get the energy you anticipated or didn’t maybe explain a drill very well.

And pretty soon you’re 10 minutes off the practice plan and it’s like, okay. What do we really need to get done today? Cause we’re not going to get through as much as we thought we were. And the other thing I would say is I’m kind of just to put your head down and work type of person.

I tell our guys this all the time, like you’re never going to come into the gym with more energy than me when it’s practice time. I challenge our guys to practice at a high level every day. And if I’m going to hold them to that standard it starts with me. And so. I can’t always say I’m in a good mood every day for all of practice, but we’re never going to leave practice and think like, man, he didn’t work very hard today.

[00:35:53] Mike Klinzing: That makes sense. All right. What’s something that you feel like over the time that you’ve had the job that you’ve gotten better at? Something that when you first got the job, you’re like, Ooh, man, I have to, I have to really start working on this or I have to get better at it. Does anything fit that bill?

[00:36:06] Will Pope: Yeah, I mean, I think X’s and O’s are one thing that’s constantly evolving and constantly changing.

I came from a program Skutt Catholic with Kyle Juergens, where we’re real successful. I was there for five years. We played for three state championships. We won one of them. We were in the mix every single year, winning 20 games. And the system that he had is something we kind of manipulated things as time went on and it evolved and it changed depending on the personnel, depending on the skill level and through that, it’s a system that I, like I said, I really believe in but you can’t just copy and paste things don’t work that way.

And so. Even within our first year at Papio we manipulated and we changed things and We had to do some things that fit our personnel. And a lot of times things that maybe worked with one group don’t work with the next group. And so it’s forced me to be more creative seek out a lot of different ideas, be more experimental about what we try and implement in practice.

And really pushed me out of my comfort zone of I believe basketball is most fun when it’s just Decision making and problem solving. I think man to man defense, motion offense, those are the things we preach and teach all the time. But we’ve had to manipulate more things with our groups the last two years and it’s forced me to be more mindful of X’s and O’s, how we teach the game the situations that we put them in.

And it’s just offense I think is, I’m a defensive coach. But offense is so much harder to be good at than defenses, in my opinion. And through coaching at Papio with my assistants, we’ve been able to kind of like push each other out of our comfort zones. It’s definitely something that as a coach, I kind of had this idea of, well, no, you just run motion and you do it this way.

But again, it’s not copy and paste. You can’t just pick it up and give it to another group. And they just pick up right where that other group was. There’s so much more teaching and manipulation that goes into it. Then I may be anticipated. And so trying to be a problem solver, trying to be somebody that’s always going to put our kids in situations to be successful just being kind of out to see a couple times has helped me make sense more of.

Of. Maybe the compass part of it, of here’s what’s really important, doesn’t always have to look pretty, doesn’t always have to look smooth but we’ll find a way to put our kids in good situations on the offensive end.

[00:38:52] Mike Klinzing: All right. So talk about in a practice setting, when you’re trying to teach the game from a motion standpoint, you’re talking about not having everything be dictated from the sidelines and running set play after set play. You’re talking about giving your kids the opportunity on the floor to make decisions. So then obviously in practice, you have to set up situations that allow your kids to make decisions off of whether it’s certain actions or entries or whatever it is that you do.

So just talk a little bit about how you design a practice to put your players in position to be able to learn how to make good decisions in games.

[00:39:31] Will Pope: Yeah. So our offensive system, our motion system is built around one post. So we’ll have four out, one in most of the time. And I think spacing is thing number one, when you’re talking about a motion offense.

More than anything, it’s putting every guy on the floor, on the perimeter in a position where they can attack right or left hand and have space to work with. And that’s where we start with, with our motion. We have spots on the floor that we try to play out of. It’s predictable. Our guys know or feel at least through their habits when they’re not where they’re supposed to be.

And so much of it is just habit building. When the ball moves and someone else moves. We got to have somebody fill into a spot. When an action happens, whether or not we get something out of it, both guys have to end up on spots on the floor that are predictable. We do a lot of away actions. At the end of the day though, what makes our motion offense effective is when we actually screw up our spacing completely and we create double gaps on the court. We teach our guys those habits of being in the right spot and having four guys in their spots, but every once in a while you have to do a cut that, that creates more space than the defense is used to. And it’s kind of, in my opinion, tricking the defense into your pattern and then just completely throwing that pattern out the door and trying to let your offensive players attack those spaces and create something for somebody else. Modern basketball, a lot of it’s about layups and threes. So a lot of our, what we preach to our kids within our offense is attack a closeout and collapse the defense. If you can make a zero second decision on the perimeter to either shoot it or drive it the defense is going to have to scramble.

Somebody else is going to have to come stop it. And then that guy with the ball gets to make a play for somebody else. And so we talk a lot about sharing the basketball and getting the thing moving, but you also need skilled players that can win a one on one matchup within a motion offense because I think decision based basketball is the most fun basketball to play where it’s not being manipulated necessarily by coaches, but you get to read your defender, you get to read your defense and you get to take advantage of whatever decisions they make.

[00:42:02] Mike Klinzing: So how do you balance then the individual skill development of a player? Because obviously the more skilled your players are, the more opportunity they’re going to have to, as you said, attack a closeout, be able to beat their guy, be able to make a good pass, be able to make a move and get around somebody versus putting that all together as a whole.

So I guess what I’m asking is, how much time are you spending with what you would call individual player development versus team offense development and maybe you just meld the two together. Just talk a little bit about your philosophy in terms of those things.

[00:42:36] Will Pope: Yeah, in the off season specifically a lot of that is based around individual skill development.

We’ve been really fortunate at Papio. We have great kids that are hard workers and they’ve bought in right away to that skill development piece, meaning they take a lot of individual ownership of showing up to the gym and don’t miss anything. We do a lot of morning workouts with guys where we’re working on individual skills.

Honestly, a lot of it’s footwork. Footwork is kind of a basis for everything. But that footwork then is kind of the foundation so that you can become a better ball handler. You can become a better shooter. We put a lot of time in the offseason into individual skill workouts. As we get more into the season we’ll build in skill into pretty much every practice.

We’ll shoot, we’ll handle it, we’ll put them in some small sided games that work on those skills. But ultimately it always kind of builds in, scaffolds, I guess, as a progression so that we can put it in a live situation. And then in a live situation. focus on those things that we’ve been working on so that it actually translates to a five on five game.

We, in practice, almost everything that we do is, is live five on five basketball. Some of them are drills that it’s a little bit more controlled. Some of them are a little bit more free flowing, but the skills that we work on in those individual skill workouts, in those breakdowns, those are the things that we’re still talking to them about, but it’s just in a live setting where We can kind of teach on the fly, coach them on the fly, make small adjustments and then let them just get back into playing in those live games.

Because I’m a big believer in that’s if we’re going to play five on five basketball, that’s where we got to put our time into it and let the kids do what, what’s fun for them, which is playing basketball. I don’t want to be a guy that I have to stand in and talk for, for five minutes at a time about something I want to teach on the fly.

And let them pick those things up, correct those things, and move on to the next thing.

[00:44:55] Mike Klinzing: In designing and planning your practices, do you have a set flow that you like to put into the practice? In other words, do you start out with some shooting, and then go to offense, and then go to defensive breakdown, and then special situations, and then, or is it kind of just based on day to day, what do you feel like your team needs?

[00:45:16] Will Pope: It depends. I would say we have a pretty standard flow to practice. School gets out and guys kind of filter into the gym. Some of them spend some time in the training room getting making sure they’re getting taped, getting treatment, getting those things done. We kind of have a standard that as soon as you get into the gym, you find a partner or a group of three and you start getting into some two man, three man skill workout things.

Getting shots up, getting ball handling in and that usually, we build it into the practice plan but there’s a little bit of the skill development that happens And they take ownership of it. And then typically, as everybody gets into the gym we start to get a little bit more into a flow.

I’ll blow the whistle, we warm up do a little bit of movement, getting them warmed up, warmed up. A lot of times we’ll do like a full court drill, an energy drill to get their get them to the level that they need to be at for the start of practice. And pretty much right away we’re into defensive work.

It’s usually live. We’re usually working on something that, that we need to improve on, but it’s live and we’re getting after it. And our JV guys, our scout guys, their energy is just as important as our varsity guys. And so it’s get that live stuff going, get them in a competitive mode.

And then after that first section we’ll maybe do a shooting drill when they’re tired. We’ll get them into some skill stuff, we’ll do some breakdown, like some small sided games from time to time and then we’re focusing on, on the offensive side of things and trying to put them in live situations.

Sometimes it’s more free flowing, sometimes it’s, it’s a little bit stop and start depending on where we’re at in the season and whether we got to load manage them a little bit. And then every once in a while you got to throw them off and you got to keep them on their toes and you got to do some things that maybe catch them off guard and focus in different ways than they’re used to. Just because it’s an unpredictable game. And we preach to our guys constantly about handling adversity, handling situations that are outside of your control. And so it’s kind of our responsibility to throw that at them once in a while and just see how they deal with it.

But for example, every once in a while, if we don’t feel like we’re executing our stuff very well. Before we start anything, we’ll get them at baskets and we’ll get them executing, going five on 0 through stuff, just because we feel like there may be in a different place of focus than they would be at the end of practice when we’ve been going hard.

We’ve competing for an hour and a half. maybe gets them in a different frame of mind where we can focus on some different things.

[00:48:07] Mike Klinzing: That makes complete sense. What’s your process for planning practice? Are you sitting down at your desk writing out pen and paper? Are you doing it on the computer? Are you doing it right after the previous day’s practice?

Are you doing it during the school day or your planning periods? What, what’s the process for actually putting the plan together?

[00:48:25] Will Pope: I always write notes following practice. So I’ll write notes on that day’s practice plan. It’s pretty collaborative with our coaches my assistant Matt Emig.

We talk throughout the entire day about what we think is necessary, what we maybe haven’t been good at, or what we’re going to need to be good at for our next opponent. And it is a pretty good back and forth of, of coming up with ideas. We like to do drills that are guys that are simple things that they know, things they’re familiar with that they can be good in.

But we’re also always looking for new things that hopefully we can effectively teach it to them so they will not spend 10 minutes of our practice talking through something new. But things that that just fit in with what we’re trying to do. I practice planning is maybe the most important part of the job just for me, because I never want to feel like I don’t have a plan or I’m not organized. And so putting that practice plan together, it gets me in the frame of mind where one, it gets me excited for practice. Two, it forces me to think about what our deficiencies are and what we need to truly work on so that we can get better that day in practice.

[00:49:50] Mike Klinzing: What about from a game prep perspective and scouting an opponent, what’s the process like for you to break down an opponent, get your team prepared? How much film are you watching of that opponent? And then what are you looking for specifically? Each opponent, it’s going to be different. You’re going to pull out different things, but just in general, from a scouting perspective, what are some things that you’re looking forward?  How do you go about finding those things?

[00:50:17] Will Pope: Yeah, I watch a lot of film. Again, we can go back to the, the technology conversation. We’re pretty fortunate to have lots and lots of tools and resources. In the modern world that allow us to have access and be better at the game planning side of it.

I watch a lot of film. I try and watch multiple films of each of our opponents. I also we in Nebraska, we use max preps. You have to upload your stats on the max preps. I think just looking at stats can tell some of the story. I don’t rely on it completely, but it usually can either confirm or make me rethink some of my thoughts about a specific player and their tendencies.

Throughout the week, we typically will implement things that we’ve seen our opponents do so that we can get on floor. it. We don’t typically talk about our opponents directly until the day before we’re going to play them though. And so it’s all built into the plan of what we think we’re going to see based off of film.

But our focus is always on us more than it is about our opponents. We want to make sure that our guys are confident in what we do. More than we want to talk to him about another team or their personnel just so that they know it’s still that mindset of control what you can control.

We can’t always control if our opponents go crazy from the three point line and make a bunch of shots. We can’t always control if it’s called tight and we have to adjust to the officiating. But we can control our daily habits and the things that we get prepared on a daily basis. But I’m a big believer in being prepared for your opponents.

A lot of times in the Metro Conference in Omaha, we have back to backs. So we’ll play Friday and Saturday night. And I have sometimes a hard time with it because I don’t always like looking at the Saturday opponent because the Friday opponent’s the one that’s the next opportunity that we have to attack.

But I have to force myself sometimes to look ahead just so that we do an effective job of practice planning so that we’re ready no matter what for both opponents on the weekend. But yeah, I probably sometimes watch too much film. When I’m watching film, I’m always looking at personnel, at tendencies, at lineups.

But more than anything, it’s just flow of play. What are they trying to get? What are some of their typical actions? Are there any specials that are really constant and come up a lot? Those are some of the big things, I guess, that I’m looking for.

[00:52:55] Mike Klinzing: How important is it for you to share the things that you glean as a coaching staff from watching film, how much of that actually gets shared with players and what part of it?

Is it mostly personnel stuff that you’re sharing with players? Are you looking at one or two main actions maybe that the other team runs? Just what’s important for you to share with your team and how much do you think they can actually process? Because I know you said and I agree with you 100 percent that it should mostly be about your team because I know in my experience coaching high school basketball, A lot of times high school players have enough trouble processing what their own team is supposed to be doing, let alone be worried about the other team is doing to any level of detail.  So I’m just curious how you approach that with your team.

[00:53:44] Will Pope: Well, that’s a tricky one because it is different from group to group. Some groups they just have a high IQ. They can intake a lot of information and take it to the floor with them. Some groups can’t. I think you figure out within the first quarter of your season what your group’s capable of.

But I’m a big believer in always fostering that basketball IQ part of it, we’re not just rolling the balls out and playing. We want to have a plan for how we’re going to beat anybody that we’re going to play. And that scouting report and that film part of it’s important.

We’ll watch film with our guys. A lot of times we try and watch us first and then talk about the things that we’ve done well, what needs to get better. I think they have an easier time understanding that part of it sometimes. A lot of times when we get in the film room with them, getting prepared for an opponent, we’ll focus on personnel.

We’ll focus on personnel, what their tendencies are, what shots they’re trying to get, and then just some common actions that we see out of them. More than anything, I think at the high school level especially in Omaha, there’s just a diversity of playing styles. If a team is really, really good in transition, we’re going to show them how fast they play in transition and why it’s important that we can get them stopped.

If they’re a really good half court team, we’re going to show them some of their really, really good possessions and how they’re able to manipulate defenses just so that they have some reference for what we’re talking about on the court with them. When we talk about this team’s really good they’re really patient in the half court.

They set tons of actions, tons of movement. We want them to actually see it. So they have some understanding of what we think we’re going to see. But I would say from my experience, the more simple you can make it, the better. Most groups can’t handle too much complexity with game planning.

[00:55:44] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it makes sense. And I think for you as a coaching staff, right, obviously you can take and you can learn things from the film that are important for you to understand so that you can make adjustments in games and know what you’re going to see in certain situations. And then that enables you to coach them in game and talk through and be able to point out things and prepared you are as a staff, the better off you’re going to be going into the game, regardless of how much you can share with your team prior to actual game and being played.

I think no matter what you are as a staff, the more prepared you are going into a game, the better off you’re going to be.

[00:56:20] Will Pope: Yeah. And I would say it like everything, it’s a collaborative process with us. It’s kind of like. Okay, who’d you watch? Who’d you watch and play? What’d you see? What sometimes the conversation’s as simple as who can our big guy, who can our post guard, because they they run a five out system, they don’t have a big on the court, we’re still going to play our big guy.

How can we match up with them so that we can still do what we want to do? Some of those collaborative things just, and that’s the fun part of it, honestly, as, as a coach is trying to find any advantage that you can in order to give your kids the best chance possible.

[00:56:57] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, that if you’re running the right program and doing things the way that you want it done, you’re looking for every advantage and trying to find that and continuing to try to squeeze every drop of that, every drop out of that orange that you possibly, that you possibly can.

Tell me a little bit about how You’ve designed your program to support the parents of your kids in the program. I know that’s one of the things that when you read reports nationally about high school coaches, one of the biggest frustrations is parents. And yet at the same time, we talked to lots of coaches and they have really good relationships with parents.

So as a new head coach, what have you tried to do to engage the parents in your program to make sure that they’re advocates for what you’re doing as opposed to adversaries?

[00:57:51] Will Pope: Yeah, I think it’s first and foremost, there’s a balance because you want their kids are obviously the most important thing to them and they need to feel like their kids are taken care of, given the best shot that at the end of the day, we’re fighting for their kids.

They have to see and believe it. But it’s also we still have some boundaries that we believe are necessary and vital in order to make sure that we don’t need too much access. And that’s a tricky thing to do because the part of the community that I’m in Papio, it’s a small, it’s a close knit community.

And we have awesome parents that are super supportive of their kids. We’re all competitive people. If you’re involved in athletics in any way, that competitive side of it is usually where that comes out. We just try and be super upfront. We try and be transparent. We try to communicate as much as we can about things that are going on in our program, the schedules, all those things that can potentially lead to miscommunications.

We just try and have as clear lines of communication as possible so that they know they can reach out to us when they need to if there’s something going on. We’re ultimately here to help them with the same thing that they’re most concerned about, which is their child’s wellbeing.

[00:59:23] Mike Klinzing: Really, I think critical, as you said, to be able to engage with them and communicate, and when you communicate proactively, I think that ends up being the best way to be able to get those parents to, to be on your side. It’s, you want to make sure they’re informed. You want to make sure that they know what’s happening.

And obviously they’re invested in their child and they’re invested the team. And if you can communicate how those two fit together, then I think ultimately that’s when you end up in the best spot, best spot. And most parents, I think, if there’s communication from the head coach, I think that goes a long, long way towards building kind of team camaraderie that you need.

The worst situations are when you have the parents that are grumbling behind the scenes and causing problems that may not even occur amongst the players. Sometimes when there’s a lack of communication, that void is going to get filled with somebody’s thought process, and it’s much better to fill that void with your thought process as the head coach as opposed to, to some parent who is obviously not around at practice and doesn’t see the inner workings of what’s going on day in and day out with your team.

[01:00:36] Will Pope: Yeah it’s a current part of just life as coaches in the high school setting. And I think another part of it that’s really huge is having coaches in your program because in our program we have five teams. And so you have to have coaches that are also good at that aspect of it because you can’t be everywhere.

You can’t be in every practice. You can’t see every game especially at those lower levels. And so having good coaches  that are also good at that communication aspect of it, that’s super important. And ultimately high school sports now, it’s a year round thing. We have them during the season, but when we get to the summertime, we’re going to have them in the weight room.

We’re going to have them at skill workouts. We’re going to go to team camps. And it’s a big commitment for families. And so that’s the other aspect of it, I think, is they sacrifice a lot for their child to be a part of a program. And so it’s always our goal to give that child, all of our athletes all the opportunities available to them so that they can do what they love doing.

[01:01:52] Mike Klinzing: I agree. I mean, I think that. When parents see that you’re invested and that you’re putting in all that time in season, off season, that goes again a long way towards getting people to buy into what it is that you’re doing. To me, that’s those two things, communication and just putting the time in, for lack of a better way of saying it.

To me, I think those are two big things when it comes to, when you hear complaints from parents about programs. I think a lot of times it comes down to is there communication and is there the level of dedication that is required? Look, one thing I’ve said over and over again is the bar for what you need to do as a high school coach in terms of the amount of time that you have to put in just to be Average, the amount of time that you have to put in today compared to 15 or 20 years ago is off the charts.

And then when you talk about if you want to be the best, if you want to be a great program, you’re talking about even more time. And a lot of that time, clearly, I think most coaches during the season are putting in I think sometimes it comes down to what happens in the offseason. So tell me a little bit about your offseason program with your kids and kind of what you do and your philosophy there.

[01:03:17] Will Pope: Yeah, we do have a lot of multi sport kids. And so our season got over last week and, and pretty much right away a decent chunk of our guys are moving into spring sports and so they don’t have a ton of time off for the kids that aren’t multi sport kids that are just basketball or maybe aren’t into spring sport, we’ll give them a couple of weeks off.

But the weight room’s really important to our program. We need to get bigger, we need to get stronger. Like a lot of programs out there and we think that that’s a pretty vital part of the process that sometimes doesn’t get talked about with all sports is that commitment to the weight room.

We’ll spend most of the spring about a six week strength program with our strength coaches, where we’ll be in the weight room four times a day after school with those kids. On top of that we get them in the gym for individual workouts. Those are pretty short in the morning, usually about 30 minutes.

We try and get them in and out. I’m a believer in putting in the time. But I’m also a believer in that use that time wisely and get in the gym for 30 minutes, three times a week. And that consistency that pays off over the long term. As we get into summer the summer part of it is super important.

It’s kind of the season light where we’ll have a team camp for our high school kids. That’s kind of like tryout week. The practice plans are built to instill the foundational concepts in our program and start to get them back in the groove of where we need them because we’ll go play some competitive things in the summer.

We’ll go to some showcases, some team camps. We like to set up a couple of days where we’ll have teams come to our gym and do some scrimmages. And the biggest thing there is just compete. Summer basketball isn’t always super structured. Sometimes it’s not real pretty but it doesn’t matter what we’re doing.

We’re trying to compete. We’re trying to win. And that mentality really starts to grow in the summer. As we get to July that’s kind of when AAU picks up at least in Nebraska. June’s kind of reserved for high school coaches. In July, we kind of let them go play for somebody else, go play a different way.

Maybe even as long as you’re doing things that are important to our program, like being tough, competing. Being a good teammate we love that they get to go play for somebody else. As we roll around to fall, it’s kind of back into that mindset of let’s get on that weight room program again.

Let’s hit it hard. Let’s get bulked up a little bit for the start of the season, all that injury prevention stuff. And we have a lot of football guys in our program. And so our fall looks way different than the summertime. But it’s just more honestly, it’s more of the same. It’s more of the foundational things that we think are super necessary in order to be an effective player, in order to be a successful program.

We just kind of hit it all year long, understanding that they still need breaks and they need breaks physically. They also need breaks from us as their coaches from time to time so that they can be refreshed and energized when the season rolls around and we’re ready to get after it for the real thing.

[01:06:46] Mike Klinzing: That’s a great point that I think sometimes we forget, and that’s often a conversation, Will, that we have with college coaches when we’re talking about the different level. of college basketball and how much access they have to their players at each level. When you talk about Division I, you’re basically looking at those guys being on campus for 11 months out of the year and doing off season workouts and working with the coaching staff directly.

And then you talk about Division III, which up until this year, they basically have no contact with their players on the court outside of the season. Now they got their eight days. I always go back and forth between the division three model, at least before the eight days, always felt like that doesn’t seem right.

You don’t get to work with your coaching staff at all if you’re a player. And yet at the same time, when I played division one basketball 30 some years ago, I say this all the time, like, my season ended and they handed me a two page ditto. It was like, here’s your workout. We’ll see you back here in, we’ll see you back here in August.

Make sure you’re in shape and ready to go and even hopefully improved your game since then. Whereas now, obviously those guys don’t get any kind of a break. And that to me seems like, man, to have the same coaching staff chirping at you for. 11 straight months seems like that would be an awful lot. So I completely understand your point of, yeah, you want to be able to be there and you want to work with them.

And there’s a fine line. I think that the danger is, right, that the more access that, and different states obviously have different rules, but the more access that you have, The more you feel like you have to do things because everybody else around you is doing them. And yet at the same time, sometimes I feel like, Hey, if even if you could go every day in the summer, that might be counterproductive for the reasons that you just stated where the kids.

need a break, especially in a place like where you are, where kids are, so many kids are playing multiple sports and involved in multiple activities. Like you can’t, you can’t go seven days a week of off season basketball and have a kid on the baseball team trying to do both of those things. It just, that seems like, that seems like overkill to me.

[01:08:57] Will Pope: Yeah, that’s to me part of the real value of that multi sport athlete is the fact that they are going to go play a different sport. They’re going to work on different muscle groups. They’re going to get coached by somebody else. And we typically see those guys super excited to get back into basketball when it’s time to do that.

And I would say the other thing too, is we have kids that won’t miss a single workout. And we’ll have kids that have a harder time making it to stuff. All we’re here to do is present those opportunities to kids. And what we see is the ones that take advantage of those opportunities usually pass other people by whether it’s just the time that they’re putting in or the development that happens we had a perfect example of that this year.

We had a freshman last year that didn’t play in any varsity games all year long. He committed super hard in the off season and showed up to everything and just outworked everyone. And he was our starting point guard as a sophomore this year, and it was just, I mean, wasn’t anything special that we did.

It was a kid that decided I’m going to do this and I’m going to put everything into it and those opportunities paid off for him specifically.

[01:10:14] Mike Klinzing: That makes sense. I mean, again, there’s no secret to anything, but basketball specifically, I mean, if you’re going to put the time in, you’re going to improve and you’re going to get better.

And that usually pays off. It’s rare that you have somebody that puts that time in…

[01:10:28] Will Pope: Yeah, he’s a unique kid. There’s not a ton of kids out there like him. And he’s just a great example of if you do take advantage of it. Here’s what could potentially happen for you.

[01:10:40] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. I mean, it’s just, again, there’s putting time in it, it translates.

It’s rare that it doesn’t translate into good things. Let’s put it that way. All right. Final two part question, part one, when you look ahead over the next year or two, what do you see as being the biggest challenge? And then the second part of the question, when you think about what you get to do every day, what brings you the most joy?

So your biggest challenge and then your biggest joy.

[01:11:10] Will Pope: Oh, biggest challenge. You know, something that we’ve worked really, really hard to try and instill, and it’s not an easy thing to instill is that winning mindset of like I said, we’re not just rolling the balls out we’re doing this thing with a plan of how we’re going to be successful.

I think there’s a really important belief of winning that anytime you step out against somebody, what is going to allow you to be successful. And a lot of times those are simple things. It’s the competing part of it. It’s the toughness part of it. It’s the problem solving part of it, handling adversity.

But with that mindset of if we do those things, we’re going to win. It’s going to be hard. We’re going to have to figure out how to navigate some things together as a group. But if we do, we’re going to win. We are still, I hate to say that we’re like changing the culture because I don’t necessarily think that’s true.

I think that’s a buzz word or a buzz phrase that gets thrown around a lot. I think we are working with a generation of kids that have grown up in AAU basketball where there’s always a game, there’s always another tournament, winning and losing is kind of inconsequential. And then they come to us and their first real experience where High school sports is drastically different from what they’ve known their whole life.

And I think that’s the biggest challenge is how can you get them to be 100 percent all in on something that they don’t know whether or not they’re going to be successful in. I know what’s going to happen if you don’t put yourself all in and don’t commit completely to the process. You’re not going to get the results you want.

I also know if you commit completely to it, you might still experience failure. And it’s getting kids to be willing to be vulnerable in that way where they’re willing to put themselves out there in a way that they probably haven’t ever done up to that point. And so with our program, I think it’s continually celebrating things that you maybe wouldn’t normally celebrate, like risk taking, like shooting that heat check shot, like those types of things are things we want our kids to play fearless and with tons of confidence and it’s just instilling some of those habits and those mindsets in them that I think modern kids, it’s some of those things are a little bit more challenging from time to time.

All right. Biggest joy. I think it would probably be something that this is echoed by lots of coaches is the fact that we get to work with young people every day that look up to us, that respect us, that We’re getting to teach them a lot of things outside of athletics.

Just how to experience some of those things, like I talked about, like adversity or challenges that they might experience. We get to work with that group and hopefully, mold people into people that are going to be effective Workers, business owners, husbands, fathers, those types of things that I think you look down the road and those are the things that we’re going to value so much more than the basketball side of things.

So as a coach, getting to work with those young people, super important, super rewarding to me.

[01:14:38] Mike Klinzing: Well said, Will. Before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share how people can connect with you, whether you want to share social media, email, website, whatever you feel comfortable with. And then after you do that, I will jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:14:51] Will Pope: I’m not an awesome social media guy by any means. You can find the, the Papillion La Vista basketball Twitter account @PLHSHoops. My email address is will.pope@plcschools.org. I’m an open book. I don’t have a ton of new ideas, but I’m a really good stealer of other people’s good ideas.

So if anybody wants to reach out, those are the two places you can do that.

[01:15:20] Mike Klinzing: Will, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule the night to jump on with us. Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.