Check us out at www.coachingingyouthhoops.com Are you a new or experienced youth basketball coach looking to cut through the noise and have someone just tell you what works? It’s easy to waste time and money learning how to coach Kindergarten through 8th-grade basketball on your own. Join seasoned youth basketball coaches Bill and Steve as they give you the blueprint you need to succeed on and off the court. In each episode, you'll discover easy-to-implement tips and techniques that you can apply to your next practice. Will Launch Weekly on Tuesday Mornings
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Ep 378 What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club? ( part 2)
Thursday, October 8, 2026 • Duration 28:19
Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show
Links mentioned in this episode
TeachHoops.com
LakeShowHoops.com — Joey's club in the Bay Area. Contact info is on the About Us page
CoachingYouthHoops.com
Beyond Pulse — the wearable band Coach Bill is testing with his team
NukeHydration.com — the fifteen second voice note evaluation app Coach Bill is also testing
What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club?
Gym time, good coaches, and the myth of arriving.
Coach Bill sits down with Joey Fuca, who runs Lake Show in the Bay Area and is also, as Coach Bill puts it, his boss. Two years in the making. Joey has coached everywhere from his third grade son's team to the college and pro level, and Lake Show now runs about twenty six teams and roughly two hundred forty boys.
Strip away the uniforms, the tournaments, and the Instagram posts, and Joey's answer is simple: helping kids. Ages seven and eight through the teens, and then staying connected to those families for decades. Over the last four or five years he has hired coaches who played in the program. He has coached multiple sets of brothers. He had Lake Show guys in his wedding party as groomsmen. He calls it a lineage of players.
The club started in 2005 as a family project. His dad, Joe Fuca, a tech CEO who worked at DocuSign through its IPO and now coaches at a small school in Dublin, put it together for Joey and his buddies. Nothing more ambitious than that.
Joey's advice to players is the same thing he did himself: take one or two good things from every coach you have.
John Raynor, his high school coach at San Ramon Valley for over thirty years, taught him toughness, grit, and how to grow up as a young man and be a leader in the community. He and Mark Madsen, now the head coach at Cal, recently went up to visit him.
Chuck Martin, his college coach at The Master's College and a former Liberty coach, was a great leader of men and modeled spiritual values off the court.
Eric Musselman, whose kids came up through Lake Show, brought Joey on as a grad assistant at Nevada after Joey finished playing professionally in Germany. That opened up the business side, right at the front edge of the transfer portal era, which Musselman helped spearhead.
What carries over to youth coaching is smaller and more ordinary than you would expect: getting to practice fifteen minutes early, how you communicate during practice, how you actually run a team.
Coach Bill asks what that coach is thinking about wrong. Joey's answer is that the premise itself is off. People want the end state, the twenty or thirty or fifty teams, without the part that gets you there.
Build a product you can be proud of. If that is two teams, it is two teams. Growth follows quality.
The non negotiables:
A good director. The leader of the program is what families actually see.
Good coaches. They are the ones interacting with the athletes every week.
Gym time. Everything else is theoretical without it.
Community roots. You do not start a program where you have no influence. Joey's is in Danville, where his son goes to school and has his friends.
Coach Bill adds the part that catches most coaches off guard: at twenty five teams you are running a business. Books, payments, scheduling, conflicts. "I'm a coach, therefore I can coach a team" turns into "I have to learn how to run a business."
Hiring gets more delicate. Lake Show keeps it close to home, drawing from former players in the program or warm referrals from coaches Joey trusts.
Gym time becomes a hard ceiling. If you are in a district with a fixed allotment, that allotment is your program size. Basketball is an indoor sport and the season is fall and winter, so there is no workaround. Joey's advice to a new director: treat gym time as your business. Go to every district, every church, every space that might give you a relationship.
And you need help. Lake Show's director of operations, Jeff Maw, wears every hat: coaching, registrations, promotion. Coach Bill's version of the same point is to hire people smarter than you with strengths you do not have, which is hard for coaches who are used to believing they know everything.
For most of its life, it did not. The program was high school only, one or two teams, built around the goal of getting kids into college, D1, D2, or junior college. Joey's mom used to give them a hard time because they never ran it like a business. They poured their own time, money, and resources into it.
Joey started looking at it as a business about ten years ago. The youth program is only eight or nine years old. They added middle school because families had been asking for years, all those high school players had younger siblings, and the Fuca family wanted a way to keep the thing in the family while still serving the area. It started as one sixth, seventh, and eighth grade team. Once you have one team, you start creating more.
They set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017.
Coach Bill raises the outside perception: an Adidas 3SSB team looks like a club that made it.
Joey corrects the framing immediately. Nobody has made it. Lake Show spent ten to fifteen years earning their spot and is grateful for it, but the competition at the elite level is a dogfight every single year. You cannot be a flash in the pan with one blue chip kid and coast. He recently got an email from Adidas asking for the program's ten year history of players who went on to college, with NBA players highlighted. Who is in your program is a very real thing.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
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Bonus Should Your Players Be Wearing Ankle Braces or Just Taping Up?
Wednesday, October 7, 2026 • Duration 04:52
https://teachhoops.com/
The debate over ankle braces is one of the most persistent topics in basketball, with coaches, trainers, and parents often split on the best approach. In this episode, we dive into the pros and cons of prophylactic ankle bracing versus traditional taping. We break down the cost-benefit analysis, looking not just at the price of tape versus a one-time brace purchase, but also at the effectiveness of each method after 15 minutes of sweating and intense gameplay.
We also tackle the biggest myth surrounding this topic: the idea that wearing braces will weaken a player's ankles over time. We look at what the actual research says about "dependency" and whether external support leads to muscle atrophy, or if that is just old-school coaching folklore. We discuss the importance of distinguishing between reliance on a brace and using it as a necessary insurance policy, especially for players with a history of recurrent sprains.
Finally, we explore the balance between protection and performance. Does locking down an ankle limit a player’s vertical jump or agility? We discuss the concept of the "kinetic chain"—the fear that bracing the ankle might transfer force to the knee—and how to mitigate that risk through proper strength and mobility training. Whether you are considering a team-wide mandate or just advising a player coming off an injury, this episode gives you the facts to make an informed decision.
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Ep 377 What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club? ( part 1)
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 • Duration 26:57
Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show
Links mentioned in this episode
TeachHoops.com
LakeShowHoops.com — Joey's club in the Bay Area. Contact info is on the About Us page
CoachingYouthHoops.com
Beyond Pulse — the wearable band Coach Bill is testing with his team
NukeHydration.com — the fifteen second voice note evaluation app Coach Bill is also testing
What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club?
Gym time, good coaches, and the myth of arriving.
Coach Bill sits down with Joey Fuca, who runs Lake Show in the Bay Area and is also, as Coach Bill puts it, his boss. Two years in the making. Joey has coached everywhere from his third grade son's team to the college and pro level, and Lake Show now runs about twenty six teams and roughly two hundred forty boys.
Strip away the uniforms, the tournaments, and the Instagram posts, and Joey's answer is simple: helping kids. Ages seven and eight through the teens, and then staying connected to those families for decades. Over the last four or five years he has hired coaches who played in the program. He has coached multiple sets of brothers. He had Lake Show guys in his wedding party as groomsmen. He calls it a lineage of players.
The club started in 2005 as a family project. His dad, Joe Fuca, a tech CEO who worked at DocuSign through its IPO and now coaches at a small school in Dublin, put it together for Joey and his buddies. Nothing more ambitious than that.
Joey's advice to players is the same thing he did himself: take one or two good things from every coach you have.
John Raynor, his high school coach at San Ramon Valley for over thirty years, taught him toughness, grit, and how to grow up as a young man and be a leader in the community. He and Mark Madsen, now the head coach at Cal, recently went up to visit him.
Chuck Martin, his college coach at The Master's College and a former Liberty coach, was a great leader of men and modeled spiritual values off the court.
Eric Musselman, whose kids came up through Lake Show, brought Joey on as a grad assistant at Nevada after Joey finished playing professionally in Germany. That opened up the business side, right at the front edge of the transfer portal era, which Musselman helped spearhead.
What carries over to youth coaching is smaller and more ordinary than you would expect: getting to practice fifteen minutes early, how you communicate during practice, how you actually run a team.
Coach Bill asks what that coach is thinking about wrong. Joey's answer is that the premise itself is off. People want the end state, the twenty or thirty or fifty teams, without the part that gets you there.
Build a product you can be proud of. If that is two teams, it is two teams. Growth follows quality.
The non negotiables:
A good director. The leader of the program is what families actually see.
Good coaches. They are the ones interacting with the athletes every week.
Gym time. Everything else is theoretical without it.
Community roots. You do not start a program where you have no influence. Joey's is in Danville, where his son goes to school and has his friends.
Coach Bill adds the part that catches most coaches off guard: at twenty five teams you are running a business. Books, payments, scheduling, conflicts. "I'm a coach, therefore I can coach a team" turns into "I have to learn how to run a business."
Hiring gets more delicate. Lake Show keeps it close to home, drawing from former players in the program or warm referrals from coaches Joey trusts.
Gym time becomes a hard ceiling. If you are in a district with a fixed allotment, that allotment is your program size. Basketball is an indoor sport and the season is fall and winter, so there is no workaround. Joey's advice to a new director: treat gym time as your business. Go to every district, every church, every space that might give you a relationship.
And you need help. Lake Show's director of operations, Jeff Maw, wears every hat: coaching, registrations, promotion. Coach Bill's version of the same point is to hire people smarter than you with strengths you do not have, which is hard for coaches who are used to believing they know everything.
For most of its life, it did not. The program was high school only, one or two teams, built around the goal of getting kids into college, D1, D2, or junior college. Joey's mom used to give them a hard time because they never ran it like a business. They poured their own time, money, and resources into it.
Joey started looking at it as a business about ten years ago. The youth program is only eight or nine years old. They added middle school because families had been asking for years, all those high school players had younger siblings, and the Fuca family wanted a way to keep the thing in the family while still serving the area. It started as one sixth, seventh, and eighth grade team. Once you have one team, you start creating more.
They set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017.
Coach Bill raises the outside perception: an Adidas 3SSB team looks like a club that made it.
Joey corrects the framing immediately. Nobody has made it. Lake Show spent ten to fifteen years earning their spot and is grateful for it, but the competition at the elite level is a dogfight every single year. You cannot be a flash in the pan with one blue chip kid and coast. He recently got an email from Adidas asking for the program's ten year history of players who went on to college, with NBA players highlighted. Who is in your program is a very real thing.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Ep 376 Are You Sure the Kid Heard What You Actually Said?
Thursday, October 1, 2026 • Duration 14:34
Cuts During Tryouts
Links mentioned in this episode
TeachHoops.com
NukeHydration.com — clean sports drink started by a sports mom and dad out of Mississippi. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off your first order
CoachingYouthHoops.com — build a custom practice plan or print and go. As Coach Bill puts it, more state titles than ChatGPT
Are You Sure the Kid Heard What You Actually Said?
Cut conversations, and the telephone game that follows.
The follow up to tryouts: the conversations nobody wants to have. Cutting a kid, or moving a player down from the top team. The goal is not just delivering the news. It is delivering it without killing the kid's enthusiasm for the sport.
Coach Bill's rule of thumb by age:
Eighth grade: parent and kid together.
Seventh grade: depends on the situation.
Sixth and below: the parent first.
But he always offers the same thing. "I'm happy to sit with both of you, and I'm happy to talk to them specifically about what they need to work on." He encourages families to take him up on it.
His reasoning is the heart of the episode. You can say the exact same words to two different kids. One hears a challenge: wasn't my year, next year look out. The other hears you do not like me, I'm horrible, I'm quitting. Same words, same delivery, completely different landing. You have to know the kid, and the parent.
Coach Collins had a long, blunt conversation with his son Drew after his sophomore year about what his role would look like as a junior. Coach Kevin Klagos and other assistants were in the room.
By the time Coach Collins got home, Drew's mother was waiting at the door, ready to let him have it for telling Drew he would never play for him.
That is not remotely what was said. He had to call time out, walk back through the actual conversation, and offer to get Klagos on the phone because Klagos heard the whole thing. What was actually said was here is where you fit and here is what you need to work on. What Drew heard, and what Drew relayed, was I'm no good and I won't play next year.
His takeaway for every coach listening: what you say to a kid is not what reaches the parent. Ever. It is a game of telephone. That is exactly why the age of the kid determines who is in the room.
And one more rule from Coach Collins: do not post it, do not put it online. Talk to people.
Coach Bill pushes for the actual language. What do you say to a sixth grader, or their parent, when what you really mean is not good enough?
Coach Collins' structure:
Start positive. Here is what your kid is genuinely good at.
Name the gaps plainly. Here are the skills they need to get better at.
Reframe the comparison. It is not that your son or daughter got worse. Other kids got better and worked on those things, and we are moving them up.
Give them the runway. You have 364 days. Here is exactly what to work on.
Land on the upside. This is a better fit for the level and the teams they will play. More playing time, more reps, more chances to develop the skills they could not get otherwise.
Coach Collins' best analogy, straight out of Madison. The city runs the biggest outdoor swim meet in the country every summer, with something like twenty public pools feeding into an event called All City at the end.
When the seven year olds swim the 25 freestyle, there are roughly thirty five heats of it. The whole beauty of it is that every kid is in the heat that matches their time. Eight swimmers per heat, and if you win yours you get a ribbon. The top eight in the city are in the top heat. Everybody else is racing someone they can actually race.
The kids leave those pools smiling. They competed. Nobody got lapped.
Basketball cannot sort that cleanly, and both coaches acknowledge it. But that is what a coach is trying to do. Not rank kids. Put them in the right heat.
"Who else got cut?" Or "how many?" Or "who did you keep?"
Coach Bill admits he struggles with this one, because nobody wants to be the only one. That is embarrassing. And when a kid truly is the only cut, the obvious follow up is why cut one kid at all.
Coach Collins' half joking answer: I can only keep ten. Well, keep eleven. I only have ten jerseys.
The real answer is that the gap between the tenth and eleventh player is usually enormous, and that it is about level, not about the number.
There is also a safety piece Coach Bill raises. Is it actually safe for this kid to be on this court the way they are right now? Coach Collins' addition: and would they even be happy there?
Coach Collins' youth program has had sixteen kids show up for fifth grade. You cannot carry sixteen. So you are cutting four to six kids, or you are telling families to go find four more players and another coach, and nobody wants to do either. Sometimes twenty kids show up and only one parent volunteers to coach, and then the program has one team whether it wants to or not.
Coach Bill's advice for the parent who says they have never coached: go to coachingyouthhoops.com, download it, follow the steps.
On the club side, Coach Bill tries never to make the cut a dead end. Didn't make the A team? Come to our camps. Play in our three on three. Keep the skills moving. And plenty of rec, city, and church leagues run equal playing time, which is its own valid path.
Pick the room based on the kid's age. Start positive, be specific about the gaps, give a 364 day plan, and end on why this level is a better fit. Assume the message will get scrambled on the way home, so put the parent in the conversation. And keep a door open somewhere so the cut is not the end of the sport.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesWho is in the roomThe Drew storyThe script for delivering a cutPut them in the right heatThe question every cut kid asksWhen cutting is a math problemFind a pathway for everybodyCoach's takeaway
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Ep 375 How GameChanger Is Building for the Future of Basketball
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 • Duration 44:31
https://gc.com/basketball
https://nukehydration.com/
Youth basketball has become more connected, more measurable and more shareable and GameChanger is rebuilding its basketball experience around that shift. The new update combines personalized player profiles, automatic highlights, flexible stat tracking and ball-tracking video with tools that make life easier for coaches and club directors. It’s an attempt to bring the video, data and storytelling once reserved for higher levels of basketball down to the youth game.
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Ep 374 Should Your Kid Be Playing Up, or Is That Just You?
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 • Duration 14:42
Playing at the Proper Level
Links mentioned in this episode
TeachHoops.com
NukeHydration.com — clean sports hydration, no additives, low sugar. Coach Bill is drinking the Lime Time. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off
CoachingYouthHoops.com — practice plans and everything else you need as a youth coach
Should Your Kid Be Playing Up, or Is That Just You?
Talent, maturity, and the parent in the parking lot.
Tryout season continues, and this one is about the hardest call a youth coach makes: getting kids at the right level. How you decide, and how you tell the parents.
(Also settled early: nobody has ever called Coach Collins "Coach Steve." Coach Bill's fourth grade girls have been debating whether to call him Bill, Coach Bill, or William, and at least one of them knows his full name.)
Coach Bill lays out the case. You have a team that can do X, Y, and Z. You have kids above that and kids below it. Then you have the tweener: too good for her grade, maybe not good enough for the level above. Do you push her up for the challenge? Can she handle no longer being the best player in the gym, when one level down she would be?
Coach Collins refuses to put it in a box, and Coach Bill gives him a hard time about it the whole episode.
His frame is academic. If your kid is genuinely ready for calculus, they should take calculus, and the parent usually knows that better than anyone. But you do not want to push so hard that failure follows, and you do not want them so overwhelmed they quit and go play volleyball.
The line he borrows: you never want to be the best kid in the gym. Caitlin Clark was playing against much older boys young, and her parents knew she wanted that. That is a real thing. It is also rare.
At younger ages, Coach Collins leans toward keeping kids with their age group. His reasoning is blunt: nobody is scouting a fourth grade girls game on a Tuesday.
Coach Bill's counter is that it does not matter whether scouts are there. Parents believe they are. That belief is where all the angst comes from, and a coach has to manage the belief whether or not it is grounded.
Coach Bill's example is not hypothetical. A dad pulls his daughter out thirty minutes into the very first practice, says nothing beyond "we gotta go," then calls later to say she deserves to be played up. So you play her up. And she is not ready, or she is simply not as good as the other girls.
Now what happens to the kid?
Coach Collins' most useful point. A kid can be physically good enough to play up and nowhere near ready socially. A fourth grader with sixth grade talent and third grade maturity probably belongs with the fourth graders, even though she is better than all of them.
That is also why he will not hand over a formula. He has made good and bad calls on this with fifteen to eighteen year olds, and he does not always get it right.
Every parent thinks their kid is special. Coach Collins' test is behavior, not talent: is your kid going outside and shooting for three hours on their own? The truly obsessed ones are already obsessed in fourth and fifth grade. Nobody has to make them do it.
His own example is his son, whose obsession was never jumpers. It was building things. YouTube channel, trick shot videos before trick shots were a thing, out back all day. So he fed that monster instead. The question a parent has to answer honestly is whether the drive is coming from the kid or from them.
Coach Bill's addition: at that age the parent pushing is real and common, and a coach cannot do anything about it. All you can do is put the kid in the right spot.
"I'm worried about all the kids. You're worried about one kid. So I understand what you're saying, and I hear you."
Coach Bill's amendment: they are worried about two kids. Their own, and the kid they think theirs is better than.
Publish the rubric. Same point as the tryout structure episode. If you communicate how the team is built before tryouts, you take the mystery out of the placement.
Be timely. Everyone is on pins and needles waiting for the roster. Do not let it drag.
Remember the kids feel it. They pick up the stress from their parents and from the situation, and depending on age they may have no way to say so.
Know that parents cannot see the moving parts. "Why can't my kid be on so and so's team" sets off a domino effect across every roster in the program.
The tough conversations. Cutting a kid, and moving a kid down from the top team.
There is no formula. Weigh the skill against the maturity, watch what the kid does on their own time, publish your rubric, communicate fast, and accept that you will not get every one of these right.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
TitleAlternate titlesSubtitleShow NotesThe tweener problemWhy there is no ruleThe real life situationReady is not only about skillHow to tell whether your kid is actually that kidCoach Collins' line for parentsWhat coaches can controlComing nextCoach's takeaway
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Ep 373 Is Your Kid Actually Hydrated, or Just Drinking Something Blue?
Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Duration 36:32
TeachHoops.com
NukeHydration.com — ready to drink clean sports hydration, shipped nationwide. Sample pack (two Lime Time, two OG Orange, plus extras) is $19.99 with shipping included. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off, sample pack included
CoachingYouthHoops.com
Is Your Kid Actually Hydrated, or Just Drinking Something Blue?
The couple taking on Gatorade from a Mississippi warehouse.
Coach Bill sits down with Marty and Lesley Frascogna, the husband and wife team behind Nuke Hydration and a sponsor of this show, which he discloses right up front. They found each other through a LinkedIn conversation, and Coach Bill's interest was simple: he was tired of picking up bottles full of dye and would never hand that to his own team.
Lesley owns this part of the story. Gatorade, Gatorade Zero, a stretch where their son drank Prime because he thought it was cool, and some Propel because, as she puts it, in her brain clear must mean healthy. The tipping point was standing over a grocery cart loaded with Gatorade she was about to hand out to a house full of kids and feeling guilty about it.
Marty's side was the Ironman. He came to triathlon with no background in it, and when his nutrition coach asked what he was actually putting in his body, the answer turned out to be not much: not enough sodium, not even enough fluid ounces. And he had played college sports. He thought he knew this stuff.
This is the running argument of the episode. Coach Bill had heard the Ironman version. Marty, an attorney for eighteen years and self described steady hand, says the Ironman was the setup, but Lesley took it and ran. She is the impulsive one. She had also been a florist for twenty four years and wanted a career change, and so did he.
Her one non negotiable from the start: it had to be ready to drink. Not a powder. A bottle a kid can hold. Marty asked about powder and she shut it down immediately. She was calling formulators the next day.
For the record, Coach Bill and Lesley referred to Marty as an Ironman six times before he brought it up himself. He wanted that noted.
Market research pointed to a real gap. Hydration packets are everywhere. Ready to drink is essentially Coke's Powerade and Pepsi's Gatorade and not much else.
When they walked into Whole Foods looking for the clean alternative that surely already existed, they found a couple of options with two problems. First, no cool factor. Their own kids laughed and said they would not walk around with it. Second, natural flavors. Lesley's view is that natural flavors are not really natural. They start from a natural product and then get heavily processed in a lab. That was a line they would not cross, and she notes that avoiding natural flavors is becoming a real consumer trend this year.
Their answer to what parents miss when they think hydration means water: most youth athletes are not drinking enough to begin with, they are not getting enough sodium, and they are short on electrolytes. Sweat goes out, salt has to go back in.
Coach Bill can vouch. He carries a large bottle, drinks three a day, and still came back dehydrated on routine bloodwork. Volume alone does not do it.
Marty's favorite frame, from his training: carbs are the gas, hydration is the oil. If you burn all the oil, you cannot retroactively pour it back in. The engine is already gone. He has actually blown an engine by skipping an oil change, so the metaphor stuck.
On timing, both agree with what Coach Bill preaches to his team. Hydration starts the night before. If your game is Saturday and you start Saturday morning, you are already behind.
This one they did not plan to collect. A high school team they work with gave players a Nuke two hours before a game, water alongside it, and another Nuke at halftime, in Mississippi heat. Not one cramp on the team. The coach said it was the first time in school history. They watched the opposing team go down every few minutes on TV, on a weekend when a player elsewhere died on the field from heat.
They have now seen it repeat for three straight weeks. They are also hearing from women who drink one a day and say it keeps their headaches and migraines away. A study with Mississippi State's kinesiology department on Nuke specifically is in the works, which should say whether the credit belongs to the coconut water, the Celtic sea salt, or the combination.
Coconut water as the base, for hydration and the added benefits, and because almost nothing else in the category uses it.
Celtic sea salt, not table salt. Lesley says the internal debate over which salt to use was close to infinite. They wanted something from the ocean, with the trace minerals that come with it.
Lemon and lime juice for actual flavor in the original Lime Time.
Five grams of added organic cane sugar. They deliberately did not go to zero. A little sugar helps hydration, carries flavor, and gives kids a small burst of energy. It is a fraction of what is in a conventional sports drink.
Stevia and monk fruit to balance the lemon and lime without piling on more sugar and calories.
They said no to extra vitamin C, extra vitamins, extra magnesium. Not necessary. The moment that defined the whole company came at the formulation lab, six months in, when they finally loved the taste and spotted an ingredient on the panel they did not recognize. They asked what it did. The answer was mostly color, with a little magnesium they did not need. Lesley's response: get rid of it.
Two halves. Nothing Unnecessary, and Keep the Energy. No, there is no caffeine in it, which is the first thing most people ask.
Nothing Unnecessary has become the filter for the whole company, not just the formula. Lesley catches herself planning a big elaborate activation in Nashville and then pulls it back to something simple that is all about the drink. Keep the Energy is about the daily wins: no sugar spike, no crash, one brick in the wall every day.
The bottle says no guilt. The team pushed back on putting it there. Lesley insisted, at a hundred and ten percent, because of exactly what she felt pushing that Gatorade cart. Mom guilt is everywhere, parents are doing their best, and if one decision can be made easier and feel good, that is the job. Coach Bill's version is the same from the coach's side: he does not feel bad handing it to his players.
Neither of them is a nutritionist and they say so. Lesley's honest answer is that the two go hand in hand and nobody is perfect. There is still junk food in their pantry. But fully hydrated and badly fueled is a moot point.
Coach Bill's version of this was handing out nutrition bars before early morning games, because so many kids skip breakfast and you can see how that game is going to go before it starts. Lesley's broader point: it is not just the kids who need educating. She did not understand the difference hydration actually makes until Marty started training. She thought eight glasses of water was just the recommendation so you do not die.
The second husband and wife pair to appear on the show, and Marty's first question was whether the first couple is still married.
They describe a good yin and yang: Lesley is passionate, impulsive, burn the boats, we are doing this now. Marty wants the long term plan and the strategy thought all the way through. The bigger problem is that they are never off. Date night turns into a work meeting. Lesley, diagnosed with ADHD at thirty six, needs the schedule to stay fluid, which frustrates a man who would like a schedule set in stone. They also have a warehouse and still fight over which corner of the house to work in.
Their kids, Lesley jokes, would like mom and dad to go back to their real jobs.
Two flavors now: the original Lime Time and the just launched OG Orange. A third is coming in the spring as a collaboration with someone they are not naming yet.
Direct to consumer at nukehydration.com, with a new site launching in about three weeks. Lesley ships it herself, nationwide, with handwritten notes. They are in independent grocery stores around Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham and expanding.
The growth they are proudest of is schools. Athletic directors are getting real pressure from parents asking for healthier options, and "we have always given the team Gatorade" is no longer an answer. Next goal: working directly with coaches to set up team shops so parents can buy straight from them.
And for anyone who does not want to commit to a full case, the $19.99 sample pack includes two of each flavor with shipping, and YOUTHHOOPS15 works on it.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
SubtitleShow NotesBefore Nuke, they were a Gatorade familyWho actually had the ideaThe void they foundHydration is not the same as waterThe Mississippi football data pointWhat is in it, and what is notWhat NUKE actually stands forThe two words Lesley fought forNutrition and hydration togetherWorking together, married eighteen yearsWhere to get it
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Ep 372 What Is a Parent Actually Supposed to Do During Tryouts?
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 • Duration 14:38
Parents' Role in Tryouts
Links mentioned in this episode
TeachHoops.com
CoachingYouthHoops.com — print and go practice plans built from years of coaching, not ChatGPT
NukeHydration.com — clean sports drink for kids and coaches, started by a couple out of Mississippi. Use code YOUTHHOOPS15 for 15% off any order
What Is a Parent Actually Supposed to Do During Tryouts?
Shoes, snacks, and getting out of the way.
Fall basketball season is kicking off, tryouts are here, and Coach Bill wants to talk about the person nobody writes a rubric for: the parent. Two sides to it. What coaches should be teaching parents to expect, and how parents can actually support their kid through a stressful week.
Coach Collins goes first, and his list is unglamorous on purpose. We are dealing with kids, not young adults who can drive themselves. So the number one parent responsibility is logistics: shoes that fit, a ball in the bag, properly hydrated, everything they need, and there on time. That is most of the job.
Tryouts can be genuinely stressful for a family, especially when nobody knows whether the kid makes a team at all, or which team. Coach Collins' advice is to drop both the coach hat and the parent evaluator hat and just be the supportive person in the front seat. When they get in the car, ask how it went. Ask what was fun today. Not "how'd you do" and not "were any of the other kids good." That one shift is what makes a kid want to come back next year.
Coach Bill's biggest coaching side point: share your tryout rubric with parents before tryouts. How are teams being picked? If there is an A and a B team, what actually separates them? If there are cuts, why would a kid get cut? Say it plainly and say it early, and you avoid most of the fallout after the list goes up.
He also names the thing everyone has seen: the leagues where the three dad coaches end up with the top three kids, automatically, because of how the structure works.
Coach Collins frames it as a triangle. Parent to kid, parent to coach, coach to kid. When one leg of that breaks down, what the kid heard and what the parent tells the kid stop matching what the coach actually said, and that is where the problems come from. Ten spots, here is what we are looking for, here is what competitive means. Say it out loud to all three points of the triangle.
Coach Bill lays out two scenarios worth walking through with your kid ahead of time.
Your kid makes it and their best friend does not. One kid is thrilled, the other is crushed. Teach yours how to handle that, because the bragging happens more often than you would think.
Your kid does not make the team you both expected. Talk through what it actually means, which is not much. A career is not over in fifth grade because someone did not make the A team.
Coach Collins agrees and adds the frame: life is about disappointment, and you learn more from failure than success. But he pushes it one step further.
His favorite parenting lesson from this episode. Before tryouts, have your athlete go ask the coach what they are looking for. After tryouts, have them ask what to work on for next year.
The story behind it: his son Drew, in fourth or fifth grade, got in the car furious about a book report. Coach Collins pulled over about three hundred yards from the school and told him to go back in and talk to his teacher, who was still there. The teacher had a great conversation with him. Coach Collins believes that single moment taught Drew more than the rest of that school year, and that it made him an advocate for himself through his entire education.
Coach Bill's addition is that this is really about teaching a kid how to speak respectfully to an adult in authority, which outlasts basketball by decades. And it is the kid who should do the asking, not the parent. Both agree a fourth grader is old enough. Coach Bill says he would love it if one of his fourth grade girls walked up and asked him to explain.
As Coach Collins puts it, your job is to get them ready to leave the nest, not to stay in it. Nobody wants their thirty five year old kid still hanging around the house.
Coaches: publish the rubric before tryouts, not after. Parents: handle the logistics, ask what was fun instead of how they did, and send your kid to talk to the coach themselves.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
TitleSubtitleShow NotesStart with the boring stuffThen take off the coach hatThe communication triangleRehearse the hard conversations before they happenTeach the kid to advocate for themselvesCoach's takeaway
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Ep 371 How Do You Run a Tryout That Actually Gets You the Right Team?
Thursday, September 17, 2026 • Duration 20:30
https://teachhoops.com/
Tryout season is here, and Coach Collins frames the stakes right away: the two most important days for a high school coach are the day you pick your staff and the day you pick your team. At the youth level, the day you pick your team is just as big. Tryouts matter.
Youth basketball has several flavors and you do not always get to choose. Sometimes you are assigned players by area. Sometimes it is a snake draft. Sometimes it is a club tryout where you evaluate and then pick. And sometimes you are the one running the tryout, sometimes you are only evaluating, and sometimes you are stuck doing both. Coach Collins has done all three and says the variables change your approach every time.
There are also league quirks worth knowing. In Little League, Coach Collins' son Drew was slotted at a certain round and Coach Collins forfeited that round's pick to keep him. His own father worked the same system a generation earlier, drafting the other best player in each of his sons' classes as an assistant coach, and won the city three or four years running. Coach Bill had a similar situation with a set of very good twins that cost him two picks.
Will the kid actually show up? This is Coach Bill's first filter, and he has been burned. He once used a first round pick on a soccer player who was the best athlete on the floor and made maybe one game all season. Lose that pick and your number one is effectively the tenth best player. He now asks parents directly what other sports the kid is playing in season, and which one is the priority. Some boards he has served on added it to the registration questions.
Coach Collins adds the nuance: showing up because a parent is busy is a different problem than showing up because soccer is at the same time. And there is more variability with younger kids. A nine year old might want to be at basketball practice, but if the parents already committed to soccer, that kid is going to soccer. By seventeen, the player gets more say.
Effort, focus, and attention to detail. Coach Collins tells the Drake Baldwin story. Baldwin, now the starting catcher for the Braves, did not have a great tryout at nine years old and slid to the second or third round. Coach Collins picked him because he saw love for the game and effort where other coaches saw the miss. He was Baldwin's first Little League coach, and Baldwin's mom still has that first over the fence home run ball.
The point: effort is hard to define but you know it when you see it, and it looks different in a seven year old than a thirteen year old. As Coach Collins puts it, Caitlin Clark was probably pretty focused at four. Personalities do not change that much.
The parent factor. Coach Bill is blunt that plenty of coaches draft for the parents. If you know a parent is going to be difficult all season, that is a real consideration when you are volunteering your time. It has nothing to do with the kid, and it is still a factor.
Fit with your style. Go in knowing what you value. If you love ball handlers, look for ball handlers. If you are defensive minded, find kids who play that way. The free rubric on the site lets you check boxes and weight what matters most to you, which keeps you organized instead of reacting to whoever scored last.
Keep everybody moving. Same rule as practice. In a ninety minute to two hour window, there should always be something happening.
Chunk the group. Coach Bill sometimes has a couple hundred kids in one gym. Start everyone together, then split into rough A, B, and C groups so kids are competing against similar ability. Then move kids between courts to test them: try this one up on court one and see how it looks.
A little gamesmanship. Coach Collins will sometimes put the obvious top one or two players down on the B or C floor, because he already knows they are on the team and he needs his eyes on the ten kids he is unsure about. He never does it to a single kid, always three or four, so nobody reads too much into it. Coach Bill's warning: watch the parents' reaction.
Numbers and pins. Number every kid on the way in. Use running bibs or pinned numbers like a cross country meet, and be warned, getting them pinned on and keeping them on is one of the hardest logistical parts of the day. Run two sets of numbers so one group is getting pinned while the group on the floor is already running. And make absolutely sure the roster matches the numbers, so number ten on the floor is the kid every coach thinks it is. Mix ups happen.
Get volunteers. The more helping hands on the logistics, the better the whole day goes.
Bring in independent evaluators. This is the piece both coaches feel strongest about. Use someone with no kid in that grade: a parent from an older grade, a high school player, anyone with experience and no stake. Their job is to rank the players one through X, and their ranking is the final word. Coaches do their own ranking alongside, which gives them their draft board, but the independent evaluator settles the disputes and decides who lands on the A team versus the B team. Coach Bill's program used that split for their American and National teams. Coach Collins' feeder program did the same thing for one reason: take the parents out of it. Better for everybody.
Watch, do not run, if you can. If you get to pick your team, hand the whistle to someone else. Coach Collins compares running a tryout while evaluating to teaching a class and grading the test at the same time. You cannot do both well.
Plan for the kids who cannot make it. Someone is always sick, at football, or just back to school. Decide in advance whether you offer a makeup day, and consider running more than one date. Coach Collins' youth theater program runs four days across a couple of weeks for exactly this reason.
What to do when you have to cut kids, and how to handle it well.
Decide what you value before you walk in, find out who is actually going to show up, put an independent evaluator in charge of the rankings, and keep the gym moving. The free tryout and evaluation package on the site gives you the practice plan and the rubric to do all of it.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
First, know what kind of tryout you are inWhat the coaches look forHow to run the tryout itselfComing next weekCoach's takeaway
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Ep 370 Should Saturday's Result Change Monday's Practice Plan?
Tuesday, September 15, 2026 • Duration 16:48
nukehydration.com, or follow along on Instagram @nukehydration.
Use Youthhoops15 for 15% off
TeachHoops.com
CoachingYouthHoops.com — practice plans, season resources, and the free tryout structure guide under the Free Resources menu
HeySami.com — new text based youth sports organization tool (Sami with an i)
The Hey Sami Podcast — available on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you listen
Questions for Hey Sami: hey@heysami.com
Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook Group — search "Coaching Youth Hoops" on Facebook
Show Notes
The guys open by marveling that they are somewhere in the mid three hundreds on episode count, nearly four years of talking about youth basketball, and the Facebook group still produces questions nobody has asked before. Today's is one of those: do you adjust your practice plan based on how the last game went? You won big Saturday, or you got run out of the gym. Does Monday look different?
That question assumes two things, as Coach Bill points out. One, that you have a practice plan at all. Two, that your plans are organized and follow a progression across the season. If either is missing, you know where to go.
Thirty plus years at the high school level and Coach Collins is always adjusting, but not off the scoreboard. He adjusts off what the team did well and did not do well. In January it might be that they are not shooting, not getting to the help line, not hedging screens. Wins and losses do not drive that. Performance does.
The mechanic is simple reallocation. If something is going well it earns less time, and those minutes move somewhere else. Take ten minutes off out of bounds work and move it to offensive floor balance. He compares it directly to teaching: if the class has quadratics down in one area but not another, you stop running examples on the part they own and spend the time on the part they do not.
He also plants a warning flag. Go too far down this road and you are the dog chasing its tail. If every week is a reaction to the last thing that went wrong, you spend the season zigzagging and you are not going to like where you end up.
Coach Bill's biggest change in the last two months was not triggered by a result. He realized he was holding his players back. He had decided a fifth grader should be able to do X and was capping them there, when what he was really capping was their basketball IQ. So he sped practice up significantly and started teaching advanced skills they genuinely struggle with. Pushing through the barrier instead of playing it safe.
His week to week adjustments are smaller and follow the same "what did we do well" logic. After a recent tournament the problem was not ball handling, it was organization: kids clumping, not getting into the right spots in their sets against zone. So this week is more time on sets and more controlled five on five, less on ball handling. He is also asking a lot of them right now, running full court zone pressure out of a one two two and falling back into a three two, sometimes man. That kind of work requires a different type of practice than normal skills training.
The start of practice does not move. Coach Bill's new fourth grade girls team does the same opening every single time: ball handling, then their layup drill. He showed up late to the gym recently and they had run the first ten minutes themselves. When he walked in they told him they had their fifty layups in and were ready to go. Fourth graders. That routine is worth protecting.
The original question asked whether the adjustment should be more reps and volume or deliberate, slowed down instruction. The answer is that it depends on what you are fixing, and the real skill is pacing. Coach Bill's kids hate when he slows things down, because slowing down means more talking from him, whiteboard visuals, and a lot of questions. Other days he speeds practice up on purpose to put them under pressure. Practice is not one tempo, and knowing when to speed up, when to slow down, when to pile on reps, and when to pull back is a nuance you learn over time.
Coach Collins goes in structured every time. He also estimates that roughly half the time the structure gets thrown out in the first five minutes, because Johnny had a bad day at school and Susie has something going on. Forty years and he never walked into a classroom without an idea, but he was always ready to pivot on a dime. You need the outline. You are allowed to deviate from it.
That is exactly why having more planned than you can use matters, and how Coaching Youth Hoops started in the first place: Coach Bill had years of elaborate practice plans, other coaches laughed at how detailed they were, and Coach Collins told him to package them up so other youth coaches could use them. Pull a piece from practice three, a piece from practice seven, a piece from practice nine, and build what today's team actually needs.
The guys added a future episode to the list: practice plan structure for a ninety minute practice and what that should actually look like. There is a science to it.
Do not adjust to the scoreboard. Adjust to what you saw. Protect the routine at the start, reallocate minutes from strengths to weaknesses, vary the tempo based on what you are fixing, and always walk in with more than you can possibly run.
And leave a review, share the show with a coaching friend, and bring your questions to the Facebook group.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
Coach Collins: adjust off performance, not resultsCoach Bill: the adjustment that had nothing to do with the scoreThe part that never changesVolume or slow it down?Structure first, then pivotComing soonCoach's takeaway
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