Smithville takes a new approach - a comprehensive rebuilding program from Coach Bennaka

 Here's Coach Bennaka' plan to bring success back to the Smithville MO program.  It was well worth the couple of hours of analysis for his team to get this response.  Read it twice and then go DO IT.

Gramps,

First, again, I really appreciate all of the time you put into analyzing our team and for all of the work that you do on the blog. It has been incredibly useful for me as a coach. It's also comforting to know there's at least a shred of evidence from an independent perspective to show that we are indeed improving as a program over a long period of time. It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day process and it can be difficult to take a step back and remind ourselves about how far we've come together. On to the questions...

Gramps: What are you doing to change the culture?  

Coach Bennaka:

For us, and I use that term specifically, it's about the understanding that it takes an army of people to make a program work. When I first got this job, I wrote a little bit about what "US" means to me and it can give you a bit of an idea about what the foundation of our culture is based on. We're certainly not perfect at anything that we do but we do try and focus on relationships. Here's some more background info on our team as well.

To set the culture, my best piece of advice for any new coach is to hire a great staff. Above anything else, get that right. It has been the most important piece of the puzzle thus far. Our staff is incredibly close, compliments each other's strengths and weaknesses and are not afraid to voice our opinions. Good times, bad times; we've been together and have supported one another this mimics exactly what we ask of our players. We're also

Our school and town have an incredible culture but I think one thing that we are intentional about is ensuring that our schedules make it so we encourage our athletes to be involved with as much as they can. In the summertime, Coach Ambroson (football), Coach Speer (baseball), Coach Reed (soccer) and the rest of the coaches, not only are those guys great friends but we make an effort to not schedule on top of one another. All of us grew up as multi-sport athletes. What's good for their athletes is good for our athletes. We're all rowing the same boat and that also means that we're all fixtures at one another's games. There's nothing I enjoy more right now than going to a Friday Night Football game or a soccer game and seeing our kids play and seeing our student section going nuts.

The last tangible piece of culture advice that we were intentional about was in our equipment purchasing process. We've really focused with our fundraising efforts and through that we've been able to purchase gear for our guys from shooting shirts, sweats, new bags, etc. As a player, it always drove me crazy that the bottom levels weren't getting as much as the top guys or weren't getting the quality stuff. That's not happening here. Our bench C-team guy is walking around with the same brand-new Nike sweats and backpack as our 1st team, all-district guy. Our 7th and 8th graders in fact have the same "US" shooting shirt as our Varsity program wears. It's a small gesture but all of these kids bring something to our program, and we feel like they should be valued the same whenever financially possible.

 Gramps: What aspects of your program are making a difference in individual skills and team play? 

Coach Bennaka:

Without a doubt, our biggest shift in philosophy from the time that I have taken over has been our focus on what everyone's new focus has been and that is to shoot more 3's, shoot more layups, shoot more free throws. Our first major purchase as a program was a brand-new Dr. Dish shooting machine. Our goal at practice every day is to have every single player shoot 100 threes and as best we can, we're trying to stat those and hold our guys accountable for those numbers. Add those numbers up and when you're shooting 2,000+ threes collectively as a group every day, it adds up.

When you shoot as many threes as we do though, rebounding becomes incredibly important. You're going to miss more. So our next focus in terms of what we do at practice is the ability to rebound and what angles to take on our rebounds depending on where the shot comes from. I thought one of the more impressive accomplishments that we had last season was the fact that we only have one player over 6'3--most of our guys are in that 5'10-6'1 range--and yet we still outrebounded our opponents by a pretty significant margin.

This year, with our depth, our focus will be to play a little bit faster in transition, getting to the rim more, more "paint touch" 3's and be more selective with our shot selection. Passing up a good shot for a great shot. The tangible change in practice this year will just simply be to play more 5 on 5. We're in Year 3 of our offensive system and so less teaching will be required but the fine tuning of the offense itself and so we're looking forward to that.

Gramps: Do you set goals with the team?  

Coach Bennaka:

This is a funny topic for me. I'm as big of a "process" guy as anyone. Our goal is to get incrementally better every single day, to have a good attitude, prepare them to be productive citizens in life, prepare them to be great fathers and husbands and all of those are extremely important to me and they are all more important than basketball and that is all stuff we talk about with our kids all of the time but in my opinion, the pendulum has swung a little bit too far in terms of coaches being unwilling to talk about the importance of actually winning games so my answer to you is absolutely. Our goal is to win a district title, our goal is to win a conference title, we want to win the Savannah, Cameron and LeBlond tournament, we want to beat our Highway 92 rivals in Kearney and Platte County. Those games and those goals matter to us. We put in an insane amount of work and have for a very long time. The parents who spent countless weekends as their kids growing up driving them to practices. The bus drivers who are spending their evenings with us, making a few extra bucks instead of being at home with their family. The student section who gives up their night to come see us play. All of these people have invested something into our program and we're trying to win games for all of those people. Loved the Jordan doc last spring but Larry Legend said it best, "While we're here, we might as well win..." and that's where I stand with it. We can have our cake (process-oriented, day-to-day grind) and eat it too (win).

We also certainly set individual goals. 3P%, how many paint touches we get as a team in each game, what our rim rate % is and we're very open with our stats. We post all of our stats online, there's no hiding in our program which enables us to say what we say is "taking the emotion out of the evaluation". A good shooter is only as good as his stats over the long term . We try and use our stats to develop individual plans about how to utilize each kid--if he's a great corner 3 shooter--here's an idea--get as many offensive possessions with him in the corner as possible.

We have very high expectations this year. With the likelihood of our football players being gone for a significant portion of the first month (November), it might take us until January to really get our legs under us and hit our stride but we really believe in this group. They've been raised right. They work hard on and off the court. They are extremely competitive. They are extremely close as friends and they are extremely coachable. We have all the ingredients to put together a season to remember and mostly our job this season as coaches will be to get out of their way and let them cook.

 That was probably *way* more than what you were looking for but once I find someone to get excited about talking hoops with, it's hard for me to stop. And I dabble in writing as well so I'm a bit long-worded in my responses. Ha! Hope you enjoy it all! 

 Great talking with you!

 Eric Bennaka

Smithville  MO head basketball coach