HoopTalk – Mindset

In the world of basketball, it’s easy to get caught up in the grind of quantity over quality. I once believed that was the golden ticket to success—pour in the hours on skills, and improvement would follow like clockwork. And sure, that approach carries you far, especially in your early years. But when I stepped onto the college court, reality hit hard. There is a fine balance; it’s not what you do, but how you do it.

My coach used to say during the off-season, “Every team is lifting, running sprints, and playing pickup, so how will we differentiate ourselves from everybody else?” Differentiating is exactly what we did. It started with our mindsets, every day focusing on what is best for the team over the individual. We viewed each other as equals; no individual was bigger than the team. In our workouts, sprints, and practice, we did hard things together, and that brought us closer together. Seeing each other’s vulnerability made us unbreakable, and finally, we recognized in practice settings our value is ALWAYS the same.

Another thing my coach used to preach was adversity response: how do you respond to adversity, and on top of that, how do you deal with difficult conversations that need to be had?

Relationships, everything starts and ends there. When having difficult conversations, the only thing that matters is the bond or relationship created up until that moment. If the relationship was positive, the conversation will be positive and vice versa. The relationship must be cemented in trust, or else that conversation holds no weight. Trust is the bedrock of relationships. The reality is that when you have a strong relationship, a difficult conversation no longer becomes difficult. It becomes accountability. Which happened to be our identity during our championship run in 2022-2023 (28-2, LEC Champions, Sweet Sixteen). So, at the college level, basketball becomes less about individual skill and more about collective mindset.