Slappin' Glass sits down this week with National Champion Head Coach of Hope College WBB, Brian Morehouse. Coach Morehouse brings almost three decades of Head Coaching experience to the podcast and dives into his thoughts on becoming more of an offensive minded vs. defensive minded coach, leveraging drives, the benefits of great pace, and discusses real-life career decisions and failure recovery during an entertaining edition of "Start, Sub, or Sit?!"
To join coaches and championship winning staffs from the NBA to High School from over 60 different countries taking advantage of an SG Plus membership, visit HERE!
Slappin' Glass sits down this week with National Champion Head Coach of Hope College WBB, Brian Morehouse. Coach Morehouse brings almost three decades of Head Coaching experience to the podcast and dives into his thoughts on becoming more of an offensive minded vs. defensive minded coach, leveraging drives, the benefits of great pace, and discusses real-life career decisions and failure recovery during an entertaining edition of "Start, Sub, or Sit?!"
To join coaches and championship winning staffs from the NBA to High School from over 60 different countries taking advantage of an SG Plus membership, visit HERE!
It is impossibly to be anxious, and have gratitude at the same time. It is impossible. So we are going to try to live our lives when we start to go what we call our good brain versus our bad brain. Somebody told me the other day we got 66,000 thoughts on average in our brain every day. 85% of them are negative. That's a lot to undo. So how do we attack our bad brain winning? A nd that's where you get to the failure recovery piece. That's when you get to, how do we talk to ourself? How do we live a life of gratitude that will undermine all that negativity and that anxiety?
Patrick:Hi, I'm Dan Cracourian and.
Dan:I'm Patrick Carney and welcome to Slapping Glass Exploring basketball's best ideas, strategies and coaches from around the world. Today, we're excited to welcome national champion head coach of Hope Women's Basketball, brian Morehouse. Coach Morehouse is here today to discuss shifting from a more defensive to offensive mindset as a coach and being disruptive in both leveraging drives on offense and we talk failure recovery and career longevity during the always fun start, sub or sit. A fun announcement on the podcast this week, as we'll be adding a ton of new and original material to Slapping Glass Plus this year in the way of practical skill development and ecological drill design with our friends at the ProLane. Here's more from them about the project.
The Pro Lane:Hi, I'm Jake Rolston and I'm Drew Dunlop from the ProLane. We are excited to announce our partnership with Slapping Glass to bring you our modern game truth series over the next year.
Patrick:This series will dive into what really happens in games from identifying skills and concepts and film study to actionable insights that can be applied to your own practices and sessions.
The Pro Lane:Stay tuned on us as we guide you from theory to practice, and practice the game day results. For more information, sign up for the Sunday morning newsletter or visit SlappingGlasscom.
Dan:And now please enjoy our conversation with coach Brian Morehouse. Coach excited to be with you here today. Thank you so much for making the time.
Brian Morehouse:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of your podcast. I've gathered and gained so much from listening to a lot of the folks that you've had on. The woman from Columbia is unbelievable and I don't use names because I forget things. That's horrible, but like she's so good. The defensive guy from Cincinnati I was like we do that, we do that, we do that. Why am I not doing that? Every time you guys have a podcast comes out, I guarantee you, within 25 minutes, courtney Lest, my associate head coach, will text me and she'll be like did you listen? Did you get this? This is really good. We can use this Job. Well done. I'd expect nothing more from a couple of great D3 guys who are highly intelligent. Thank you, appreciate that, coach.
Dan:And shout out to Meg Griffith and Wes Miller for those podcasts you were thinking of. We appreciate that. We're really excited to have you on as well. You've had a ton of success over a long career, so we're going to dive into a lot of that stuff today. And we wanted to start with this is something you mentioned to us off air being a defensive coach. But then more recently, your teams have tended to be more offensive minded. Not that you're not good on defense as well We've checked the stats, You're good there too but for you as a coach and as a staff, some of the benefits of becoming a great offensive team and last year I believe you were the most efficient offensive team in Division 3 Women's Basketball and just all that goes with it. So we'll start there kind of broadly on that transition for you from defense to offense and what it's meant.
Brian Morehouse:First of all, I think it gives you a greater degree of being able to not be perfect.
Brian Morehouse:It gives you greater latitude, right?
Brian Morehouse:So if I know that there's a good chance that we can throw 80 up, then every possession on the defensive end has maybe a little bit less anxiety filled with it and we can try different things, we can gamble a little bit more, we can make adjustments, as opposed to, like I felt like earlier in my career, we would just grind games to a pulp and we won a lot of them.
Brian Morehouse:But I also thought it opened us up to maybe be upset in the national tournament and things like that, because you run into better and better offenses and you can't necessarily out defend sometimes in those situations. So you got to be able to score the ball more. And then, probably the biggest reason that I did it is because I allowed myself to continue to grow as a coach and I think I've watched enough coaches sort of die as they get older because they're so stubborn that I think that it really is something that I wanted to be forward thinking on, where I was constantly evolving as a coach, whether that be defensively, offensively, culturally that I didn't want to just say, well, I've got this figured out.
Dan:Where was it within your offense that you evolved?
Brian Morehouse:We evolved with pace because we play incredibly fast on the defensive end, we're on the line up the line, we're denying, we're fronting posts. Some people are like we want to force a tough shot. We don't even want you to be able to get to the shot, because we want to just be disruptive. I didn't think that our offense was married as well as it should have been to our defensive system, so I tried to marry the two in a better format, as far as pace and also as far as disruptives. Everybody talks about defenses being disruptive. I think that you can be offensively disruptive as well with how you play, how you put people at a disadvantage and how you teach every single day in practice.
Patrick:What were the ways you looked to be offensively disruptive?
Brian Morehouse:I think it started with having our defense lead to offense. I think a lot of times people marry that and then when you say you want to play fast and you play fast defensively, then most people want to marry that into like a transition. We very much wanted to have it be free flowing from defense to offense and not have our players slow down but actually play even faster. So that was a big thing for me. And then I think the other part was just being okay with not having control. I had to give control and ownership to our players and by doing that it freed them up mentally to take more chances. And some people might say make more mistakes. You know what I would say Make more great plays. If there are more possessions in the game, all of a sudden they don't have to feel like the last possession might be the only possession and cost us the game. It frees them up. I think that you can still have a lot of discipline within that concept of playing fast. We want to make sure that we're playing to an advantage on the offensive end.
Brian Morehouse:We stole this from one of your previous podcasts. People like where's Waldo? We're on the search for Waldo, and so we've never termed it that way until this fall. That's another way that we're trying to do it and I think it also makes the game a lot more fun for your players. I mean, we used to run much more of a high low offense. I actually did a presentation on it at the WBCA convention. You know, with low post, high post stuff, putting my best players not wearing, being positionless within our high low offense, and I'm not saying that we've shelved that forever, but for the current players that we have, we've gone to a little bit more wide, open, free flowing game.
Patrick:You mentioned that you wanted to keep growing as a coach and evolving, and then you know your offense was a lot about seeding control. How did you grow as a coach or what did you need to learn and how you were going to coach this new style, your offense to be successful and to be actually able to teach your players how to run it successfully.
Brian Morehouse:It starts with surrounding yourself with people that you trust and then giving people that are highly talented the latitude to go. I have a coaching staff where we have some young coaches on our coaching staff and I allowed them to bring me ideas about pace of play, about how we might attack people, about early three point shots, about shot value and where we didn't want to take shots for we did want to take shots and how we were going to coach that every day in practice. I mean, I'll be honest, sometimes I've had people come to my practice and at the end you know they'll come up to me and they'll be like, hey, thanks for letting us come to your practice, we want to talk to him. And they'll point at my assistant coach because I would let Kyle literally a you're going to take this 20 minutes of practice today and I would shut up or I'd look at Courtney Cuss and I'd be like, hey, can you get us into this? Today I'm going to give you attitude and by allowing that delegation, allowing them to have a voice, it really allowed me to grow. It allowed them to grow. I mean Kyle's now the number one assistant at St Thomas Division, one school in out Minnesota. You left my staff this summer. We should be wanting that to happen as coaches.
Brian Morehouse:When he came to me and he goes hey, would you call coach there? Do you know who that is? I go I know Ruth. I've been coaching against her for 20 years. He's like, yeah, I don't really know what that job is, I'm not even sure it's something I'd be good at. You know, probably a director of basketball operations or something and he goes.
Brian Morehouse:I don't know if I wouldn't want to leave for that, but I just want to continue to grow. I called up Ruth and she said this is what I'm looking for. I go Well, this probably gonna cost me one of my good assistance, but this is what the guy could do, because I let him do it and I think they were, in a huge part, a reason for our growth as becoming more efficient. I think that that is a huge part of my growth and about our team's growth is to not think that you got to do things the same every year. I want to church Heshefsky give a talk and he said at the end of every year I tear it down to the ground all the way and burn it down to the ground, and then I rebuild it because I never want to get caught trying to be the same team next year as I was last year.
Brian Morehouse:He goes now, granted, I'm like 65, 70% of what I'm doing, so that automatically comes back, but he goes. If you don't tear it all the way to the ground and do a true evaluation, you're going to get stuck and then you're going to get behind.
Dan:Going back to some of the thoughts on pace and growth, and you kind of mentioned it, but you were also the most efficient team across almost most statistical categories last year, and sometimes those things in coaches mind hey, if we're going to play fast, we're going to make a lot of mistakes. Potentially we're going to make better plays, like you mentioned too, but then you also were really efficient in all those things and that's just a really interesting topic for me on how you play really fast and also efficient without throwing the ball over the gym.
Brian Morehouse:Discipline is freedom, and I think a lot of young people think that discipline is rules and it's constrictive. It's restrictive. I think just the opposite. When you have discipline and there's good conversation and communication between you and your players and they understand why, it's a good shot. We're a highly academic school. We explain this from a date of standpoint all of what we're talking about Instead of just being like, well, just do what I tell you. They want to know why. So we explain that all to them. And now, all of a sudden, we're playing faster. But they understand that they aren't trying to do 12 things. They've practiced all these things. They've taken shots from these spots Every day.
Brian Morehouse:We're playing and practicing and drilling at the pace that we want them to shoot and play at, so that when they get in the game, they're still playing fast, but they can play efficiently. There's good turnovers and bad turnovers. I think that there are good and bad turnovers. They need to be able to hear you say, when they throw it out of bounds hey, that's what we're trying to do, right, connect on it next time. But like I like your thought with that versus what in the hell are you doing with that? That is not what we do. And so when you start to have that discipline in practice and they can play with that discipline, which equals freedom, now you can become, I think, a more free flowing and you, as a coach, can be like I did my coaching in practice. Let's go and shut up in games.
Patrick:In terms of pace. You mentioned other stats you're talking about with your team, or benchmarks you want them to hit.
Brian Morehouse:Yeah, like we want 18 possessions a quarter, 18 and 19 possessions a quarter. That's really bad. By the way, I think at times last year we were up to 21 possessions a quarter. I think that that's also the idea of meshing your defense to your offense, because we're not in a gap and because we're not just allowing the other team to go 25 seconds on their offense. Now, all of a sudden, you've married your offense to your defense and I've always played a lot of people. You know.
Brian Morehouse:I think if you look at my teams historically, we go to the national championship in 2006 and Mike Strong was the Hall of Fame coach out of Scranton and you know we're playing Southern Maine and they commented that we just kept bringing kids and there wasn't a drop off from when we subbed and we've always tried to do that and I think that that's part recruiting, but it's also part development and it's part trust. You've got to give young kids a chance to go in there and throw it to their grandma in the third row, not yank them after one possession and be like, okay, let's keep playing, let's keep playing. So I think that's where that pace comes from as well. You can't play as fast as we play playing Southern kids.
Patrick:With this pace you're trying to hit? And speaking of rotations, do you have a regimented rotation? Like, after three, four minutes, you're going to start getting new players in to keep the lakes fresh? Keep the pace up.
Brian Morehouse:That's a great question, patrick. So if you watch us play in 2022, when we won the national championship for the third time, you would watch us have players that we'd start the game with and then we would bring five new kids and they actually got a name in our town. They were called the chaos crew, which then got to become its own thing and it just grew and grew and grew. So we're excited for our starters and our player of the year, kennedy Schoenfeld, and the national, you know, our defensive player of the year, bosco, the most outstanding player in the final four, sidney Muller. But then our fans. They get all geeked up when our chaos crew comes in after like three or four minutes and they'd be like, oh, here they come, they're dancing on the sideline. To me they're just wacko. I know my daughter was one of them. I'm like dance less and play more defense, but that allows you to play a lot of people.
Brian Morehouse:Now that versus how we did things last year. We didn't go five for five, we played a tighter rotation, we were a lot younger, we were trying to get our second group more experience, but like we were playing our senior group longer or we would sub one of them after two minutes. Well, they weren't tired, but I needed them ready to come in with my less experienced kids so that we could keep the pace of play up and we wouldn't have this big pause of an ability to score or no leadership on the court. Can't get a defensive stop.
Dan:Especially in the season when everything's kind of messy. How do you view that as a head coach? You mentioned more freedom. You're scrimmaging. The ball is being thrown out of bounds. They're not doing stuff the way you quite want or the pace you want. How much do you stop versus not stop? How do you teach through those things? That was yesterday.
Brian Morehouse:I looked at Courtney Cost, my associate head coach. She looked at me and I looked at her and I go through struggle. There is growth. If you stop it on every time, there's not going to be any growth. That being said, I took our sophomores out for dinner last night. I took them all to the cafeteria. We sat for an hour and just talked Not necessarily about basketball and stuff, but I was all right.
Brian Morehouse:Guys, here's where I need your help. It's messy right now. We're trying to have a great deal of patience, but I need to see the growth and I need to see so. I don't have to stop it. If you say, coach, that's on me, I now know that you understand the concept. You just didn't execute it correctly, as opposed to, I'm just sometimes going. I don't think I have any idea what we're trying to do there by having those kind of communications. They can look at me and say, coach, I got the next one, I got the next one, I know what I did there. Okay, great, we don't have to stop If they give me the blank. Look, okay, we got to teach this better.
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Brian Morehouse:Early. We're going to teach a lot more. My practices are going to be a little bit longer because there's more standing and diving into the details, just so they can have a grasp of the discipline. I'll go back to that the discipline that it takes to then be able to be allowed to play fast. So there's a little bit more explanation. There's a little bit more.
Brian Morehouse:We need you to get by this kid. We need to attack and beat them off the dribble. But you can't just roll it out and say go beat them. They have to have techniques and I'm not going to teach 16 different dribble moves like we're in an and one video. You're going right or you're going left. You got a counter, you got a counter. It's not simplifying, but it's the details in simplifying.
Brian Morehouse:We call it leveraging drives. I don't know where we came up with that. Basically, once you get by someone, they're taught in AAU to go around people. They're taught in high school. Don't touch people on offense, because you never get the call. At the college we have really good officiating On offense. You should want to initiate content. On defense, you should want to be away from content. So we try to teach those concepts because we're trying to break a lot of bad habits of dribbling around people as opposed to I need you to move two inches. If I can get you to move two inches, either with a rip and go or a jab and cross, as soon as I've got that, I've got to drive at the inside part of your thigh hip, whatever you want to call it. Then you've got two choices You're either going to open the gate or you're going to grab me.
Dan:And once I got you there now we're rolling On the leveraging drives and the initiating contact and all that sort of stuff, especially like in transition. I guess is this also something you're really teaching on outlet to point guards or throw ahead passes, where you're trying to find that leverage drive really early and then, I guess, play through those concepts right away.
Brian Morehouse:So when I listened to Meg talk from Columbia on her transition stuff, first of all, she gave me some really good ideas. It sounded like me talking to my team. So if people want to learn, go back and listen to her stuff on transition break because it's fantastic. It's throw it head and attack. Get the ball up. If you can throw the ball 15 feet, throw the ball 15 feet, because that's better than you continuing to dribble. And then we have some rules about how quickly we're going to transition from offense to defense and get to our spots and our corners. And it's positionless. It's not about which corner you run to, it's just about filling spots and it's about how quickly we fill them. And then what we're trying to do when we throw the ball ahead.
Brian Morehouse:Understand that this is phase two of our defense, to offense. And now what are we trying to accomplish there? Everybody has to be on the same page, disciplined. But by being disciplined I mean literally. Our kids can throw the ball with their eyes closed by the middle of our season because they know where people are going to be. And so now they're reading the rim. They're not reading their own defender, they're reading the rim and by reading the rim. They're seeing the defense. By seeing the defense, they know if they've got the shot or they know who's open, and then that simplifies their offense. Now they can play even faster.
Patrick:You mentioned you like to transition positionless. You know we've been talking a lot about your pace and, let's say, when the initial attack isn't there, throw the ball head. They can't really grab the paint. What kind of concepts are you looking to play out of, based upon the spacing of the court and where there are no really set positions, and how you continue to keep the offense flowing in the pace high?
Brian Morehouse:Again. I think that that's where your players we have to train them in small sided basketball. We've got to train them in four on four so that when they get into a five on five, it doesn't matter where they are on the court, they could just read and react offensively. To me, it's a matter of not stopping To your point, patrick. How do you get them to not slow down? So we talk a lot about playing 35 by 50, 50 feet wide, 35 feet long and really trying to attack different quadrants of the court, and by doing that, we've got some different rules to keep the ball moving. For example, if we kick it out, we need a one second decision. You can't catch and hold. I've got video from yesterday. I got to go back to two of my juniors because they got bad habits this summer. You know what in the heck is she doing? She just held the ball literally two and a half seconds. It's horrible.
Brian Morehouse:So what are we doing on a pass out? You're either going to shoot it or you're going to move it. If we grab paint and we throw it to you, we simplify their decision making process. You got a shot right. Let it fly If you're on the court and you don't shoot that well, why do I have you on the court if you're not a good enough offensive player to take that shot? Number one, number two if you don't have a shot, you don't get to drive a drive. We're not going to be running the three man weave of offense where catch drive, catch drive, catch drive that's the easiest thing in the world to guard. So now we're going to catch eye of the rim. We don't have the rim. We're going to move it once, move it twice, reattack a bad close up. It's all about creating difficult close ups for people, in my mind. If they're running at you, you got them. If they're sitting in a gap, we're in trouble.
Patrick:You mentioned the one second decision making outside of five on five or, of course, live game situations. Are there any sort of drills that you like to go to, maybe when your freshmen come in, and how you help teach quick decisions?
Brian Morehouse:To be able to just think and shoot, and think and play at the same time. So, for example, yesterday I was working out with a young lady, so I'd get the pass, I'd get the gun, shoot it back to me or whatever, and I'd pass it to her and as the ball got to be about five feet from her, I'd say shot, drive. Or fake. If I say shot, rise up, let it fly. So now, before they catch it, their feet have to be right, their hands have to be right. They can't premeditate their move because all of a sudden you're like, hey, we're going to work on ripping those right now.
Brian Morehouse:Well, you do that. All they do is they catch their feet, aren't even looking at the rim, their eyes aren't looking at them, they're just ripping those. So that really reps. You know the whole idea of they have to play unplanned so they can't just be like, oh, I'm on the gun, I'm going to get 30 straight threes from the corner. Well, that's good to a certain point because you're repping the form, but I got to rep real playing skills and that's one of the ways that we do it.
Dan:Within this bucket of offense and efficiency and all that and you mentioned playing a lot of players and substitution stuff earlier on Does any of that change? For you say, fourth quarter, as you get deeper into the game you shorten the rotation, you slow the pace at all. If it's a close game, does anything change as you get closer to you know kind of the crunch time of a game?
Brian Morehouse:Theoretically, no, okay. Philosophically no. You know, 29 years now, right, it's still hard for me not to grind out a game at the end without some feel for time and score, because all the data adds up until it doesn't add up and it's under two minutes. And it's not that we don't run sets to create spaces, to create opportunities. But I can't let the game slow down and micromanage every possession at the end because it puts such a high premium on they have to make the shot that you create, as opposed to playing more free. But the other part is, I think it's easier to defend. I think you can dial up certain things that you feel really good defensively about. Or you can find Waldo and try to attack that person and say she cannot guard and that's been proven over the course of 37 minutes of this game and they're going to go help her. So it's more important not to just find Waldo but know where the help is going to come from to create the shot for the next person. That's just my philosophy.
Patrick:How do you also build a team capable of attacking the weaklings? You know we've talked about how you build pace, but now, if you're going to be a team that we want to attack mismatches or find Waldo's, what do you have to think are as important to installing in your team every year so that you can attack these different mismatches?
Brian Morehouse:I think that you can't have a Waldo on off-puts. First of all, you can't have a kid out there that can't dribble, or they flat out can't shoot. You can't have all those. And then I think the other part that we've really worked hard on in our scouting isn't so much like what do they run? What do they do? You know how do they defend, but how do they defend matters, because that allows you to get your best player on their worst defender. If they switch one through four, let's run a screen with our best ball handler and our best attacker, get that switch and now let's go and let's attack her off the dribble, maybe on a weak side swing or something like that. So I think strategically a lot of that stuff comes into place, especially with how much people are switching right now. It's almost easier now to find that person and get them on your player, because they don't hide them as much by just saying our worst defender is going to be on your worst offensive player.
Patrick:When you find these mismatches you have, like switch spacing. Are you working if it's in the post, if it's on the wing the characteristics of that player and how you want your other four players to react or is it it's enough just to get the Waldo on the player you want and it's going to work itself out?
Brian Morehouse:I think it's super important to get the Waldo. I think it's also super important to understand where people help from, because they aren't going to be able to change their habits of where they help from. I'll go into time on them. Okay, we're going to get this switch on to Ella and then we're going to run this ball screen. We're either getting a layup with you, sab, or we're getting a wide open three from Carson, because we know that they can't guard Ella and we know that this is how they're going to guard the ball screen. They're going to have to make a choice because we're putting these people on this spot and basically now we're playing a small-sided game with two and or three people and then our best are on your worst and you're going to have to figure out how you're going to compensate for them defensively.
Dan:Coach, great stuff there. Thanks for your thoughts on that. I think we could keep talking for hours on all these things, but we want to transition now no pun intended to a segment on the show we call start, sub or sit, and so we'll give you three different options around a central topic. Ask you which one of them to start, which one you'd sub, which one of them you'd sit on your bench? All of these might play, but for this game, one of them is going to have to sit for this game. So, coach, if you're ready, we'll dive into this first question for you. Absolutely, let's go.
Dan:The first one has to do with career growth and career longevity for coaches and your advice or your thoughts on when you're building your career as an assistant.
Dan:These are three different options coaches can take, and I think we kind of touched on some of them already, but three different options they can take in their career growth and your start would be maybe what you think is the best option for them. And so start, sub or sit and this is for someone that wants to become a head coach at their level I'll add that caveat At their level. So start, sub or sit. Option one is to be an assistant coach at a good school, a good position, so a winning program, and try to stick in that spot as long as possible. Option two is take a head coaching position as early as possible, even if it's at a struggling program or a place that's really tough to win. And the third option is try to go coach at a higher level somewhere, even if it's video or some kind of other role, maybe at a D2, d1, nba, wnba, whatever it is, before coming maybe back down to try to become a head coach. Start, sub or sit. Those three options.
Brian Morehouse:I've never left here. I mean, I kind of know what I know. So I'm going to go number one, start assistant at a good school and be the absolute best, learn, winning culture and become an expert. I would say my sit would be head coach at a bad school. I know that people have done it. I do believe that there are places that you can't win it. Maybe I need to redefine what a bad school is, because I think there are places that absolutely you can't win it and I think there are places that are tough to win it. But the reason I would put that as my sit is without defining that that's a tough one. And then I think that your third one, going to a higher level.
Brian Morehouse:There's so much good that comes out of my way of doing that is like getting out to as many practices as I possibly can Going to Notre Dame, going to DePaul, going to Michigan State, going to Michigan just places in state going to Central Michigan, going to Western Michigan, you know, even getting down into Indiana and watching their practices.
Brian Morehouse:Next week I'm headed to a D1 practice. That's my version of immersing myself in a different level and learning because I haven't left. So I get on the phone with my friends that are Division I coaches and we have long talks about how are they doing things. I also think like there are ways to immerse yourself in growth opportunities by watching teams that make sense to watch. I'm sorry, but if you watch Kentucky men's basketball play or Golden State and say, yeah, I'm going to apply a lot of that stuff next year, I don't know, but you watch some of the great mid majors for men or women and watch what they're doing and coaching, it is like a masterclass in coaching. Same thing with I watch international games, I watch Spain and I watch Germany. I watch like fascinating to watch how they play and create spaces and do things. So that would be my start sub and sit, and that's a little bit of the background behind why.
Dan:Coach. Loved all the answers there and I guess, before dive into any one of these three, you've mentioned your assistant coaches here throughout the podcast. What is the end of the year? Conversation with them often look like when you know the career trajectory that they're trying to reach and how do you sit and talk about goals, plans, stay, go visit. What do you talk to your assistants about? Because you've mentioned you've made a call that you lost one this year, but what do you do with them in the off season?
Brian Morehouse:They need to know at the end of every season. We talk about this all the time. We talked about it at Practicedale. There's a conditional love and then there's unconditional love. I have an unconditional love for my players and for my staff. Well, I better because one of them is my dad. Right, my dad coached with me for 20 years. He drives an hour and 15 minutes to practice every day, drives home. He's 84 now. He's not doing that anymore. He was one of my staff. That was 20 years of longevity with them. You know that's your hero growing up, your dad, the guy that coached you in high school. That's a person that you trust. Well, luckily for me, he wanted to leave it.
Brian Morehouse:One of my other coaches I assign everything in our program like football, I have a football mentality to coaching basketball, so I have a decoordinator, special teams coach. I have skill positions. I have an offensive coordinator, so we do that. My decoordinator was my college roommate. He coached 14, 15 years in high school basketball. He was one of the greatest players ever to play at Hope College, got out of high school because of some politics with administrators and things like that, sat out for two years, came to me and said, yeah, I was thinking about getting back into it and I was. I'll ball with me and he's been with me since 2006. Architect of our national championship defense in 2006, continues to call the shots. Got pissed at kids yesterday for not closing out, not understanding. Helped out, for you know, these four freshmen are like I don't even know what that means. But he's all these cranky. He's like me, he loves the game, he loves kids and he's old school.
Brian Morehouse:And then I've got the young bucks, you know. I've got Kyle Lervie, who you know was with me, left for St Thomas as a coach. Courtney cost, my associate head coach. She's turned down multiple, multiple, multiple head jobs and I keep telling her if you want to go, go, it'll be a great growth opportunity, or you can stay and I'm going to continue to give you more. I hired last two years ago guy named Austin Randall, one of the better skilled development guys in the state of Michigan, works with G league guys, works with the top a you program in our state, trains all the best players in the state and he's had tremendous growth and he's also helped us grow. I think we've helped him and he's helped us.
Brian Morehouse:After Kyle left, you know I was short of staff person and so I'm looking around and trying to decide what I'm going to do and I went a little nontraditional and that I hired somebody that played for me last year. She has the wisdom, she has the maturity to be able to handle that. I told her she doesn't have to yell at kids, she doesn't have to correct them, she just has to learn. She just has to be open to learning. And I want her wisdom every day in practice, that mentorship, and she's going to decide if she wants to go to be a college coach, if she wants me head high school coach. So a big part of it is like I've got to help them reach their goals, whatever they might be, and knowing that those might evolve, you know, they might say I'm never leaving and two years later they're like, yeah, maybe I would, and I got to help them get where they want to go.
Patrick:You mentioned that you've never left hope. I know it's unique to you, but why? I'm sure other opportunities rose or came your way. Why, ultimately, you thought it was worthwhile just to stay in one place. Stay at hope and not chase is the right word. But go elsewhere, seek other opportunities or new, other jobs.
Brian Morehouse:At different times, different things kept me at hope. To be perfectly honest, there was a time when we won our first national championship. We're in the final four and people came and called and asked and I interviewed and got to the finals and something happened within our family with our kids, and I could have taken the job and it was a really, really good job, would have paid me a lot more, would have given me scholarships, best facilities around. It was a great job. Probably the hardest phone call I ever made was to turn that job down, knowing that if I would have taken it my family would have really suffered my two daughters. They were not in a position, with some stuff that had happened for them and our family to be able to survive that. So I would have gone. That would have catapulted me and the D1 jobs and stuff like that and I said no.
Brian Morehouse:I would say like the next phase of saying no came when it was like six years ago, had an opportunity. Somebody came and asked and I was in this weird spot where my daughter was. They were both playing high school sports. I would have uproot them. It would have been great for me not going to lie. My wife had just taken a principal job and I had to deny myself for the good of the people that were around me. Now, why did these things happen in life? Well, in the end my daughter turned down some other scholarship opportunities as a high school basketball player and a high school soccer player player of the year in both in our area and she made the choice to come and play for me and she wasn't one of our best players. Her mom got pissed at me all the time because I didn't play her enough when she was a freshman, but in the end we ended up winning a national championship together and we had one string, I think, where we won 65 games in a row together. She graduated from Hope and she was 103 and four Not. She was like our program was during those years right.
Brian Morehouse:I don't know, maybe more money would have been better, maybe a higher level would have been fun. Like, I'm pretty good with the way my life has turned out and I think that you can't be so busy trying to chase the next job. That you don't appreciate where you're at this place is unbelievable. I mean, until people visit Hope. I mean I don't know if you've watched any of our games, if you've seen our facilities and everything. But we have D1 facilities. We have amazing academics. If you've never been to Holland, guys, come, I'll put you up, I'll take care of you. We're right on Lake Michigan, one of the best beaches in the United States. It's not a bad place to be and recruit to.
Brian Morehouse:I don't know. My life has turned out okay, even though there have been certain times where I'm high. Am I not taking that? And then I think the next part of it is right now. I'm at the phase where I'm 55. Not that many people are calling, believe it or not. They're not that interested. There's a lot of really, really quality young coaches that are out there. I think the focus of athletic directors is somewhat changed in what they're looking for and they probably wonder how much longer I'm going to do it. I'm not going to be mad about that, because I love where I'm at and I'm super happy. If somebody calls, I'll listen. And who's to say I don't go for the last portion of my career, the last 10, 12 years of my career, but right now, be happy where you're at.
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Patrick:Moving along. Our next Start Subbersit for you. I'm going to give you three characteristics a player characteristics that impede a player's ability to recover from failure. Is it one, their ego. Two, an understanding of their own personal strengths and weaknesses, of who they are. Or three, is it the status amongst their peers, slash teammates.
Brian Morehouse:I would sit ego because, as much as we want to think it's ego, it's what we've taught and what they've learned as opposed to. I think kids are inherently good and I think ego is something that is a lazy thing that we laid that on. I would sub-status and I would start personal strength.
Patrick:Okay, coach, I'll start with your start. How do you help your players with whether it's role clarity or conversations to help them have a better understanding of who they are as a player and maybe even as a person?
Brian Morehouse:The role player in clarity is somewhat of a factor, patrick, but if I was going to go start some and sit, I would probably actually sub or sit that one, as opposed to having them have a greater understanding of who they are as a human being. For us, the failure recovery is incredibly important because we live in a failure sport. That was a huge part of my conversation last night with our sophomores. We live in a highly corrective sport, so your offense versus defense somebody's winning, somebody's losing and how do you respond to that? I think one of the keys to winning the national championship is how we approach failure recovery. That year in 2022. We are coming off COVID.
Brian Morehouse:Everything had been a failure for a couple of years. They didn't let us play for a national championship when they shut things down in March of 2019. Then the next year, d3 is the only one that didn't play for a national championship that year and we did not lose either one of those years Undefended. They are wired for what's the next bad thing that's going to happen? So we've got to flip that switch Way number one that we do it. It is impossibly anxious and have gratitude at the same time. It is impossible. So we are going to try to live our lives when we start to go what we call our good brain versus our bad brain. Somebody told me the other day we got 66,000 thoughts on average in our brain every day. 85% of them are negative. That's a lot to undo. So how do we attack our bad brain, winning and that's where you get to the failure recovery piece. That's when you get to. How do we talk to ourselves? How do we live a life of gratitude to undermine all that negativity and that anxiety? That's number one.
Brian Morehouse:Number two you can't do it alone. You got to be vulnerable. We have a circle. Our circle is everything for us. The people in our circle are the most important people, and that's where you can be vulnerable. You've got to have people that can help you recover. So when we talk about failure recovery, you'll see us do this all the time at each other. We'll point at each other. We'll literally point at each other, and that means we are best friends with our players in our team. They need to be friends, they're friends, they're teammates and together they can overcome anything. When I do this to you, it means, hey, get the next one. But then you, after responding to me thanks, I got it. What does that do? It resets us from failure into recovery, because I can't be thinking about what I'm feeling at if I'm acknowledging that somebody just lifted me up to a different standard.
Dan:You said some interesting things about ego that I wanted to follow up on and said it. Sometimes it's thrown out as kind of a lazy hey Dave, ego or whatnot. I agree with you on that. I think it's such a complex subject, someone's ego, and for you you're coaching really good players that you kind of want them to have a bit of an ego in a sense to want to be the best and all those things. And so I guess, more detailed on your answer on sitting the ego, what you like about it or what you try to do with your players when, say, they have a bit of it, and how you foster it for good, I like a little bit of ego, because people call ego, they name it a lot of different ways.
Brian Morehouse:Ego can come out in so many different ways, but part of your ego is you've got to believe that you're the best. Why would you believe you're best? Sometimes it's a false narrative that you've been built up by your parents, by other people, and your ego really isn't confidence. It isn't really like come on, I'm the best, give me the ball. It's a lazy way of you being afraid of letting people really in Good.
Brian Morehouse:Ego, though, comes from discipline. It comes from repetitions. It comes from knowing that you put in the work. Maybe I'm meshing confidence and ego together right now, but I do think that they're connected. When you know you've done the work and you hoist up a shot and you miss I mean, it's always a joke with our players. Listen, you've shot so many shots. When you miss one, I hope that you look up at the ceiling and you look up at all those big vents that are up there and they're dang it. The heating and cooling guy must turn on the vents, because that's the only way I miss that shot. I feel a little breeze in here. I will make the next 20 of those. Just give me that shot coach. I think you got to have ego, and it doesn't always have to be a bad thing.
Dan:You subbed the status and when Pat and I were discussing this question, thinking about you know certain players responding to failure in different ways if they're a freshman versus a senior and if they've never been coached by you before. Or a freshman come in and never really had hard coaching at their high school level, whatever it is, and that could sometimes lead to reactions that aren't great. And I guess just how you think about a freshman versus sophomore and senior in how they handle some of those things.
Brian Morehouse:Great question Again. This is where I've grown when you have a good staff and you can have knockdown, drag out arguments because I am a process guy I'm like we don't worry about national championship, we just wake up and do something every day stack them, stack them, stack them, stack them. And then I have the argument with my associated coach oh, how are we ever going to get there? We don't know where we're going. We got everybody and goal. So I'll go back to one of our biggest arguments is where does your confidence come from? Status confidence? I'm on the argument Well, just get in the gym and work more. The more you shoot, the more you rep, your confidence is going to get there when you're most challenged. You can just lean into that and you're going to be like I did the work and you're going to be good.
Brian Morehouse:And her argument is that's not true because it is a continual. There is a confidence continuum in her mind and it starts off as a freshman where, yeah, you got a teach amount to get in, get reps and everything. But guess what, moe, they need to hear from you hey, I saw you. Hey, you're doing a great job. What do you need from me? Wow, I really see you working, moe, have you really improved since last week? And as a sophomore, you hope that that's a little bit less. And as a junior, you hope they're giving that out to the younger players to help their status rise and not protecting their own turf as a junior and then as a senior, it shouldn't be about you at all. You should just be walking around gratitude, giving out compliments, raising everyone else's status so that they know they belong, because you need them more than they need you as a senior. And when you start to develop that confidence continuum, I think that you can really have your best functioning team and you can have your best functioning individuals.
Dan:Well, coach, it's a great place to end it actually. So you're off the start sub or sit hot seat. Thanks for playing that game with us Learned a ton. That was a lot of fun Because we got one final question for you. Thank you very much for all your time and your thoughts today. We appreciate it.
Brian Morehouse:You guys are the best and thanks for the opportunity. I'll still be texting me 15 minutes after this comes out and telling me what she thinks and everyone that you guys put out. I know she watches them within a half an hour and now she's got me hooked. Now I'm going back and watching all the old ones way, way back, which are some of the beauties guys. Thank you. You guys have not gotten better looking as you've gotten older, but some of your old ones were really, really good.
Dan:Thank you, coach. I appreciate that. Thank you, coach. Coach. Our last question that we asked all the guests is what's the best investment that you've made in your career as a coach?
Brian Morehouse:That's a great one. My wife won't watch this, so I'm not doing this for anything that way. But the best investment I ever made was when I got married to my wife and she gets me. She understands the importance of basketball, but she's honest with me, she invests in me, she holds me accountable and it allows me to be my best for everybody that's around me. And is marriage an investment?
Brian Morehouse:Probably that's the best decision I made slash investment because I think if you have the right people that you're surrounded with and I would start with my wife and then I would go to the assistant coaches that have worked with me they get paid from hope, like my summer camps. I run my summer camps for one purpose only so that I can add to my assistant coaches, because as a small college, we don't pay them enough. We don't have full-time assistants. It's amazing like high school coaches get paid more than my associate head coach and Certainly my other coaches probably could get paid more by just going and coaching out of high school. But by investing in them, not just monetarily, I hope that they feel like I invest in them with their growth, with caring about them, their families, and it becomes this partnership.
Brian Morehouse:Those are the best investments I made, because now that's a trickle down to every single player that walks into our program and then when those young people graduate, hopefully what they're gonna do is they're gonna go out and do the same thing wherever they are not necessarily coach a basketball, but when they go into that company for the first day, I hope that they walk in there in the investment that I made in my Assistance investment that I made my players and they walk into that company and by the end of that first week they're like who is that and where is she from? And we want to know more about her because she's amazing and she's into this for everybody else, not just for her own personal gain, and we want that kid on our team, at our company and we need more.
Dan:All right, pat. Always good to get a coach on that's won some national championships. Coach Morehouse at Hope has had a tremendous run of success there. It continues to and really an awesome experience for us to have him on and talk to him before and afterwards and a fun coach Outside of also being a terrific on the court, off the court coach, as we just heard. So a great episode today, yeah.
Patrick:I really enjoyed coach Morehouse and his thoughts and, as we get into it, always Discussion on pace and then his honesty and openness when we got into the start.
Dan:Subsets questions yeah, we'll get to that in a second, because I think that both hit us in a good way Just how open he was about the truth about staying with jobs, taking new jobs. I think those are just really great real-life examples of Careers and why people choose the jobs that they do. But before we get too far down that rabbit hole, let's start with our bucket, our main theme, and there's something that you know he had mentioned to us a potentially being interested in this switch from being a historically defensive team to what he was last year, which was the most efficient offense in the country, and we just thought it was interesting to how he got there and it was fun to hear all his thoughts on pace and being disruptive, offensively, defensively. So before I spew a bunch of stuff about that, I'll kick it back to you on first takeaways on that first bucket before we hopped on to talk with them.
Patrick:I think one of the last things we talked about, with potential avenues or questions about why this jump from defense to offensive-minded Not that he stopped caring about defense I think we said the margin for error, focusing more on offense or having more offensive firepower and rather than trying to grind out games I think that was like his first thing he said. When we kind of kicked the conversation off and asked him what was his big reasoning, he said yeah, just larger mark for Aaron, and especially late in the season and when you're trying to compete for Championships, when you're playing against usually pretty good offensive teams, and just the need to be able to score to win these games for us.
Dan:It was interesting to hear him talk about and you and I talked about it briefly even before we got on with coach more house Just our own thoughts on why, being a great offensive team, from a coaching psychology standpoint it's beneficial and you just kind of hit on it and coach more house did too as well.
Dan:Knowing that when you walk into any gym, home or away, it's a different feeling, knowing that you can score and Be in those games and beat those good teams and, as he mentioned, they were very successful also Grinding it out and playing lower scoring games in his past, but just changing to this, I'm sure, at the highest levels or when you really got to beat the best teams in the country, being able to score means so much and you and I talked about this too. The Psychological aspect for your team of knowing you can score we discussed this with coach will Hardy as well, utah jazz and knowing that you can put the ball in the basket is great benefit for your team as well. That you're able to stay in games and dig in defensively even more.
Patrick:You feel a lot better going back on defense after you made a couple baskets in a row, the other important aspect he mentioned to was marrying his Defensive philosophy to his offensive philosophy, in terms of he always has been, and will continue to be, highly disruptive on defense, and so then, translating it over to let's be disruptive on offense as well and play with the same pace and not like, be that these peaks and valleys or highs and lows of defensive intensity, and then a slow walk-up team and just marrying both ends of the court.
Dan:He had a really great teaching point about offensive players learning at the college level how to initiate contact and not try to stay away from contact. And Defensively you're trying to not create as much contact, but offensively being disruptive, where you take a space and then you create the contact and you keep them and they work a lot on that Advantage. I thought that was a really good teaching point.
Patrick:Within all this stuff too, a fun caveat within this conversation that we had was, you know, ways obviously, with this shift, how he's continued to grow as a coach, and then how he views his staff and allowing his staff he said that he treats it like a football staff, so he has an offensive court and defense of special teams, but by empowering them, it's allowed him to become a better coach and continue to grow. I think it's always cool to hear how these coaches have continued to stay relevant on top of their craft and continue to innovate and the ways they've learned. We've had several conversations on how they continue to learn in off seasons and how they use their staff.
Dan:Absolutely, and there was a part where he was talking about that discipline is freedom, and just his thoughts on that I think we're really good too. It reminded me of Ben McCollum that we had a couple years ago, northwest Missouri State, and coach McCollum was talking about that similar thing where Sometimes restricting a player and what they can do or giving them more discipline Offensively, not allowing them to try to do a ton of things does create freedom. It does create an easier way for that player to have success. And I just sort of tied that note of that because I think those were two coaches I talked about it really well with push McCollum and now today with coach Moore house.
Patrick:That was an important point because I think another question that we had going into this conversation on the defensive side of the court it can be, let's say, more black and white. You can make more demands, there can be more rules and and offense. I think it's much more gray, it's much more player dependent and you have to see control Going in. We were curious about how to make that shift as a coach where, yeah, one in the court if you're, you know, been predominantly a defensive minded coach and so much more rule-based Orientated, and then shifting to offense and giving this freedom and allowing them to play with pace. And we got into just how he teaches Through mistakes and allowing mistakes and this is where he got into that discipline is freedom conversation. So that's also was another one of these interesting pieces that we're decided to explore with him when making such a shift, moving to start subberset.
Dan:We'll start with the career growth longevity one, and you know you and I were Talking about this question a lot beforehand and trying to find a way to have a I don't know interesting, unique career choice, career growth Conversation.
Dan:We've had, you know, career conversations for sure before and they're always interesting. But we're thinking about he's a national champion coach and along the way I'm sure there are opportunities or places or he could have gone and why do you stay? And then he talked a lot about His assistance and how he's tried to help them move to become head coaches or get higher jobs, and so, you know, we just felt like throwing a sort of sit to really hear what he thought about good career moves or the different moves that people can make, and I think it led to what you and I both felt was a really honest, truthful discussion about jobs and things that affect you Outside of your actual job. You have that, why you do would do not make decisions, and it's not always just about Leveling up or more money, but, as we know, there's so many factors involved, and so I really loved that part of the conversation.
Patrick:Yeah, the thoughts that went into coach more house or any of these other coaches that have really made great careers at certain levels. That yeah, you're not national TV every other week and I think getting in their mindset and picking their brains on these things is always a pleasure for me to add on to your point.
Dan:He started being an assistant at a good program and the benefits of that and Understanding how to win how a good program operates for him was a start, and I'm sure you know he's seen it a bunch where assistance from really good programs who are winning all the time End up being in the position or at least to get interviews for good jobs. Because you know other athletic directors People hiring. They do look at that stuff and say okay, Well, this person's one you know been an assistant on a team that won a national title. I thought the start there was interesting. The sit was also interesting because we've had conversations to reminds me of, you know, Tobin Anderson at times talking about taking a head job Early at a struggling place and building that up can be really beneficial as well and obviously he did it and he's done okay for himself the last few years. There's so many different paths but I think it was just an interesting conversations route.
Patrick:Yeah, moving to our last start subset, talking about players recovering from failure, something in our research, or talking to him before. He mentioned that I think he's big on and Values in his program and helping his players recover from failure. So kicking it to you, dan what were your takeaways from this start?
Dan:subset. I think he had mentioned a couple of things to us about failure recovery or part of his culture, so we were trying to figure out, yeah, some way to hit on that, but in a different way. And I think these three things the ego, the kind of understanding yourself and the status on the team I think we pulled those off from our own personal coaching experiences and where, when we've coached our players and they've responded poorly to failure, it seems to be in and around one of these three. I mean, there's more for sure, but these three things stuck out. And so the interesting one to me was that he sat ego and I think he agreed that it is in there as well.
Dan:But I think we've heard other coaches say that ego can be just such a disruptor to someone's failure recovery or they can be thin skinned on stuff, and he did mention it too. But I thought that was interesting, that that for him was a sit. And then he gave some really good kind of caveats as to why and why we lazily sometimes throw ego out there and that there's so much more behind it. So I definitely agree with that. So I think that just an interesting one. I thought ego might have been higher, and then I liked his answer as to why it wasn't I.
Patrick:Enjoyed.
Patrick:when we got into the conversation about the status month peers, I believe was your follow-up he mentioned his growth on it that you know he thought your status among peers, where your confidence come from, is mainly from repetition and work and that, with his assistance of you know, broken him down that it's more of a confidence continuum and that as an incoming freshman, maybe you need more confidence given and you know people to build you up, but then slowly, as you become a sophomore, junior or senior and that flips that, you need to be the one giving confidence to the Underclassmen. I really enjoyed that you wanted and shaping it that way and then also I think it spoke to the kind of the culture that they build and the program he has and, like he said, as a senior you shouldn't be expecting any of it, you should be only giving it in an ideal world and then at some point I wrote the quote down.
Dan:It was, I think, in that part of the conversation that he discussed how anxiety and gratitude Cannot exist at the same time and basically expressing gratitude Eliminates anxiety because they just can't exist together. I thought that was a really cool quote and he was kind of speaking to his culture on that. As we wrap this up, he misses or anything. You wish we could have went a little bit deeper on from your standpoint nothing that stood out.
Patrick:I'm happy with the conversation ended up and kind of the rabbit holes we explored today with coach morales Okay cool.
Dan:I think with honestly, with all these things, there's just always like places. I think we could have went. I thought that the Leveraging drives, initiating contact, teaching players how to create, keep and take advantage of small opportunities I got the sense we could have talked a lot longer about that and that's a large part of his teaching in his offense, and you know how do we have more time? I mean, this is something too. Would have been nice to see maybe some film, because I think that would have been cool to hear him teach those things, because that is hard for I'm speaking maybe from the college level now but really having players Understand leveraging space and contact. So that was the guess. You'd say a miss for me there. Since there's obviously nothing else from your end, we'll go ahead and no missus today. Wrap this up. We thank coach morhouse for coming on being so open with all of this excited to see them play this season. Thank you everybody and we'll see you next time.
Patrick:Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit slapping glass comm for more information on the free newsletter slapping glass plus and much more. Have a great week coaching and we'll see you next time on slapping glass.
Dan:Would we have a name yet for this thing? I've like slapping back for slapping glass, slapping glass.
Patrick:That's kind of funny. I like that. Let's roll slapping glass.