Welcome to the hardwood hustle powered by PGC basketball.

We believe in the value of a coach.

We're here to educate, empower, and encourage you to lead like never before.

In today's episode, T.J. and Sam address the question, does your best player have to be your best leader?

As coaches, we're

often searching for leadership on our teams and TJ and Sam give tips for guiding and

mentoring your best players so they can reach their potential and your team can achieve. Before we

start, a quick word from PGC basketball.

Coaches, we're excited to let you know we've announced our PGC summer camp dates and locations if you want your team to be the smartest players on the court there's no other place for them to be this summer don't settle for unnecessary turnovers a lack of playmaking and a lack of leadership next season a week at PGC for two to three of your players could be the difference between a mediocre season

and winning a championship. As enrollment may be limited at some sessions due to COVID restrictions,

we don't want you or your players to miss out on getting a spot before sessions sell out.

You can find the camp locations closest to you at PGCbasketball.com.

Okay, Sam, we're going to dive into leadership, specifically the players on your team, and here's what I think. I think coaches have got it wrong. I think I've had it wrong for a long time. I think a lot of times we go into leadership thinking like, you know, gosh, wouldn't it be great if our best player was our best leader? And I look back on the last 20 years of coaching for me. And, you know, I might have three years out of my career out of 20 had my best player be my best leader. And so then I started thinking about that. I don't want to base my game on hope. I'm not just going to hope that I get a great player and a great leader. I want to make sure that my leadership system is set up for me to be successful and leading them and for them

to lead each other. I want good leaders on my basketball team, but I think too many times we've just

fallen into this thing where we've watched, maybe we think, oh, Michael Jordan's a great leader.

Or we look at a quarterback in the NFL, Peyton Manning, like, oh, he's the best player and the best leader. And we fall in love with those. But that's not reality. Like, that just doesn't happen all the time. I mean, that's pretty elite to be a great player and a great leader. In fact, I've been around some great players

and they're sometimes not great leaders because they're so driven individually. They start

working on their game thinking about what they have to do that it's not easy for them to

go think about leading everybody else. It just doesn't come naturally. Like when I think about

LeBron and Kobe and

Jordan and all those guys, I think they evolved in the pretty good leaders, but I don't think they

were very good leaders for a long time. I think they were great players and they wanted to win.

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