Every coach has a favorite drill.
Some love defensive shell drills.
Some love rebounding drills.
Some love shooting drills.
Me?
My favorite part of tryouts happened in a classroom with a pencil and a piece of paper.
It wasn’t exciting.
Nobody dunked.
Nobody hit a game-winning shot.
Nobody ran a 4.4 forty.
But it told me more about our team than anything that happened on the court.
The Form
Before every season, even before we cut the roster, we handed every player an evaluation form.
At first glance it looked pretty ordinary.
What are your strengths?
What are your weaknesses?
How many minutes do you think you should play?
The usual preseason questions.
Then we got to the good stuff.
Every player had to rank every other player in the program in three categories:
- As a person.
- As a teammate.
- As a basketball player.
Simple.
Honest.
And occasionally terrifying.
The scale was one through five.
One meant excellent.
Five meant… let’s just say there was room for growth.
We told the players to be honest.
We also told them we’d be reading every answer.
If a player gave himself all ones and everyone else gave him fours and fives, we were probably going to have a conversation.
Some kids were incredibly self-aware.
Some were completely delusional.
And some apparently believed they were a combination of Michael Jordan, Mother Teresa, and Abraham Lincoln.
Those evaluations taught us a lot.
Sometimes a kid would score incredibly high as a basketball player and incredibly low as a teammate.
That told us something.
Sometimes a player everyone assumed was popular would receive poor scores from his teammates.
That told us something too.
The evaluations revealed what coaches don’t always see. Because players live in a world coaches only visit.
And sometimes the truth is hiding in that world.
One of My Toughest Meetings
Only twice in my coaching career did I ever bring those evaluations into a meeting with a parent.
One of those meetings still sticks with me.
A middle school coach came in to see me.
His son was a junior in our program.
The son wasn’t starting.
The dad wasn’t thrilled about it.
Actually, “wasn’t thrilled” might be the understatement of the century.
He sat down and immediately launched into a speech.
“My son is a leader.”
“The players respect him.”
“The kids look up to him.”
“He makes everyone around him better.”
I listened.
I nodded.
I let him go.
The problem was that I had already read the evaluations.
And according to his teammates, his son wasn’t the leader his father thought he was.
Not even close.
As a player?
Good scores.
As a person?
Mostly fours and fives.
As a teammate?
More fours and fives.
His teammates didn’t trust him.
They didn’t enjoy being around him.
And they certainly weren’t following him.
I sat there wondering how to handle it.
Then my younger, less diplomatic self made a decision.
I grabbed the stack of evaluations.
Whited out the names.
Dropped them on the table.
And said:
“Read what the players say.”
To this day I’m not sure I’d handle it the same way.
Age has a way of sanding down some of your rough edges.
But that day I let the team do the talking.
The room got quiet.
Really quiet.
The kind of quiet where you can hear people rethinking their entire argument.
Eventually he looked up.
And for the first time, he stopped talking.
The amazing part is what happened afterward.
His son improved.
The dad softened.
And over time we became friends.
The truth had hurt.
But it had also helped.
That’s the thing about honest feedback.
It stings.
But it teaches.
The Foxhole Question
There was one final question on the evaluation form.
I stole it from my high school coach.
It’s probably the most important question I’ve ever asked a team.
“If you were in a foxhole, who would you want next to you?”
Not who scores the most.
Not who gets the headlines.
Not who has the coolest shoes.
Who would you trust when things got difficult?
That question revealed everything.
Sometimes the answer was the team captain.
Sometimes it wasn’t.
One year we had a transfer from Las Vegas.
Good athlete.
Tough kid.
A little rough around the edges.
He openly told me he had spent time in juvenile detention after helping rob a store and firing a gun into the ceiling.
Not exactly the answer they teach you in coaching clinics.
Now, let me be clear.
I’m not recommending armed robbery as a character-building exercise.
But if you asked me who I wanted in the foxhole?
I’d have picked that kid.
Not because he was the most talented.
He wasn’t.
Not because he was the best player.
He wasn’t.
Because he was loyal.
And when things got hard, he didn’t run.
Coaches understand something most people don’t.
Talent gets noticed. Loyalty gets remembered.
That’s why I always loved convincing a few football linebackers to play basketball.
Most of them couldn’t shoot.
Some dribbled like they were carrying a suitcase.
But they’d box out.
Protect the paint.
Defend their teammates.
And if things got messy, they’d still be standing there when everyone else backed away.
You need a few of those kids.
Every team does.
The Best Team and the Worst Evaluation
One of my final years of coaching, we knew we had a chance to be special.
Maybe the best team in the state.
Definitely one of the best teams I’d coached.
When the evaluations came in, I immediately grabbed the form from the player I believed was our best leader.
His opinion mattered.
The coaches respected him.
The players respected him.
I couldn’t wait to read what he thought.
The form took him about two minutes to complete.
Two minutes.
That should have been my first warning sign.
Then I looked closer.
Every single player received a three.
Every category.
Every player.
Three.
Three.
Three.
Three.
No foxhole answer.
No comments.
Nothing.
My heart sank.
Either he didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings…
Or he had somewhere more important to be.
Maybe a date.
Maybe lunch.
Maybe literally anything other than helping his coaches understand the team.
The damage was done.
The most important evaluation in the room told us absolutely nothing.
And oddly enough, that taught me another lesson.
Sometimes avoiding honesty feels nice.
But it helps nobody.
Not the coaches.
Not the team.
Not the person filling out the form.
Truth doesn’t build comfort. Truth builds clarity. And clarity builds culture.
More Than Basketball
People think tryouts are about finding talent.
They aren’t.
Talent is easy.
I can usually tell who can play within ten minutes.
Culture is harder.
Character is harder.
Trust is harder.
The evaluation form wasn’t really about basketball.
It was about people.
It revealed hidden leaders.
Hidden problems.
Hidden loyalties.
Hidden egos.
It showed us what players saw when coaches weren’t looking.
And after 35 years of coaching, I’ve come to believe that the strongest teams aren’t built by talent alone.
They’re built by honesty.
Because until people are willing to tell the truth about themselves and each other, growth never really begins.
And sometimes the most honest form in sports has nothing to do with sports at all.
This story first appeared on Matt’s Substack. Read the original post — “The Most Honest Form in Sports” — and subscribe to the newsletter for short stories and practical lessons like this one every week.
