Three Tips for Maintaining Team Culture at the End of a Basketball Season

• By Grant Young

Maintaining and sustaining basketball team culture at the end of a season can be a challenging task, irrespective of a team’s performance. Several factors contribute to this difficulty:

1. Emotional Fatigue: Players and staff often experience burnout from the long season, leading to decreased motivation and focus on team cohesion. 

2. Future Uncertainty: As the season wraps up, players may face uncertainty about their futures, which can distract them from team unity. 

3. Reflecting on Performance: The end of the season often leads to introspection regarding successes and failures. Negative emotions can create tension and hinder trust among team members. 

4. External Pressures: The scrutiny from fans, media, and organizational expectations can amplify stress. Players may feel pressured to perform individually rather than focusing on collective goals, which can undermine team culture. 

5. Waning Team Morale: If the team has struggled throughout the season, morale can be low, making it challenging to foster positivity and a strong culture as the season concludes.

6. Ineffective Communication: As the season comes to an end, communication might suffer if players are preoccupied with their futures or disheartened by past performance, leading to misunderstandings and a lack of cohesion. 

Navigating these challenges requires strong leadership and open communication to ensure that the team remains unified, regardless of how the season unfolded. Doing so becomes much easier when one has access to cultural cornerstones that past coaches have used with their teams to sustain morale at the end of the season.

We have pulled three tips on maintaining team culture from three high-level basketball coaches that you can use to finish your season strong. 

Matt Doherty - Symbolism

Matt Doherty is a former American college basketball coach best known for his time as head coach of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball team. Prior to accepting the head coaching position at UNC, he spent one season as head coach of the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish men's basketball program. After leaving UNC, Doherty would go on to become head coach of the Florida Atlantic Owls and then the SMU Mustangs, where he was for seven seasons.

In his ‘Strategies of Effective Leadership’ clinic, Coach Doherty explains the value of having symbolism within a team culture and how that can help keep a team’s morale up regardless of on-court outcomes. 

He explained that little things—whether handshakes, trophies, or anything else that might seem insignificant—could be given value through the symbolism they provide a team and used as a visual representation of their core values. 

The item that Coach Doherty used was a stone which he wrote ‘RTC’ (Respect, Trust, and Commitment) on, which was an acronym for his three biggest core pillars when it came to team culture. From there, all of his players could sign this stone, and he used it as a contract that his players could be held accountable to uphold as the season progressed. 

When a player breaks these core values, Coach Coherty could remind them of their signature on the stone, along with that of their teammates, and then have a visual representation that will drive his point home.

The key here is to keep the stone (or whatever symbol) you would like to use readily available and in the open. This will serve as a constant reminder of the values a team agreed upon at the start of a season and is therefore accountable to.

Bart Lundy - Having Your Own Language

Coach Bart Lundy is currently the head men’s basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he led the team to back-to-back 20-win seasons for the first time since 2004-05 and 2005-06. Coach Lundy is a former D1 Head Coach and current Head Coach of Queens University (NC). He was able to take over Queens University's Basketball Program and turn it into a nationally recognized powerhouse with multiple NCAA tournament appearances.

Coach Lundy’s ‘Blueprint to Creating Championship Culture’ clinic goes over every single aspect of the program that has an impact on team wins, including everyday rules a team should live by. 

Coach Lundy spoke about having a specific set of words that are integral to each team and to the program as a whole, which can be employed both on the court and in the locker room to evoke a sense of cohesion and camaraderie among a team. 

The language a coach uses (and the way they speak to their team) does a ton for promoting and sustaining a team's culture. If these words are used throughout a season, they can serve as pertinent reminders for a team that’s having lapses in concentration and accountability as the season nears its end. 

Lynn Milligan - Understanding the Why

Lynn Donovan-Milligan enters her 18th season as the head women's basketball coach at Rider University in 2024-25. The Broncs won at least one game at the MAAC Tournament for the seventh time in the past eight seasons in 2023-24, defeating Iona in the opening round. Rider closed the 2022-23 season strong winning five of its final nine games, including an opening-round victory in the MAAC Tournament over Marist. 

Coach Donovan-Milligan’s ‘Lynn Milligan - Creating Culture Through Practice’ clinic discusses the value of a coach knowing and understanding the ‘why’ behind everything that they do. 

A coach knowing the why behind why their team does layup lines, why there’s a pregame huddle, why there’s a team dinner the night before games and communicating that why to their players will help create a team culture that’s rooted in understanding, which will allow teams to stick together regardless of how a season goes.