A. Positionless Basketball
B. The Read & React
C. An untraditional paradigm

Those are three difficult things to explain, and yet they are all tied together. If you explain one, you probably have to explain the other two. If you’re new to this, then don’t be surprised…

Don’t be surprised that your peers may never understand you. I have resigned myself to the fact that many in the coaching community (maybe most) will never understand Positionless Basketball – The Read & React. But that’s OK and here’s why:
If I were painting with a VERY broad brush, most coaches would fall into two camps. I’m sure that there are more types than these two. And I know for sure that none of us are 100% two-dimensional. But, to make my point, I’m describing only two types:

THE MANAGER COACH: This type of coach sees his or her responsibility is to be a filter – someone whose job is to decide who can play and who cannot. If you cannot play, then it is the manager-coach’s job to get rid of you and replace you with someone who CAN play. Once the team has been decided upon, then the manager-coach’s job is to rank the players and play them according to their rank. If the team is not successful, the reason is simple: the players were not good enough. The solution: Get better players or quit this team and get another job where the players are better. In the mind of the Manager-Coach, wins are a function of having the best players – nothing more; nothing less.
THE TEACHER COACH: This type of coach sees his or her job as a teacher. His or her responsibility is to ascertain the stage of development of each player (and the team) and to move each player (and the team) to their next level. This type of coach view success in terms of how far each player (and the team) develops. The wins are simply a by-product of this development. If the team is not successful, this type of coach looks internally first: how could he/she have developed the players/the team better, faster, more efficiently, etc.
When I meet members of the Read & React Tribe, 99 out of 100 fall into category 2.

So, don’t be surprised when one of your peers does not understand you when Read & React is the subject. Understanding and being attracted to Positionless Basketball might be more of a function of WHAT TYPE of coach you are talking to rather than what you are saying or how well you explain it.