Basketball at Its Purest

A Proactive Coaching podcast interview with Trice Ham, wheelchair basketball coach — multiple-time national champion at the club and high school levels, adaptive recreation specialist for the City of Houston Parks and Recreation Department, and a staff member for Team USA's gold-medal-winning U25 women's team at the world championships in Thailand — hosted by Bruce Brown as part of the "Greatest Coaches You've Probably Never Heard Of" series. Topics covered: falling in love with wheelchair basketball ("basketball at its purest") at a tournament at UT Arlington and volunteering with a team two weeks later; the abnormal path — realizing his program's words about developing young people didn't match its results, and rebuilding the culture; what he hopes players remember (how much the program cared, and a culture where it's safe to fail); his two overarching goals (building people of character, and unapologetically teaching young people to compete and win); the Team USA experience under head coach Trooper Johnson; his work in adaptive recreation; books (The Captain Class, Eleven Rings, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People); coach-selected captains who must be communicators, servants, and willing to uphold standards; and advice for young coaches — ask for help, because the turning point of his career was admitting he didn't know what he was doing.