The Basketball Teacher Podcast · Mike Hernandez

Episode 278: Being a Coach Who Teaches and Learns With Coach Davon Muhammad

September 15, 2025·1 hr 6 min·1 clip

Coach Mike Hernandez opens with a framing of coaching as a balance between teaching the game and staying a lifelong learner. The conversation with a guest coach moves into the steady work of helping players understand a system well enough to run it without the coach hovering over them. The guest explains that learning any system takes time, and that players may need as much time, if not more, than the coach needed to learn it. The approach is built on patience. It starts with the easiest pieces and then expands from there, rather than trying to jump from zero to 100. The guest says the staff has learned to build things in over the years, focusing on one part at a time and adding more later when needed. That pacing matters because not every detail can be mastered at once. The talk also leaves room for the fact that the early version will be messy. Players are going to miss more than they make at first, and the coaching job is to teach through that mess instead of waiting for perfection before moving on. Mistakes become part of the lesson. From there, the discussion turns toward how players respond when things go wrong. The guest emphasizes that the response matters just as much as the result. He also talks about the value of conversation in that moment. One of the central ideas is that there are three perspectives in the game that have to be respected: coach, player, and official. Each one sees something real. None of them can be ignored if a team wants to understand what is actually happening on the floor. The discussion uses that idea to underline communication. It is not enough to assume one view is the only correct one. The coach has to understand what the player saw. The player has to understand what the coach saw. The official has to be part of the same reality, even when the call is frustrating. That thread gives the conversation a practical edge. It keeps returning to self-reflection as part of coaching growth. It treats improvement as an ongoing responsibility. It also keeps the focus on teaching as a daily craft rather than a grand theory. By the end, the conversation leaves a clear picture of coaching as a process built on repetition, patience, and honest communication.

As heard by us

A patient coaching talk about teaching, learning, and staying steady when the game gets messy.

The episode is strongest when it treats coaching as a long apprenticeship, not a quick fix. It keeps coming back to one useful point: players need time to understand systems, and mistakes are part of learning, not a reason to panic.

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Why you'd press play

You want a coach-to-coach conversation about teaching the game without rushing the process.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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