Killeen sits across the interstate from Fort Cavazos, one of the biggest Army posts in the country. What that means for a coach, three kids out of five, is that your roster moves. A girl runs the floor for you in November and her family PCS's out after break; a boy shows up at open gym in January with a LaCrosse, Wisconsin accent and a jump shot that needs no introduction.
I've had a decade of this. The kid I want you to meet is every one of them at once.
He arrived the second week of the season. Transferred in from a town I won't name. Played point guard, could see the floor in ways the other kids couldn't, and was lost inside every defensive concept we run — because three different schools had taught him three different ways to do all of it. His instinct was to overhelp on every ball screen. Not arrogance. Survival. He was carrying four systems and none of them were ours.
First, unlearn
My first rule with a mid-season transfer: don't teach. Ask.
Before I hand him our shell drill, I sit him down and I make him explain his scheme back to me. What did your last coach call this coverage? When the screener slips, who covers the roll man? I'm not testing him. I'm mapping the seams — finding the exact places where our words don't line up with his. Half of coaching a kid like this is translation.
Here's the part that trips up most new coaches: you can't just bolt one scheme onto another. The kid's feet know what to do before his head does, and his head is still running last year's software. Unlearning is slower than learning. It takes reps, not lectures.
So we give him time. The whole team gets a lesson out of it: protecting a new teammate is part of the job, and it's the cover for the offense — everybody's moving, everybody's heard the call.
What the fire teaches
Sometime in January it clicked, the way it always eventually does. Not because I said the right thing. Because we ran the drill forty-one consecutive days, slowly, without letting the game outrace the understanding. Same as the brisket — you don't hurry the stall, you hold the fire and let the flat pull through.
The boy ended the season averaging double figures. But that's the least of it. What I remember is the day he corrected a freshman on the pick-and-roll coverage, in our words, without looking at me first for permission. That's the transfer in. When a kid stops translating and starts using your language without checking, that's the process finishing its work.
The four-step catch-up, in brief
- Map the seams. Have them teach you their last system before you teach them yours.
- Cut it to one rule. For ball-screen defense, one coverage, one voice, one call. Everything else builds on it.
- Rep daily, slowly. Forty-one drill days beat four long lectures every time. Unlearning is repetition with patience.
- Let them teach. The moment a transfer corrects a starter, quietly, in your words, the whole roster is one team.
The same clock
This is why I made the film. A brisket and a basketball game run on the same clock — four quarters, each its own fire, and nobody wins by opening the lid at halftime to check. The kid who transfers in mid-season is the stubborn stall in a long smoke. You don't crank the heat. You hold steady, you let the connective tissue break down, and you trust the process to do what it's been doing all along.
Military towns are full of these kids, and they're not a disruption to the roster — they're the whole reason the roster works. They've learned a kind of resilience the drill doesn't measure. My job is to meet them where they are, set the fire low, and get out of the way.
It's the closest thing I've found to coaching that actually matters.
Buildings on the same foundation
Alwyn runs the drill tower sims I've been trading notes with — hydraulics on a rig and a full-court press, it turns out, teach the same sixth sense. What he's doing with his crew is what I do with my kids, just set on red dust instead of oak floors.
Related: the brisket rub field guide — why the ratio, not the rule, is where patience lives. And the film itself: Trust the Process.