Episode
Ep 2010 Are You Adding Potential or Removing Interference?
- Published
- Sep 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 536
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://teachhoops.com/
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Summary
https://teachhoops.com/ Performance equals potential minus interference. That one equation, borrowed from Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis, is the spine of this episode, and it flips the way most coaches think about player development. Nearly all of our energy goes into the first half of that equation. Better drills, better lifts, better skill work, better film. But Coach Collins argues that some of the biggest breakthroughs in a season do not come from adding anything at all. They come from removing what is standing in front of a kid. The episode opens with a player every coach knows. Terrific on Tuesday, unrecognizable on Friday. His ability did not vanish between those two days. Something got in front of it. Coach Collins walks through why the interference we go looking for is usually external, the crowd, the refs, the matchup, when the loudest interference is almost always internal. Fear of failing. Fear of looking foolish in front of friends. Overthinking. Trying to prove something to someone in the stands. Playing to protect a stat line instead of playing to compete. That is not a skill problem, and it does not respond to skill answers. Then comes the uncomfortable part of the conversation. Sometimes the coach is the interference. A player struggles, so he gets a cue, then another cue, then a correction and one more reminder on his way out of the huddle. Now he is standing at the free throw line running six voices at once, and none of them are his own. Coach Collins makes the case that our job is not to fill a player's head. It is to free it. From there the episode turns to a simple change in the question we ask. Instead of what does he need to learn, try what is getting in the way of what he already knows. One question assumes the player is missing som…