My Biggest Fear Is Being a Clown
I watched a coach put in two hours of “instruction” recently and do almost nothing right.
He didn’t own the gym. He didn’t correct anything that mattered. He didn’t give a single piece of usable feedback. Players ran through drills like they were waiting for a bus, and he just stood there watching, occasionally nodding, occasionally clapping, occasionally saying something vague and encouraging that meant absolutely nothing. Families paid for this. They drove across town for this. They cleared their day for this.
At the end, I heard him tell the group to be careful about spending time with “clowns.”
That’s the part that stuck with me. That’s the part that really bothered me.
What I’m Actually Afraid Of
I’m always asking players what they’re afraid of. No one asks me.
A lot of people would say failure. Not me. I fail constantly, in sessions, in conversations, in decisions. Failure is information. You take it, adjust, and go again. Success doesn’t scare me either. I already hold myself to the highest standard I can manage, so higher expectations have nowhere scary to take me.
My biggest fear is more specific and more embarrassing.
My biggest fear is being a clown.
I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean the concrete thing I watched: a person standing in front of players who needed real instruction, taking two hours of their time, collecting money from their families, and delivering essentially nothing, while being entirely convinced he was helping. That person. That outcome. I am terrified of becoming that.
What It Actually Means to Waste Someone’s Time
What bothers me isn’t just incompetence. It’s the combination of low standards and complete self-satisfaction. That coach wasn’t troubled by what he wasn’t giving. He wasn’t scanning the gym for what wasn’t working. He was just there, present and unbothered, doing his version of the thing.
His version had no accountability, no corrections, and no real instruction. Time passed and things moved. It looked like development, minus the friction that development actually requires.
I think about this every time a player I work with struggles in the “real world” of basketball. Maybe they don’t play well, or they don’t get what they’ve been working toward. My first thought isn’t “they must not be working hard enough.” It’s about what I might be missing: what I haven’t taught clearly, what I haven’t reinforced enough, what I don’t understand about how this player learns. When someone isn’t succeeding, where have I gone wrong?
That’s where the responsibility sits.
The Clown Doesn’t Know He’s the Clown
What haunts me most is the warning he gave at the end. Stay away from bad coaches. Invest in good instruction. Be careful who you trust with your development.
All true. All things I believe. All things I would say.
But he was saying them without looking in the mirror.
The question I can’t shake is whether I’m ever in that position without knowing it. Is there a version of me giving the warning while being the problem? That’s the fear: the gap between what I think I’m delivering and what I’m actually delivering might be bigger than I know.
I mess up every day. Most of the time I catch it in the moment — a correction I almost let slide, an explanation that didn’t land, a drill that wasn’t doing what I needed it to do — and I fix it right there. That’s the part I can see. The part that keeps me up is the mistake I don’t catch, the one that walks out of the gym with the player and never comes back to me.
The only answer I have is to keep closing that gap on purpose. Ask for feedback I don’t want. Study what I do, not just what I intend to do. Watch sessions back and be brutal. Care about results more than I care about looking like someone who cares about results.
Why This Is Worth Saying Out Loud
I think it matters that coaches say this. Youth basketball is full of people who got into it for the right reasons. But good people can still be bad coaches, and almost no one is around to tell them: do better, do it this way, why didn’t you do this?
So the feedback stays positive, because families keep coming back, not because the coaching is good. Over the years the standard erodes quietly, until what you’re doing looks nothing like what you tell yourself you’re doing. For some coaches, the standard was never there to begin with.
I’m not immune to that drift. Nobody is.
So I keep the fear. It’s useful. Every time a player isn’t getting it, every time a session feels flat, every time I watch tape and see something I didn’t catch in the room, that fear tells me to figure it out.
I would rather be afraid of being a clown than be comfortable being one.
Aram runs Hoops College, a basketball training program in Charlotte. The program is the offer that follows from the argument. → hoopscollege.com