The Coach Can Play Chess. The Players Should Play Checkers.

In 2022, Provo High won one game. When I took over in 2024, the program was coming off multiple losing seasons in a row. In March 2026, my third season, we won the 4A state championship. It was the program's 18th banner and the first in 18 years.

People ask what the system was. The honest answer is that there wasn't much of one. That was the point.

#Who's playing chess?

There's a version of coaching that looks like chess. A dozen sets. Counters to the counters. Different rules for different situations. On defense, a menu: switch this screen, hedge that one, ICE the side pick, go zone on the second dead ball, man on made baskets.

Chess can win. The question is who's playing it.

The coach can play chess. He can scout, plan, make calls, and adjust. The players should be playing checkers. Once the call is made, every player's move should be simple, obvious, and automatic. The coach's job, the whole job, is teaching well enough to turn his chess into their checkers.

When a coach can't do that, he hands the chess board to his players. Now five teenagers are trying to remember which coverage goes with which screen while the ball is moving. That's how coaches out-coach themselves. The playbook gets thicker, the principles get thinner, and players start thinking when they should be playing.

I'm not an elite enough teacher, and high school players don't have enough reps, to make a big chess game feel like checkers. So I kept the board small: be simple, and be great at what we do.

#What "simple" actually looked like

Simple didn't mean no structure. It meant a small number of principles that never changed.

On offense: If we drove baseline and you were in the opposite slot, you 45-cut. Every time. You didn't have to wonder whether we were in a set or whether this was the possession where it was different. The drive told you what to do.

On defense: If you were the low man, you were the backside help. Period. We switched 1 through 5 on the ball. No coverage calls, no "what are we doing on this one?" in the huddle.

Because the principles never changed, two things happened:

Players stopped thinking and started playing. The read was automatic. Their brains were free to compete.
Accountability got easy. When the principle is clear, a mistake is obvious to everyone, including the player who made it. Nobody could say "I thought we were doing something else." Film sessions became short and honest.

Our guys were confident for two reasons: they'd put in the work, and they didn't have to think out there. Those two things feed each other. Clear principles make reps count, and reps on clear principles become instinct.

#Principles, not rules

I had zero rules for my team. I had a lot of principles. That difference matters more than anything else in this post.

A rule is meant to never be broken. It tells you what to do and assumes the situation will always look the way the rule-writer pictured it. When it doesn't, the player has two bad options: follow the rule anyway, or break it and feel like he did something wrong. Either way, he's thinking instead of playing.

A principle is a shared belief that guides decisions. It carries its why with it. Because every player knows why we do something, they can make the right call even when the possession gets weird.

Take "low man is backside help." As a rule, it's an instruction: stand here. As a principle, it's a belief: we never give up a layup to a drive we could have seen coming, and the player closest to the rim is the one who protects it. Now when the low man is also guarding the other team's best shooter, or the drive comes from an unusual angle, he doesn't freeze. He knows what the principle is protecting, so he knows what to do.

Same with the 45 cut. The belief underneath it is that a driver should never be left without a target. The cut is just how that belief shows up when the drive goes baseline.

Principles are also what make accountability fair. With rules, you judge a player on compliance: did he do the thing? With principles, you judge the decision: did he act on what we believe? That's a conversation players can learn from, not just a correction.

And principles are what make the chess-and-checkers split work. The coach can call anything he wants from the sideline, because every call lives inside beliefs the players already share. A new set doesn't need new rules. It needs to fit the principles.

#Does the research back this up?

I wanted to know if this was just a coach's hunch, so I went looking. There isn't a study that says "simple systems win state titles." Nobody can run that experiment. But the research on why it works is strong, and it comes from three directions.

#1. Role ambiguity hurts confidence, adds anxiety, and lowers performance

Sport psychologists Mark Beauchamp, Steven Bray, Mark Eys, and Albert Carron spent years studying "role ambiguity" in interdependent teams: how unclear a player is about their job. They measured it on offense and defense separately, across four questions every player is asking whether they say it or not:

What am I responsible for?
What exactly do I do to carry it out?
How am I being evaluated?
What happens if I don't do it?

What they found:

Players with more role ambiguity had lower role performance, and the link ran through confidence. Ambiguity lowers a player's belief that he can do the job, and that lower belief drags performance down. (Beauchamp et al., 2002)
In a study of high school rugby and field hockey teams, role ambiguity explained roughly a fifth of the variance in players' confidence in their roles, on both offense and defense. (Beauchamp et al., 2005)
Being unclear about the scope of your offensive responsibilities predicted pre-game cognitive anxiety, the worrying, racing-mind kind. (Beauchamp et al., 2003)
Clearer roles were tied to higher athlete satisfaction too. (Eys et al., 2003)

That list of four questions is exactly what clear principles answer. Low man is backside help answers the first two. Everyone can see when you don't answers the last two.

#2. Thinking your way through a skill under pressure makes it worse

Sian Beilock's work on "choking" shows that well-learned skills run on autopilot, and pressure breaks them when it pushes athletes back into consciously monitoring what they're doing step by step. (Beilock & Carr, 2001)

A player who has to stop and ask "which coverage are we in?" is doing exactly that: pulling a decision out of instinct and into conscious, deliberate thought. In a state tournament gym, that's where mistakes live.

#3. More options means slower decisions

Hick's Law, one of the oldest findings in psychology, says decision time goes up as the number of options goes up. It rises on a curve, not a straight line, so each added option costs a little less than the last. But in a game decided in tenths of a second, every option has a cost.

Just as important: the same research shows that when choices are predictable and well-practiced, the cost shrinks. That's the real payoff of principles. You're not only reducing options. You're making the right option so familiar that it stops feeling like a choice.

#What the best coaches actually do

The obvious pushback is that plenty of great coaches run complicated stuff. So I looked at four of them, from the simplest systems to the most complex. What I found is that the complexity is real, but it always sits on top of clarity. It never replaces it.

#Jim Boeheim: one defense, for decades

Boeheim went to the 2-3 zone full time around 1996 and built a Hall of Fame career on it: more than 900 wins, a national title, and nine Final Fours. By the 2010s, Syracuse never switched to man. When people asked why he didn't change defenses after an opponent got hot, his answer was basically: a man-to-man coach doesn't switch to zone after three made shots, so why would I? "We're a zone team."

That's the simplest system in modern college basketball. But Boeheim himself pushed back on the idea that it was easy. "Zone is complicated," he said. It looks simple because every detail had been drilled for years. One player remembered Boeheim telling him not to overthink the technical movements, just to work so hard in practice that the details became automatic.

And here's the part I love: opponents knew exactly what was coming, and it didn't matter. Teams could practice attacking a 2-3 all week, but their scout team couldn't imitate the way Syracuse played it. Knowing isn't the same as stopping.

#Tony Bennett: two systems, rigid roles

Bennett won the 2019 national title with his father's two systems: the pack line defense and the blocker-mover offense. In the blocker-mover, you're either a blocker (a screener) or a mover, and the roles don't blur. The pack line exists for one reason: to have help already in place before it's needed, instead of chaotic help that shows up late. Bennett has described it as a team system where no one strays from the pack at the expense of the group.

That is role clarity, built into the scheme itself. You always know your job because the system assigns it.

#Rick Pitino: a few principles, many situations

Pitino is the coach people point to for complexity. He pioneered the match-up press, changes defenses constantly, and is the only coach to take three different programs to the Final Four. Coaches who teach his match-up press admit it's harder to learn than a zone press and takes real practice time.

But look closer. There's a core set of press principles that apply to every variation. Even choosing which press to run follows a simple trigger:

Opponent scores on a jump shot: match-up press
Opponent scores in the paint: 1-2-1-1
Opponent hits a 3: half-court trap

And his core emphasis is dead simple. His staff charts deflections in every practice and every game, and he hammers that one message all season: stay active, keep your hands busy, knock the ball loose.

Pitino's complexity is more situations covered by the same principles, not more instructions per situation. It also costs years. His freshmen have struggled with the learning curve, and high school coaches who run his press start teaching it at the freshman and JV levels so their players understand it by varsity.

#Dan Hurley: maximum complexity, maximum teaching

Hurley is the strongest test of my theory. UConn's offense has hundreds of plays with multiple reads off many of them. Going into most games, they have about a dozen opponent-specific alignments with five or six variations each. Hurley calls it "layering actions": different outcomes out of the same offensive shell to keep a defense guessing. Back-to-back national titles say it works.

But every call Hurley makes from the sideline comes with a set of decision-making principles his players have drilled since the summer. He makes them watch long film clips to learn the variables, and he quizzes them on it. Notice the phrase "the same offensive shell." The layers hang off a structure the players already know cold.

That's elite teaching, and even Connecticut high school coaches who study him say you can't take what Hurley does and teach it to high school kids. The complexity is only affordable because of the teaching, the practice time, and the players.

#The pattern

Line the four up and it's clear:

Boeheim and Bennett won by being simple and being better at their system than anyone else was at preparing for it.
Pitino added complexity by expanding the situations his principles cover, not by adding new ones.
Hurley added the most complexity, but hung every layer on a shell and principles his players already owned, and paid for it with massive teaching time.

None of them sacrificed clarity. The complex coaches just built more on top of it.

Put another way: all four coaches play chess. Pitino chooses the press. Hurley chooses the alignment and the layer. But none of their players do. A made jump shot tells Pitino's players which press they're in. Hurley's players run their part of a shell they already know cold. The chess stays on the sideline, and the players play checkers.

#What elite teaching looks like

The best-studied example of an elite basketball teacher is John Wooden. In the 1974-75 season, researchers Roland Tharp and Ronald Gallimore sat in on 15 of his practices and logged 2,326 separate teaching acts. Just over half, 50.3%, were pure instruction: specific statements about what to do or how to do it. Not praise, not criticism. Instruction. They also noted his teaching was short, dense, fast, and tightly organized.

A similar study of Jerry Tarkanian, whose teams ran a complex defensive system, found that almost a third of his practice behaviors were spent teaching offensive and defensive strategy.

That's what "elite teacher" means in practice: an enormous volume of clear, specific instruction. If you want to run a complex system, that's the bill.

#Why college players can hold more than high schoolers

There's one more piece that explains why complexity works at UConn and would sink most high school teams.

In 1980, Allard, Graham, and Paarsalu found that expert basketball players recognize and remember patterns of play far better than less-skilled players. Experts see the floor in chunks. Where a young player sees ten people moving, an experienced player sees one familiar action.

Learning research has a name for the flip side: the expertise reversal effect. Beginners learn best with lots of structure and guidance. Experts often learn better with less, because the extra detail becomes noise.

So Hurley's players can hold more partly because he's a great teacher, and partly because they already see the game in bigger pieces. High school players mostly don't yet. That's exactly why each principle has to carry more weight at our level.

#Simple doesn't mean predictable

The other pushback I hear is "if you're that simple, teams will just take it away." Sure, they know what's coming. Knowing and stopping aren't the same thing. Boeheim proved that for 40-plus years.

Here's how I think about it: if you're better at what you do than your opponent is at preparing for you, you win. An opponent gets a few days and a scouting report to prepare for us. We got the whole season to get great at the same few things. When our 45 cut arrives on time, on every baseline drive, at full speed, it doesn't matter that it was on the scouting report. A player reacting without hesitation beats a defender who knows what's coming but has only practiced guarding it for two days.

#What this doesn't mean

Simple isn't easy. We drilled these principles relentlessly. Simplicity is what let us get great reps on fewer things.
Principles aren't the absence of reads. A baseline drive is a read. Low man is a read. The difference is that the read triggers a known answer instead of opening a menu.
Complexity isn't wrong. It's expensive. Every layer you add has to fit inside your principles without breaking them, or at least without breaking too many. You pay for it in teaching time, and you need players experienced enough to hold it.

#The takeaway

Play all the chess you want on the sideline. Just don't hand the board to your players.

Before you add a set or a coverage, ask whether every player on your roster could tell you, without thinking, what their job is when it happens. If the answer is yes, you've turned your chess into their checkers. If the answer is no, you're not adding a weapon. You're adding hesitation: a player who has to stop and decide, who can't execute at full speed, and who plays with less confidence because he isn't sure he's right.

#References

#Research

Allard, F., Graham, S., & Paarsalu, M. E. (1980). Perception in sport: Basketball. Journal of Sport Psychology, 2, 14–21.
Beauchamp, M. R., Bray, S. R., Eys, M. A., & Carron, A. V. (2002). Role ambiguity, role efficacy, and role performance: Multidimensional and mediational relationships within interdependent sport teams. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 6, 229–242.
Beauchamp, M. R., Bray, S. R., Eys, M. A., & Carron, A. V. (2003). The effect of role ambiguity on competitive state anxiety. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 25(1), 77–92.
Beauchamp, M. R., Bray, S. R., Fielding, A., & Eys, M. A. (2005). A multilevel investigation of the relationship between role ambiguity and role efficacy in sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 6, 289–302.
Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701–725.
Eys, M. A., Carron, A. V., Beauchamp, M. R., & Bray, S. R. (2003). Role ambiguity in sport teams. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 25(4), 534–550.
Gallimore, R., & Tharp, R. (2004). What a coach can teach a teacher, 1975–2004: Reflections and reanalysis of John Wooden's teaching practices. The Sport Psychologist, 18(2), 119–137.
Hick, W. E. (1952). On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4(1), 11–26.
Kalyuga, S. (2007). Expertise reversal effect and its implications for learner-tailored instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 19, 509–539.
Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1976). Basketball's John Wooden: What a coach can teach a teacher. Psychology Today, 9(8), 74–78.

#Coaching sources

ESPN, "Understanding the Zen of the Syracuse zone" (2016)
Sports Illustrated, "Jim Boeheim's zone-centric defense the key to Syracuse's success" (2012)
NPR, "Always In The Zone, Syracuse Is Hard To Beat" (2013)
Grantland, "Pack-Line Progeny: How Tony Bennett Used His Father's System" (2015)
Card Chronicle, "An Extensive Look at Rick Pitino's Defensive System" (2012)
Coach's Clipboard, "Match-Up Press Defense"
FOX Sports, "Dan Hurley's desire to adapt helped UConn evolve into an offensive juggernaut" (2024)
Sports Illustrated, "Inside the Dichotomy of Dan Hurley" (2026)