Liddicoat Basketball is one coach, working with players aged 7 to 17 online, and in person once a month in Melbourne. It is named after my late mother's maiden name, and it is built on the idea that confidence comes before skill, not the other way round.
Cameron James, Founder and Head Coach
Liddicoat was my mum's maiden name. She is the reason I fell in love with this game, and she is the reason I coach the way I do.
She taught me to share the ball. That sounds small, and it is the whole thing. She was not teaching me an offensive concept, she was teaching me that the team matters and that other kids matter. Now I am teaching a generation of players that it is their turn to shoot.
Putting her name on the business means I have to coach in a way she would have been happy to watch. That is a useful thing to have hanging over you.
Around seven in ten Australian kids walk away from organised sport by the age of 13. Almost none of them leave because they were not good enough. They leave because nobody was really watching them.
One session a week in a stadium with thirty other kids is not coaching. It is supervision. Your child gets a handful of touches, feedback that was written for the group, and no idea what to do with the ball when they get home.
So the gap is not more training sessions. The gap is the other six days, and somebody who actually notices whether the work happened.
Most coaching does this backwards. It drills the skill and hopes confidence turns up later.
I have never seen that work on a kid who does not believe they belong. A player who is scared of getting it wrong will not shoot, will not ask for the ball, and will not try the thing you just taught them. You can run the best drill in the world at them and nothing sticks.
Get a kid believing they belong on the court, and the skills go in fast. That order is not a slogan. It decides what I do in the first month with every player I take on.
Every message with your child happens in a group chat that you are in. I do not message a player on their own at any point, for any reason.
That is not a feature I am selling you. It is the minimum, and you should expect it from every coach your child ever has. If a coach wants a private channel to your kid, that is worth a question.
I have spent a fair bit of time on child safety in Victorian basketball, and the thing that stuck with me is that most harm does not come from a stranger. It comes from someone already inside the club. An open group chat with a parent in it removes the private channel entirely, which costs me nothing and matters enormously.
I got tired of explaining the same eight things to parents in stadium car parks. What rep actually means. When tryouts are. Whether their kid has to keep playing domestic. Why their club got graded where it did.
Every association explains its own corner and nobody explains the whole thing, so parents end up on eight websites and still are not sure. So I started writing it down properly, with the source linked on every page.
It is free, it does not ask you for your email, and you do not have to buy anything to read it. If it saves you one confusing phone call it has done its job.
Two plans, both month to month, cancel any time. Or just call me and ask.
