December 01, 2025   |   Tagged Skills,

What is initiative and why is it important for basketball and for life?

What is Initiative?
Imagine you want to build a house. You must begin with a plan--an architectural, structural, and foundational plan—where to build, how to build, what materials, and who will do the work. In basketball, you need a plan—what skills to develop, what coaches and programs to work with, a bigger dream and goal to aim for.

Initiative is crucial for sports. Unlike building a house, you can’t turn your student athlete over to a coach and get the product you want. Many parents make this mistake. They think of their student like raw material to be shaped and modeled by an expert into a premiere athlete. Coaches have the same trouble, they want to treat their players like inanimate objects, like clay, that need to be molded by their hand.

Instead, your work as a parent is to help your son or daughter become their own architect of their future--to provide them the resources and the tools to drive their own initiative and advance their own dreams. Your work as a coach is to create dynamic players who with their own spark of creation and inspiration work with you to create a legacy team.

Here are some ways parents, coaches and student athletes can move the initiative to where it can make the greatest impact.

What is the definition of initiative?

Initiative is connected to many amazing words: innovative, capability, creativity. The word came out of the Latin meaning beginning. It means the power to take the lead.

What is initiative for sports?
Sports requires power and energy. Who is driving this for the athlete? If an athlete has no internal power, no initiative, they will not gain much momentum. If an athlete must be energized from the outside to work hard, to set goals, to be a better player, this will lead to an energy crisis.

Sports initiative requires athletes to set big goals with the discipline and passion to commit to these goals.

THREE QUALITIES NEEDED FOR INTIATIVE

• Confidence
• Passion
• Commitment
  
  
  

How confident is the student athlete?
Confidence is the mindset that you can achieve what you want to achieve. Confident means you can understand you need to improve and you can advocate for yourself to get the help and do the work necessary to improve those deficits. Confident athletes take initiative.

How passionate is the student athlete about their sport?
One of the biggest energy crises is lack of passion. If your son or daughter LOVES basketball—rejoice! This is the engine behind big dreams. Passion is a heart issue. A kid who doesn’t have their heart in the game can’t succeed. A passion crisis is a serious issue. Sadly, too many parents and coaches don’t know how to solve a passion crisis. The great sorrow is when a son or daughter is missing passion or when their passion is going in a destructive direction. This requires wisdom and discernment to fix. Initiative is impossible without passion.

How committed is the athlete?
Commitment is like glue—the stronger your commitment, the more follow through you will have. A student athlete can have passion without commitment. Commitment is self-discipline and patience. Commitment is the discipline to do what is difficult especially during difficulty. Commitment is the patience to weather the long journey of the dream. Helping a student built the muscles necessary for commitment will give them the ability to take the initiative.

About NBC Basketball
Since 1971, NBC Basketball has been training athletes to be wise leaders on and off the court. For more information about this intensive training program visit, www.nbccamps.com.