The right things come down to program specific outcome goals. These have been narrowed to four categories. Psychological Skills is the primary, and most significant category. This category details the foundational skills, performance skills, personal development skills, and team skills. Though the additional categories of Individual Sport Specific Skills, Individual Physical Skills, and Team Systems are key to successful concentration and leadership within a basketball program, their real purpose is to serve as a context in which to practice the Psychological Skills that lie at the heart of concentration. These skills are trans-disciplinary. Another way of stating this is these are the skills that lie at the heart of the worthy truths that will bring significance into ones life in any context!

Ehrman (2011) states “ Sports need not be seen as separate from academics; rather they can work hand in hand with academics to educate and equip the whole person” (p. 205). As an athletics program within an educational institution it is imperative that we follow this co-curricular approach within our program. In fact, because a great many trans-disciplinary as well as disciplinary skills are covered within the provision of a well organized basketball program, the general "right things" provide here can and should be narrowed by attaching the many appropriate curriculum outcomes which are in fact key outcome of the program itself.

The co-curricular approach not only proves a programs academic value to the school community, but the attachment of academic disciplinary and trans-disciplinary outcome goals to each component actually serves to further define exactly what coaches are working so hard to teach. Additionally, when coaches and educators utilize a common language they better serve the student athlete.

It is recommended that coaches research the local, State/Provincial, and/or national curriculum applied within your region. A model of the utilization of the Co-Curricular Approach is provided within the Practical Application section.

Concentration: The Right Way!

In all contexts of life it is our relationships with the people around us that are the greatest indicators of our success in achieving significance. Chapman (2015) contends that there are “five ways that people speak and understand emotional love” (p.18). These love languages consist of words of affirmation, quality time, giving/receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Chapman goes on to explain that each individual tends to utilize one or two of these five languages. It is through our common respect for those within our community that we invest time in getting to know them and thus come to understand their needs, wants, and how they communicate love. Only through respecting and recognizing differences does it become possible to then choose to act to communicate emotional love in a way that is well received and understood by the people around us.

Concentration: The Right TIME!

The “right time” to focus on something is actually at the heart of concentration itself. “Different situations make different attentional demands” (Williams, 2015, p. 307). Nideffer (as cited in Williams, 2015) explains focus is constantly shifting between the dimensions of attention on two axes. Broad-Narrow and Internal-External. Broad-Narrow can be likened to a camera lens focusing on the overall picture or zooming in on the finer details of what is being seen. Internal-external refers to whether one is focused on external events or internal cognition. This breaks concentration into four quadrants in which our concentration is constantly shifting. These four quadrants take the form of Assessing (Broad-External), Analyzing (Broad-Internal), Rehearsing (Narrow-Internal), and Performing (Narrow-External).