Jaume Ponsarnau on working as a coaching staff: ‘It is always possible to learn’

It is often said that to create a successful basketball team, every player has to understand their role and know exactly what they are expected to do, putting the group ahead of the individual.

The same applies also off the court among the long list of coaches, assistant coaches and staff members who form the team behind the team. Within that group of sidelines and backroom staff, everybody needs to work together, carrying out their roles within a collective framework to support the players on the court in the best possible way.

Nobody understands that more than Valencia Basket Coach Jaume Ponsarnau, who has filled virtually every imaginable coaching position since he started in the mid-1990s as the Under 14 coach at Tarrega, a small town an hour’s drive west of Barcelona. Recalling those early days, Ponsarnau’s first piece of advice for aspiring coaches is simple: enjoy yourself, because that will also help the players enjoy themselves and improve.

“I believe the most important quality for a coach is honesty.”

“I was playing, but I had problems with my back and soon discovered that I enjoyed coaching more than playing!” he recalled. “So from that moment, I put 100% of my mentality towards becoming a coach as soon as possible. I was 24 years old and for my first season, I was coach of the Under 14 team in Tarrega. In the second year I was the coach of the Under 23 team and I was only one or two years older than the players, who were my old teammates.

“Then I coached the women’s team at Tarrega and we had a lot of success, winning four promotions in seven seasons. When you are working with young teams or women players at that level, they did not want to be professional players. It wasn’t a reality for them. They just wanted to enjoy the competitive experience and develop their [game]. And the same for me – at that time, I never thought that I wanted to become a professional coach. I just wanted to help my players to improve and to enjoy this amazing sport with them. Eventually, many years later, the consequence was that I became a professional coach, but that was never my goal in the beginning.”

Ponsarnau’s success with Tarrega led to further opportunities and he returned to the men’s game by becoming an assistant coach at nearby professional club Manresa, having picked up some valuable lessons along the way.

“The best lesson I learned from my first few years was the importance of integrity,” he explained. “It’s very important to live every moment with your team at 100% so the team can keep improving. Even now, I believe the most important quality for a coach is honesty. To always be honest with your players, your staff, your club, and your directors. Last season at Valencia, for example, we had a roster of only 14 players, so everyone was very important, but I had to make decisions about which players were left out of the roster for which game, which was difficult. It’s possible that sometimes I didn’t make the best choice, but always I try to be honest. If you lose the capacity to be honest, you lose your credibility with the players. Not only for the next game, but forever.”

During his time as an assistant coach at Manresa – and later with the Spanish national team – Ponsarnau was eager to soak up the knowledge of the people around him: “Even if you are working with kids or women, it is always possible to learn. And when I became an assistant coach it was another opportunity to learn from the older head coaches and create my philosophy. I learned so many things from all the head coaches I worked with, starting with the importance of maintaining human relationships in a professional environment. I built my philosophy, sometimes by changing a few details or sometimes by really just copying.

“In professional sports, the most important thing – before the individual players – is the team.”

“I also discovered that when you are with a professional team, it is still important to be involved with your players as individuals, but it’s even more important to have the bigger picture of the team and the club, everything around the team. In professional sports, the most important thing – before the individual players – is the team.”

After several years coaching various teams in the Spanish ACB league and then arriving at Valencia as an assistant coach, the next big change to Ponsarnau’s life came in 2018 when he was appointed head coach at Valencia. After all the experience he had gained with his various roles over two decades, he was ready for the challenge, but Ponsarnau soon discovered the job of working with a EuroLeague team was unlike anything he had previously seen.

“It’s very different in EuroLeague. When I was coaching Manresa and other teams in the ACB, all week I was working to improve and develop the team and working with the scouts to prepare for the next game. But when you are in EuroLeague, you don’t have that time because there are so many games and so much travel. This makes it even more important to start every season with a plan, a philosophy which you can use against every opponent. But that philosophy has to be flexible. You cannot make big changes, but you always have to be ready to change some of the concepts or the mentality on offense and defense. For this, it’s very important to have an open mind so the players can also have an open mind to be ready for every situation.”

After everything he has experienced, Ponsarnau said he knows exactly what he can expect from the people around him and he emphasized the importance of a collective attitude:

“First of all, the most important thing is that everybody feels responsible for their work. And when everybody feels that responsibility, you can work together with trust. I like to use the opinions of my assistant coach, the physical trainer, the medical service. It’s very important for me to know their opinions so I can make the best decisions,” he said.

“I don’t like their opinions always being the same as mine and sometimes it’s good to have discussions or even arguments because to make the best decisions you need to consolidate the opinions of all the staff. Sometimes I change my decisions or my plans after listening to the opinions of the other members of the staff or other times my ideas are reinforced after listening to the dialogue. Basketball is not black or white and sometimes the best decisions can be found in the grey.”