Last year, I got to coach my daughter’s recreation league basketball team.

I was really looking forward to it. I knew since I hadn’t coached that age level before that my team probably wouldn’t be as talented as many of the other teams, but I thought we’d be competitive.

I was wrong. We lost every game. There were only two games that we had any chance of winning. Most games we got our doors blown off.

By the end of the year, I was totally frustrated. To be honest, I felt like a failure. Looking back, I’ve tried to find lessons that I could learn from the season.

I think I made two big mistakes.

First, I overestimated what the girls could learn. I had in mind several plays and several defenses that I thought they could play.

We practiced our plays, and we practiced our defenses, but when we played our first game we looked lost. It seemed as if we’d never been on a basketball court before.

After a similar performance the next game, I decided we had to scale back on what we were doing. That was my second mistake.

When I tried to get back to more basic basketball, the girls got even more confused. It took me several more games before I realized that the shift had made things worse. By then, it was too late to do much about it. I tried several desperate moves, but nothing worked.

So what’s the lesson? Once you’ve decided on a strategy stick with it until you have to change.

Napoleon Hill analyzed hundreds of successful men for his book, “Think and Grow Rich.” He discovered “that every one of them had the habit of REACHING DECISIONS PROMPTLY, and of changing these decisions SLOWLY, if, and when they were changed.”

Sometimes adjustments are needed when things go wrong, but don’t be too hasty to change directions at the smallest bump in the road.

Steve DeVane