Trey Mourning

† 🏀 I help teenagers stop overthinking and play more decisively. More than 50+ elite youth basketball families coached. Start here 👇🏽

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

I learned Portuguese in 2014 just to go to the World Cup in Brazil with my dad, @iamzo33. We never made the trip — my college commitment came first. But I kept the language.

12 years later, I watched a World Cup match with him in the city I grew up in.

Worth the wait.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

If your family has the ability to invest at least $10,000 a year into your teenager’s basketball journey, you need to understand this:

Spending more doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting the right outcome.

If your player is a sophomore, you have roughly two years.

You don’t have time to wait for the system to change.

I broke down what you need to know about navigating the college recruiting landscape.

🔗 Watch the full video: https://t.co/jtX9WUDef2

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

@LegacySiu Suarez.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

If you’re rich and you want your teenager to play basketball in college, this is for you.

In this video, I break down what you need to know about the college recruiting process and how to make the most of the years you have left in high school with your teenager.

I’m Trey Mourning, founder of Coach Comma. I help families of elite youth basketball players cut through the noise and politics of high-level travel and varsity basketball and get real results.

I’ve played professional basketball in the U.S. and overseas, spent time in Houston Rockets training camp, and came out of high school with full-ride offers from Duke, Florida, Georgetown, and more.

More than 50 families have gone through my program, with some going on to earn college scholarships.

If you want more information on how to navigate this process, go to the link in my bio to watch the full video.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

"Get out of the way and let a professional be a professional."

Said that to my players on film last week, breaking down a press break. Half the time the right read is to move, clear the space, and let the guy with the ball do the thing he spent four years learning to do.

Then I said the part that matters more than the basketball.

The more decisions you make a player make, the higher the probability they mess one up. Give somebody five things to think about and there's a chance they get each of the five wrong.

Parents do this in the driveway before every game.

Rebound. Be aggressive. Talk on defense. Don't force it. Have fun.

That's five, and the last two contradict each other.

So the whole assignment this week is one sentence.

Before the next game, give exactly one instruction.

One. The thing that would actually change the game if they did it. Say it once in the car, then say nothing else about basketball until they bring it up.

You'll want to add the second one. Adding the second one is how the first one gets lost.

More than 50 families have come through the Varsity Performance System. Link in my bio.

What's your one?

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

Be selfish in your development is the right instruction and the hardest one to actually follow in a full gym. I spent a whole offseason getting better with my strong hand because the left one looked ugly and people were watching. A voluntary Saturday sorts that out fast. You find out who's working on the thing they're worst at and who's just polishing.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

Alonzo Mourning is my veteran. That's different from being my coach, and the difference is the whole post.

A coach teaches you the job. A veteran has already paid for the job and can tell you what it costs.

Every player I know who lasted had one.

I've sat in a lot of rooms with parents of elite youth basketball players, and I can count on no hands the ones who had a veteran of their own.

Trainers. Club coaches. School coaches. Somebody for strength, somebody for the ankle, somebody running the camp. Every one of those people hired to coach the teenager.

Zero hired to coach the parent.

Tonight. One page, line down the middle.

Left: every person currently coaching your teenager. Include the unpaid ones.

Right: every person coaching you. Not friends. People who already made the decisions in front of you and will tell you honestly how they went.

For most families it isn't close. That gap isn't evidence you did this wrong. It's evidence the industry got built for the fifteen-year-old and nobody built anything for the person financing it, driving it, and lying awake after it.

More than 50 families have come through the Varsity Performance System. Link in my bio.

Who's on the right side of your page?

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

Half of that enjoyment gets killed after practice, not during it. You can run the best ninety minutes of a player's week and the ride home undoes it, and under thirteen the parent is the one holding that end. Coaches take the blame for a lot of quitting that actually happened in a car.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

The thing parents underrate is that she comes out of those games having stopped waiting for the ball, and that habit outlives the age group by years. The thing they overrate is toughness. And in most houses nobody actually asks her whether she wants to play up, it just gets decided at the kitchen table.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

@Coach_DeMarco @zg_newengland Naming the award after a behavior instead of a stat line is the part most programs skip. A hustle ball gets carried home and the parent has to ask what it was for, which is a conversation nobody ever schedules. Who picks it, you or the team?

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

Week four is where the roster actually sorts itself. Nobody quits in week one, and the guys still walking in at week nine have decided something about themselves that no December game is going to teach them. Do the parents get told what week four is for, or do they just see the schedule?

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

You're measuring what a program produces instead of what it advertises, and that's already better than anything a parent gets handed on a visit. The gap is that it counts who finished, not who left. Two programs can post the same placement record while one kept almost everybody and the other quietly churned half a roster a year, and those are very different rooms to put a teenager in.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

@RyanJMoore4 The twenty isn't the expensive part. It's that somebody found a line item nobody can refuse once the schedule is already set, and the family eats it on top of the gas and the hotel. The sign-up is the only leverage anybody in this thread actually has and nobody uses it.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

It sounds like the grind is the whole story for you, and the sore body and the yelling are real. I lived that part. Where I'd push back is the money, because the parents I actually sit with are not thinking about a check, they're scared their teenager quits something at sixteen and regrets it at thirty. That fear makes worse decisions than greed ever does.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

@JaMarkkusEvans At four there's nothing to manage yet, and that's the fun part. The only thing worth protecting is that going outside stays his idea.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

It sounds like you're putting the failure on adults folding rather than teenagers being teenagers, and I think that's mostly right. What I'd add is why they fold. A parent two years and a lot of money into this hears "he's not playing" as a bad investment instead of the thing the teenager actually needs to sit in. "You committed, go figure it out" is a much easier sentence from the bench than it is from the passenger seat at ten at night.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

Joel Embiid was a skinny teenager on a court in South Africa when I met him around 2011.

I was there with the NBA, with my dad. Maybe a freshman in high school. Nobody in that gym was pointing at him saying that one's a franchise center.

I think about it every time a parent tells me where their teenager ranks.

The ranking is a photograph. Everybody treats it like a forecast.

One question this weekend. Ask your teenager to name a player who was behind them two years ago and is ahead now.

They'll have a name immediately. Every player does.

Then ask what changed. And push past the first answer, because the first answer is almost always "he grew." Height is real and it happens, and it is also the easiest place in the world to hide. Ask again.

The second answer is the one worth having. He started working. He stopped caring what people thought. He got a coach who told him the truth.

Nobody gets to be the victim of somebody else's growth spurt.

More than 50 families have come through the Varsity Performance System. Link in my bio.

Who was behind you and ended up ahead of you?

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

Agree on the clock. What extending costs is the thing coaches don't price in. Eight minutes becomes fifteen on offensive rebounding because it's going badly, and that's seven more minutes of the same two players failing in front of everybody. The fix for the team is a bill for them, and neither one will ever mention it. Still extend it. Just say out loud why you're staying in it, so nobody in the gym decides it's about him.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

A group chat gives them the content. It can't give them the script, and the ride home is the one part nobody rehearses. A dad who just watched a rough one has four silent minutes to fill and he fills them with the only thing he has, which is the box score. Run the same circle questions at the parents in that chat. Then the car is a repeat instead of a rebuttal.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

The airball is the part of that story people skip, and it's the reason it worked. Make the first one and he watches a three star make a shot and drives home. Twenty seven of the thirty two players who have filled out a Performance Roadmap for me wrote down the same fear, a mistake being seen and punished. Not one said losing. What you just described is the thing that actually gets evaluated and nobody sells a camp for it. The one move a parent can make tonight is to stop breaking the bad game down in the car.

[Trey Mourning @treymourning]

He'll be ready for the shooting part, and that's the part everybody gets right. What decides November is whether he can take a hard correction in front of the group and still want the ball on the next possession. An empty gym can't teach him that. If you can, put him somewhere with somebody who will tell him he's wrong.