Reporters who attended Thursday’s Nets apply in Brooklyn had been greeted by a wierd sight.
Unfold throughout three cabinets on the far finish of the courtroom sat 18 black soccer helmets with white facemasks. “Brooklyn” was written throughout the facet of every helmet within the staff’s fancy, old-school font.
No, the helmets weren’t reserved for an upcoming crossover occasion with Giants and Jets gamers. The helmets are being utilized by the Nets as a novel device for culture-building functions.
“I’m going to keep it a secret, but if somebody else wants to tell you, they can,” Cam Thomas mentioned.
Fortunately, head coach Jordi Fernandez was keen to elucidate what soccer gear needed to do with Nets basketball.
Fernandez credited his assistants for the concept. Every participant on the roster has their very own helmet, and there may be additionally a staff helmet. Like in soccer, gamers get helmet stickers for adhering to offensive and defensive staples, but additionally for private milestones and achievements. It’s a cool manner for coaches to acknowledge gamers for what they do for the staff.
“After games, people have chains, but we have those helmets, and this is great to have,” Dennis Schröder mentioned.
The historical past of helmet stickers is a bit difficult. In response to sportdecals.com, it began with Ohio State soccer coach Ernie Biggs within the fall of 1968. He was on the lookout for methods to encourage his gamers and selected to offer them a sticker for lesser-celebrated in-game achievements, like throwing a key block within the fourth quarter of a tie recreation. Different high-major packages like Michigan, Florida State and Georgia adopted the idea through the years. It stays an vital soccer development at this time.
Nonetheless, some declare that the apply of awarding helmet stickers truly started with Jim Younger, a former assistant coach at Miami in 1965. In his ebook “Rutgers Football: A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet,” Michael Pellowski wrote that former defensive backs coach Dewey King was one of many first to award helmet stickers in 1961.
Now the development has in some way discovered its manner into basketball through Fernandez and his workers.
“You can get stickers for being really good in the weight room,” Fernandez defined. “You can get stickers for doing your shooting metric drills and so forth. It’s not just for the guys who play a lot of minutes, so we try to do it in a way where everybody can get them. Some helmets will look like they have more stickers than others, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you can work; you can get them in different ways.”
And which Nets participant has amassed essentially the most stickers to date, you ask?
“I don’t know. I’m up there, though,” Schröder mentioned. “I gotta put some on right now, but I got a lot of stickers. I want to have a lot more.”
The helmet stickers are simply the newest instance of Fernandez’s willingness to suppose outdoors the field in terms of establishing a novel tradition in Brooklyn. Throughout coaching camp, the Nets had common free throw contests that used a golf-like scoring system.
“It’s different,” Schröder mentioned. “I mean, I’ve been in the league for 12 years. Never had a training camp like we had before. That was by far the hardest. I’m used to it because I’m from Europe. How we do training camps over there is two-a-days with tape and so, I’m used to it, but the structure, just coming in and setting the tone early, even in the summertime and bringing things in like that, where everybody buys into it and embraces it means a lot. For us, for the group, for everybody having fun with it as well.”
