Slappin’ Glass is joined this week by the Head Coach of the Estonian NT, Jukka Toijala! The trio explore the areas of winning with less talent, building a national team youth and top level program, and talk practice tempo and channeling competitiveness during a fun segment of “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Inside the Episode
It was another great week on the podcast as we were joined by the Head Coach of the Estonia National Team, Jukka Toijala! Coach Toijala has the Estonia National Team on the rise in Europe and we were happy to sit down with him to discuss:
- Winning with Less Talent: Coach Toijala has helped Estonia compete with some of the best teams in Europe without having the same depth of talent as other, bigger countries. In the first segment of the podcast with discuss philosophy and ideas ideas on how to play in a way that helps to compete with some of the more talented teams.
- Posting Non-Traditional Bigs: Within our conversation about competing with less talent we talked about Coach Toijala’s use of posting his bigger guards and forwards instead of big men. An interesting way to still have rim/post threats without having to go through a traditional big.
- The First Five Minutes of Practice: During “Start, Sub, or Sit?!” we discussed the importance of setting the tempo during the first part of practice and how Coach Toijala prefers to do so.