About Us

Man In The Arena, LLC exists to help improve basketball coaches, players, and teams. While there are almost unlimited resources available to improve skill, technique, and overall Basketball IQ, there are few resources designed to help organize a holistic approach to growing a team’s ability to win and conquer the mental game behind basketball. Man In The Arena, LLC focuses less on the Xs and Os, and more on the mental grit, toughness, and tenacity that every team needs to succeed.

Our work organizes the moments of inspiration and triumph that both coaches and players experience in any given season so that these moments become habit, routine, and part of a team’s culture. Within these organized efforts, we focus on the easy-to-implement tools that both coaches and players can adopt to drive the kind of team culture that is required in an ever-increasing competitive basketball environment. 

Every basketball coach in America has undoubtedly asked their players this question at one time or another: “Who wants to win more? Us or them?” We use this question to try and inspire toughness within our team, yet two opposing teams can answer that question equally passionately. Our approach changes the basic nature of that question to this: “What will we do that is different than anyone else, in order to win?”

The answer to that question is and should be different for each team, depending on both player and coach personnel, your competition, and other unique variables. Thus, our work exists not to prescribe specific plays or drills, but to provide the structure by which you can answer that important question for your team. This is the work that occurs off the court, after practice, sometimes collectively, other times individually. In all cases, our work supports both coaches and players as they take their game to the next level. 

To that end, we are inspired and motivated by this now-famous quote from President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man In The Arena” speech, which also serves as the inspiration for the name of this company. This quote informs how we build the tools any team needs, the methodologies we create, and the approach we organize for long-term team success.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

     - Theodore Roosevelt, 1910