There was a moment early in USA Basketball's Youth Development Festival when clinician Don Casey, a former NBA head coach, was explaining to the participants in Colorado Springs, Colo., how to trap out of a zone defense. Caroline Doty, one of the country's top 2008 players out of Doylestown, Pa., was following convention in her positioning. Casey had other ideas and made his point to Doty, forcefully and very publicly.

At one point, Casey fired, "Where are you from?"

Doty, her body language projecting defensiveness and her tone reflecting confusion over the out-of-context question, shot back, "Philadelphia ... "

"Philadelphia?" Casey repeated in a manner that seemed almost mocking.

"Well, Doylestown ... ," Doty corrected.

About a month later, at the Nike Skills Academy in Beaverton, Ore., Nancy Lieberman, one of the sport's all-time greats, stops proceedings. She wants to present an alternative shot to a scenario they'd all just been drilling. She explains the philosophy behind using such a counter, describes the technique, demonstrates it, then has the players practice it under the watch of the academy's coaching staff.

Another month later, Chris Hansen and I are watching Doty at Nike Nationals in North Augusta, S.C. Ever the aggressor, Doty attacks the lane and, facing a wall of defense, executes a perfect floater that tear drops into the basket.

"She's using that shot from Nike Skills," noted Hansen, HoopGurlz's national director of scouting.

Is there any debating which teaching (synonymous, in my book, for coaching) method was more effective?

Nancy Lieberman

This is not a commentary about the superiority of female coaches. Rather, it is an examination of the way girls are coached. And that's not to say that Lieberman, being a woman, doesn't indeed have a better feel for coaching females than, say, Casey, whose decades of coaching experience came in the NBA and coaching men in college.

When I switched from coaching men and boys to coaching girls, I treated the experience like a science project. For nearly 10 years, I had a formal advisor, a friend who counseled at-risk teenagers. I spoke to women's college-basketball coaches I knew. I read voraciously, from girl-culture tomes such as Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman and Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons, to coaching manuals such as Catch Them Doing Good by Tony DiCicco and and Training Soccer Champions by Anson Dorrance; DiCicco and Dorrance being former head coaches of the U.S. National Soccer Team.

All that research led me to this startling discovery: Girls (and women) are wired differently than boys (and men) and therefore should be treated, taught and coached differently.

OK, when you are finishing guffawing, tell me, if this is such an obvious, fundamental fact of life, why do I continue to observe the following, over and over again:

• Coaches, particularly men, who scream at their players in public. It's difficult to imagine a more lethal combination, probably the two things that females (at least the ones I've spoken to) despise the most - yelling and being singled out for abuse in front of peers. Yes, sometimes in the very short run this actually works. I've seen it time and time again, and men seize upon those short-term results to rationalize the behavior. However, while males tend to process quickly (some would say incompletely) and move on, as well as compartmentalize their lives, females appear to lump aspects of their lives together, plus always keep everything in files. That is to say that girls can build piles of negativity - screamings, difficulties at home, mistreatment by boyfriends - haul all of it around with them on the court and, if left untreated, can be pushed to a breaking point.
• Coaches who ignore, or are ignorant of, group dynamics for girls. Ever notice how many talented teams crash and burn at the end of seasons? On high-school teams, where teammates can encounter each other on a daily basis, or club teams, where teammates literally live together for extended periods away from home, the social foundation can become toxic if not understood and nursed. That's why the Simmons and Wiseman books are on my must-read list. It's not enough to rent Mean Girls, either. A sidebar to this are coaches who insist on long team meetings right after games, particularly losses. Men are fixers, who want to dive right in and doing so is simply self-indulgent. The girls are still processing. Everyone remains emotionally charged and likely have not thought things through. Why in the world can this not wait?
• Coaches who ignore, or are ignorant of, social needs and differences. Here's another earth-shattering revelation: Girls are highly social creatures. This manifests itself in many ways - from the need to check in with one another, to not wanting to look "stupid" (mostly, by trying new things) in front of friends and teammates, to dreading feeling alone, alienated and disconnected. Not formalizing a period for checking in with each other risks losing their focus on you through practices and games. Not creating a forgiving atmosphere risks creating choreographed, rigid and unimaginative play. And failure to create an open and embracing environment probably dooms the team from the start.
• Coaches who ignore, or are ignorant of, physiological differences. In case you haven't noticed, there is an epidemic of anterior-cruciate ligament (ACL) tears among female athletes, attributable to physicological causes that, believe it or not, can be ameliorated. Coaches who dismiss daily stretches and strength-building as a "waste of time" should not be surprised when the ticking timebombs are triggered. To me, ignoring this problem is downright negligence.

This of course cannot be a full discussion of coaching mistakes made with girls, but these are my pet peeves. I will offer some solutions in a future piece, but first want to address one obvious question: Are women better suited to coach girls than men?

There has been a lot of discussion, some of it downright mean-spirited, regarding the success of male women's coaches such as (or, rather, focusing on) Geno Auriemma of Connecticut. And, certainly, there are factions who would have the women's game extricated of male influence.

I have indeed noted that the winners of the past two Nike Nationals have been coached by women (Kathy Richey-Walton of the Georgia Metros and Kimberly Davis-Powell of Essence), and that the all-time most successful women's college-basketball coach, Pat Summitt, of course is a woman. On the other hand, I've witnessed women who have gotten out of hand on the sidelines, who screamed at and grabbed their players. I've had women attempt to explain away such behavior as "cultural necessity," which is hogwash. One female executive I know recently told underlings that she didn't have to communicate with her staff. So, yes, there are women who shouldn't be coaching girls (or anyone, for that matter), just as there are men who shouldn't be.

We are a generation that works too much and feels much guilt at the dwindling "quality time" we spend with our children. As long as there are fathers with daughters, there will be men who are interested in coaching girls. We are not exactly brimming with qualified coaches and not in position to possibly overlook the next Van Chancellor. I still can't get out of my mind Ron Conner of Lancaster, Ohio, whose team won gold at the 2005 USA Basketball Development Festival, despite not being the most talented. Conner arrived in Colorado Springs armed with as much information as he could find about his players, then made a pact with his best player and point guard, which helped the group buy into an approach and common goal.

Men can be effective at coaching girls as long as they examine their own maleness and ponder its effect on their methodology. It's what I do daily with HoopGurlz.com. Still, there needs to be some institutionalized guidelines and assistance. Left to our own devices, many of us simply will go with what we think we know. And that's not enough.

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Glenn Nelson is the founder and publisher of HoopGurlz.com. He is a member of the McDonald's All-American Selection Committee, SportsShooter.com (Click for Porfolio), National Association of Photoshop Professionals, National Press Photographers Association and Online News Association. Glenn also founded and coached the Dragons and Northwest HoopGurlz select girl's basketball teams and previously was the editor-in-chief at Scout.com and a longtime, national-award-winning basketball columnist and writer for The Seattle Times. His work has appeared in several books and national magazines. He is co-author of "Rising Stars: The Ten Best Players in the NBA" (Rosen Publishing, 2002). For more on Glenn's World, click here. Glenn can be reached at glenn@hoopgurlz.com.