Cyberspace is a delight for a big basketball fan. Just click into Yahoo! or SportingNews and you, acting as a team manager, could build your team around a set salary cap with the best talent for each position ready for the picking.

In fact, you will have all the superstars in the NBA for your team if you want to, and sit back with sheer delight as you see your fantasy team’s players perform in real games, piling up points.

For a coach, that’s a dream come true. Having all the star players and doing a little coaching to coax them into playing is every mentor’s dream, but that’s only in a perfect world.

In the real world, one coach builds his team with blood, sweat and tears under the probing eye of team owners, alumni and fans whose patience for a protracted basketball program is usually paper-thin.

So under this pressure-packed setup, a coach begins with an ideal that will have to absorb reality in the form of restricted funding, the lack of an effective recruitment program and even academic failures among resident stars if any.

So you’ll ask: Does it have to start with a vision?

The answer is yes as it is the blueprint of how you foresee your team.

Is your team big or small? Will it run-and-gun or play half-court set offense? Will it focus play around the center or have a point guard as its core? Will it be defensive-oriented or offense-oriented? A coach has to take these things into account in his viewfinder for the team’s future.

For example, a new coach is a defensive stickler so he builds a team around this concept. He chooses the ingredients that make up a defensive team. He makes sure that a player does not only play defense on the basis of his individual skills, but in conjunction with the whole team.

If a mentor’s forte is smooth offensive patterns, then expect his team to be filled to the brim with players who cannot only score but also deliver the ball swiftly to the first, second and third options at any given play.

If a mentor opts to run, he builds his team with energetic players who push the ball up court with lightning speed and precision and catch the rival’s defense off guard during a fast break.

If a mentor wants a big team, then expect big players even for traditional positions to force mismatches with opposing teams because of their sheer size and ability to play big and small.

If a mentor decides to build his team around a talented and heady guard, like what coach Ron Jacobs did when he had the likes of Hector Calma and Olsen Racela, expect it to be an intelligent team that will be able to pluck the most out of every opportunity even in the case of a broken play.

If a team counts on a center for its survival, then expect the plays to revolve around the center’s ability to score and pound the ball inside, with eyes peeled for a shooter on the wings or a cutter in case he is contained by the rival’s defense.

So many purists would ask: Why does it have to be so complicated when the game of basketball was created for fun in the first place?

I sometimes hope it was that easy, but the popularity of the sport has made this web of competitiveness.

A coach does not pick players only because they are best in the lot, but pick players if they fit into his whole scheme of things. An immensely talented player would not do justice to a team that does not have use for his skills. It would only be a waste of talent and he could be of better use to another team.

A coach builds a team around an ideal and hopes that he picks up the pieces to fit into that ideal. Or he makes the players fit into the ideal. Expect a lot of coaxing, pushing and shoving in this scenario, but there’s pure joy when all these players eventually fall into the grand scheme of play to the team concept, day to day, game to game and even play to play.

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This week’s question comes from a basketball enthusiast named Richie V. from Quezon, who wrote:

Dear Coach E,

How does one go about in recruiting players for the team?

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Hi Richie,

I will be discussing this at length in my next column, but to answer your question, you must know first who you are looking for and make sure you know what to look for in a desired player. You cannot go on a wild-goose chase since it will waste time and money. Get into the habit of watching basketball tournaments, whether big or small, huge or inconsequential, and keep your eyes peeled on a diamond in the rough, not necessarily a polished basketball player. There’s pure joy in the searching.

Coach E

(Original Article was published last May 23, 2007 at the Business Mirror Sports Section in the column Ask Coach E.)