By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
Successful coaches often become best-selling authors. They’ve written countless books about what it took for them to achieve a championship season and how to apply their winning strategies in everyday life.
A couple of former Northern Kentucky high school basketball coaches are avid readers of those books. That’s how they came up with the idea of starting Next Play Basketball Academy to help local athletes and teams learn what it takes, physically and mentally, to compete on a high level.
George Stoll and Kenny Collopy are co-founders of the academy. In addition to offering training sessions to improve basketball skills, they provide classroom sessions that focus on being mentally prepared for competition in any sport.
“You hear all these old coaches’ clichés that the game is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical,” Stoll said. “Well, then why in the heck do you just practice the 10 percent part of it. That’s where we come in.”
Both men were head basketball coaches at Newport Central Catholic High School. Stoll, 31, was in charge of the girls program from 2012 to 2018. Collopy, 34, was boys varsity coach the last three seasons and recently resigned to become a grade school principal.
They started Next Play to stay involved with basketball, but they can design mental training classroom sessions that are specific to any sport in any age group. Their mission statement says they “want players and coaches to have the proper mindset to learn the game.”
“(George) and I both really value that mental aspect of it all,” Collopy said. “He did some book readings with his teams when he was coaching, and so did I. We kind of thought, ‘Not everyone does that type of thing, so what can we provide that maybe other coaches don’t do.’”
The Next Play website has been online since March. There are video clips of Stoll and Collopy explaining what they offer along with a complete price list for their training and classroom sessions.
While they were head coaches, Stoll and Collopy often set aside time for mental training classroom sessions before going into the gym for practice. They used that time to focus on character traits like attitude, effort, trust and accountability that are involved with being an athlete and carry over to their personal lives.
“That’s the perspective as teachers that we’re trying to bring to this,” Collopy said of the academy. “We’d tell our players, ‘When you’re finished doing this, you can go do something else using the skills you obtain here on the basketball court and apply them.’”
Their classroom sessions can be designed for a specific team, no matter what sport or age group. Earlier this summer, they did one for a middle school girls select basketball team and said they got positive feedback from the coach.
“We give them an action plan on how to keep this going practice-to-practice and game-to-game,” Stoll said. “It gives highlights of what we did and then what they can do to keep it going.”
With their background in basketball, Stoll and Collopy enjoy working with teams in that sport. But they plan to attend meetings with coaches, athletic directors and boosters to spread the word about their classroom sessions being available to teams in any sport.
“I worked really hard to become a head coach and when I got there I realized this isn’t just about basketball, ” Collopy said. “Part of my relationship with those kids was preparing them for life, and the mental part of it is so important beyond basketball.”