A chance meeting with Hawks coach Quin Snyder one summer led to a new opportunity for Brittni Donaldson.
The Hawks changed over their coaching staff this offseason, bringing in several developmentally minded coaches to support Snyder on the bench. As for Donaldson, the first female coach in Hawks history, Snyder was able to observe how she worked to develop athletes before they had a chance to speak.
When Snyder moved to Austin, Texas, a friend told him of Strata Athletics, a research-driven coaching curriculum for each age group. The Hawks coach signed his kids up for a camp in Austin and got the chance to see Donaldson in action. He came away impressed.
“Then she and I talked and started communicating, and I just was really just impressed on multiple levels. One, that she created this development program for – if anybody’s ever worked with 12-year-old kids, it’s not easy,” Snyder told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So, I just saw the way she communicated. The level of detail and planning that had gone into what she had created, and she was someone that I really respected, and so when the opportunity came here, we reached out to her.”
A 30-year-old Iowa native, Donaldson agreed that the meeting of their minds came by chance, but it eventually taught her that she and Snyder aligned philosophically on several fronts.
“Pretty like serendipitous, but we met and we got to talking, I think just really philosophically aligned on a lot of things – development being one,” she said. “That was the basis of my program. So naturally, that’s what we talked about. And I think more and more and hearing his ideas around it and even the way he chooses to lead and chooses to manage people and put a staff together. It sounded really intriguing to me, and so from the get-go, I think when we connected, there was a lot of alignment there, and we continue to discover there’s more and more alignment which is awesome.”
The Hawks want to have the best development program in the NBA. So, with Donaldson’s expertise, the team can focus on coming up with better programs specified each individual player. It also will help them to run more efficient programs and environments optimized for learning and retention. In doing so, the Hawks coaching staff will help set up the players for better success in games.
“At the end of the day, we want our players to coach themselves,” Donaldson said. “We’re there for support, but if they can coach themselves and make adjustments on the fly and self-correct, like that’s the hardest thing to guard. That’s the hardest thing to play against. So that’s kind of what we talked about in between all the X’s and O’s.”
Donaldson joined the Hawks in June, and her role will focus mainly on analytics while also helping with the development of some of the team’s younger players. It’s what she did before coming to the Hawks. Last season she worked as an assistant as well as the director of coaching analytics with the Pistons. Before that, her talents supported the Raptors as they went on to win an NBA championship in 2019.
Throughout her coaching stops, numbers and analyzing data always has stayed with her. That interest began when she was young, and she eventually combined them with her love of basketball when injuries shut the door of playing professionally.
She graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a degree in statistics and actuarial sciences, and she eventually worked for Stats Perform, a sports data and tracking company. That job led her to the Raptors.
Credit: Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Hawks
Credit: Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Hawks
Now, Donaldson comes to the Hawks armed with plenty of experience to help the team improve on last season’s 41-41 regular-season record. She won’t look too far into the past to learn about the team, but she’ll keep her eye on what she has in front her in the present.
So, as she moves through offseason, through NBA Summer League and through training camp, Donaldson will use what she picks up to help her come up with her plan for each player.
“That’s been my sort of thing is just the guys I’m with every day really trying to understand, what are they already really good at, what are some areas of growth, and then how can we put them in positions to do what they’re really good at?” she said. “Because ultimately, that’s what we want to do. So, it’s a bit of a learning curve, but I’m happy I got here a month ago and I’m (around) all summer, and by the time the season comes around, I hopefully know all these guys really well.”
Of course, Donaldson mostly has worked with the players on the Summer League roster, but she’s gotten a chance to meet some players who have been in and out of the team’s training and practice facility. She has not gotten a chance to speak with everyone, but she will when the Hawks open training camp in late September or early October.
As she gets to know the players and begins to build data to sift through, she will use analytics as a tool to point her eyes in the right direction. She will combine her experience with numbers, of working as a coach and evaluator to guide her.
With analytics, she will have a lot of information that she will have to parse, such as player tendencies and opponents’ patterns, before prioritizing what is important. Then, deciding what is important will fluctuate, depending on what Snyder cares about.
“It depends what our points of emphasis have been,” Donaldson said. “It depends what we’re trying to do, what our scheme is. So, I think from game to game, it completely changes. That’s why having somebody in a role that deeply understands the basketball aspect and the schematic part of it and what we’re trying to do and then also deeply understand the data side of it and where to find things and how to filter things and make sure we’re getting the answer we want, it’s important.
“So, yeah, we’ll see. But the answer is, it depends. There’s not like one stat we always look at. It depends on the opponent, on our personnel, what we care about that week. It’s very, what’s the word malleable.”
Analytics helped Donaldson break into the NBA and with the opportunity she has now, she wants to pass that tool to the rest of her coaching teammates.
“I want to give them the tools, as well,” she said. “I think, ultimately, the data is not meant to be like a surveillance mechanism or something to like, critique by, it’s meant to be a tool and it’s meant to optimize decision making. So the more coaches that feel comfortable with it and can just interact with it directly, the better.”
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