Hernando Planells has built one of the most unconventional careers in sports, moving between college basketball, international coaching, NBA development, broadcasting, and Hollywood. Today, he serves as Technical Director of the NBA Basketball School in Dubai, where he oversees hundreds of young athletes and a large coaching staff. In this episode, Planells talks with Nick Elam about player development, coaching coaches, building confidence, adapting leadership styles, and why the best coaches need to keep evolving just as much as the players they teach. Planells also looks back on a coaching journey that has taken him through Duke University, the NBA D-League, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, Illinois, and more. Along the way, he experienced success, failure, firings, reinvention, and the kinds of career turns that only make sense in hindsight. Then the conversation shifts to another major part of his career: sports choreography for movies and television. Planells has worked on productions including Coach Carter, Semi-Pro, Spider-Man 3, Swagger, Running Point, and more, helping actors and filmmakers make sports scenes look believable on screen. He shares stories about working with stars such as Samuel L. Jackson, Channing Tatum, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Ben Affleck, and Tobey Maguire. In the Innovation Segment, Nick relays a proposal to ban yellow shoes and gloves in the NFL and college football because they can easily be mistaken for penalty flags. He gives the idea a +9 on the Sports Rule Pod Good Idea Scale. The episode also goes Unlayered on how New York Giants teammates Jaxson Dart and Abdul Carter handled a political disagreement without letting it divide them, and the Next-to-Last segment revisits the penultimate scene of the 2007 film Michael Clayton. What You’ll Learn: How Hernando Planells built a career across basketball, media, and film Why coaching today requires more than X’s and O’s What he learned from working across different countries and basketball systems How actors are trained to make sports scenes look authentic Why sports choreography involves much more than teaching someone how to shoot or dribble Why Nick wants yellow shoes and gloves banned from football Estimated Chapters: 00:00 – Introduction 01:30 – NBA Basketball School in Dubai 06:30 – Developing players and coaching coaches 13:00 – A basketball career across the world 22:00 – Duke, international coaching and the NBA system3 1:00 – How coaching philosophies evolve 36:30 – Breaking into sports choreography 41:00 – Coach Carter and training actors 47:00 – Making sports scenes look authentic 44:04 – Ban yellow shoes and gloves from football? 46:41 – Disagreeing without dividing a team 52:41 – The next-to-last scene of Michael Clayton About Our Guest: Hernando Planells is the Technical Director of the NBA Basketball School in Dubai, a longtime basketball coach, and a sports creative director whose work has included college, professional, international, film, television, and commercial productions. Have an idea for a sports rule change or innovation that Nick should scrutinize on a future episode? Send it to nick.elam@sportsrulepod.com or submit it at htp://sportsrule.net connect with Sports Rule Pod on LinkedIn or Instagram.
