When you cover women's basketball season-long, it's a given that some of your colleagues who don't cover it but do have some interest will wander over to your desk and ask two questions at some point:
1. How good a player is X?
2. How good a coach is Z?

I never have much problem answering the first, other than being concise. In fact, if she's someone I've often covered, I'll tell the inquisitor how good a player she is, her best game, her worst game, the funniest thing she said all year, what she might order at IHOP, what kind of tree she'd be if she were a tree ... until the person says, "I think I hear my phone ringing,'' and flees.

But the coach question? Well, I'm not concise about that either, except it's much harder to answer, and I always feel less sure about my opinions.

What players do for the most part is fairly obvious. You can't always be sure how they are in practice or if they gripe a lot or how high-maintenance they might be, but ... how good they can play is right in front of you.

Coaching is more difficult to judge. I feel like I'm in the minority saying this, as talk radio and chat rooms and message boards are full of folks who are experts on coaching. But other than when it's evident that someone is really good or really bad, I often find it hard to put a measurement on coaching talent for several reasons.

First: There are so many different elements to coaching: recruiting, strategizing, delegating, taking charge, psychoanalyzing, promoting.

Let's say Coach A diagrams plays in her sleep, can adjust quickly to other teams' strategies, but doesn't know what to do when a player walks into her office crying because she had no idea she'd miss her little sister so much.

Then there's Coach B, who sometimes gets flustered on the bench. However, she'll listen -- really listen -- for two hours to the girl who's lost confidence and then be able to rally her into believing she can do anything.

Then there's Coach C, who's kind of average at everything else, but really excels at recruiting.

Who's the better coach?

A lot of people would say Coach A, because coaching is mostly about Xs and Os. Others might say Coach B, because coaching is mostly about understanding people and helping them perform at their best. And some would say Coach C, because coaching is mostly about having good players.

But ... who ends up being considered the better coach -- by outsiders, anyway -- probably comes down to who's best at hiring assistants who have strengths the head coach doesn't.

That seems breathtakingly obvious, doesn't it? Yet it's harder to do than it sounds. Because it means that you have to be honest with yourself about where you have weaknesses, and then must find people strong in those areas who also get along with you.

In other words, when you assess head coaches, you are just as much assessing their assistants. And vice versa.

Second: Much of what coaches do, most of us never see. We don't know what they're working on in practice every day, or what emotional crisis they salved, or the conversations they're having on the bench, or what they say in timeouts, or what they accomplish at halftime. (We in the media ask about all this stuff, but usually get the short-hand version at best.)

The players don't even know all of this. They know a lot of it, but not everything. And, of course, players' perceptions are going to be different. How they perceive a coach can't help but be filtered at least a little bit through their own self-interest.

Third: How can you tell for sure between great coaching and great play? Or can you? Some people think it's more likely that a great coach could take average players to a championship than great players could take an average coach to one. I fall in the other camp, yet ... there's no question that an average (or worse) coach can squander a lot of talent.

Fourth: What parameters do you put on defining "success?'' Some people might say, "Coach R is a great coach because he's in a mid-major conference where he can't get the cream-of-the-crop players, but most years he wins the league or comes close to that.''

But if Coach R's team really is never much of a factor in the NCAA Tournament, how does that impact the assessment of his coaching career?

So what's the upshot of all of this?

To be considered the "best,'' you have to perform and excel at the highest level available. So to judge "best,'' you talk national championships and Final Four appearances.

But to judge "good,'' you have to define the parameters of expectations. And then you'd really need to study the performance of a program, see the trends and tally the triumphs and mistakes over a period of time.

Judging coaching -- like coaching itself -- is harder than a lot of people think.

Mechelle Voepel is a regular contributor to ESPN.com's women's basketball coverage. She can be reached at mvoepel@kcstar.com.