Friday January 12 Practice Report

For Monday’s practice I seriously over prepared. Making yesterday’s practice the “what we didn’t get to on Monday” practice to a large extent. Of course one of the more important things I wanted to do, practice our in bounds play, I completely forgot to put on the practice plan and so we didn’t end up doing it.

As usual we started practice a few minutes a few minutes late since I had to raise the baskets from 8 to 10 feet. I arrived particularly early as I wanted to make sure I could grab Brian and Jack M to talk to them before we started. As I was watching the house league team practice, I liked a lot of what the coach was doing with the team. Skills that I assume my team has (well cause they do) this team most definitely did not have. Watching the practice it made me sorta want to coach a house league team next year as it would force me to think about the fundamentals more, which would only benefit my travel coaching. I had to bite my tongue at one point. They were working on a movement drill trying to get open. It was a pretty good drill. Only problem was that when one of their players got stuck at the top of the arc by the sideline the coach was encouraging everyone to come to the ball. While I understood what he was saying what he was really encouraging them to do was converge on the ball. That’s bad basketball. Our ability to space the floor is actually one of the things that’s made us so successful. Anyhow it was fun to watch their practice.

The triplets were the first to arrive. I pulled Brian aside. It was clear that he feels I disrespect the team at times. I had a two pronged message: first I think we’re a good team. Second, my stating things such as certain players shouldn’t be shooting three pointers isn’t disrespect, but instead is trying to put us in the best position to win by giving players a shot at winning. I also particularly emphasized what a good player I thought he was. He seemed very receptive to the message.

When it is time to start, after raising the basket, we had 7 players. Dante I wasn’t expecting to be there. However, I had no idea where Jack or Gordie were. I later checked and Gordie’s mom had told me that he was going to be gone at his grandmother’s birthday and I’d forgotten to mark that down. I talk for a few moments about our upcoming games and who should arrive but Dante just as we’re about to start our continuous motion. And evidently he’ll be at the game tomorrow as well. I don’t quite understand what happened with soccer, but I’m not complaining.

We did our continuous motion. I really need a new drill besides the dribbling and Princeton for continuous motion. Anyhow that went on. I then had a decision to make. We really needed to practice our zone buster, but only had 8 players. Despite it not being optimal I decided to just run it with the groups I’d made out and whoever was playing a particular position where there should have been a missing player. If I’d known we were going to have 8 players I’d have planned something for the three who weren’t in at any given time, but I couldn’t think of anything good at this particular moment (things are complicated since there is only one 10 foot basket in our Friday practice gym and so I couldn’t even send each of them to a basket to shoot lay-ups). Good news was that our play was a lot sharper today than it had been on Monday overall. Even better was that Jack arrived just as we were about to start out third rotation. As I had Gordie playing the clueless 4 (simply because I need to give Scott and Jack some reps at 3 and David needs reps at all the positions so I need to put a guard at the 4/5 once in a while to make sure that everyone gets some looks at spots they might play in the game) in the last drill, his not being there made it possible to run it with 9 players. Brian who had run things so well in the 2 on Monday actually didn’t do so hot. Jack M continued to struggle to play the two position as well. Tom actually did the best job of it. This changes my plans slightly for how I am going to handle starters for the game, which I’ll talk about more below. Anyway, we look better overall in our Zone Buster. I talked a fair amount last night about how if it breaks down we just have to reset it. Resetting is easier said than done, but I feel a lot better about them being able to run 3 or 4 iterations of the play in a game.

I then decided it was time for the Animal Rebounding drill. This time I didn’t quite do the shorties and tallies. Instead in group 2 was David, Tom, Lucas, Scott, and Brian and group 1 was Jack M, Jack P, Dante, and Noah. I honestly don’t really remember how the drill went except that Brian finished in 4th and Tom in 5th in Group 2. After they had finished their round I had them shoot two free throws. Except that Brian was having trouble doing his push-up and David felt the need to point this out. This set-off Brian. I reminded David that his job as a player was to be supportive of his teammates. Brian had been having a pretty good practice until this point however after his brother’s taunt he got very frustrated and tried to turn that determination into finishing his pushups. And then when he couldn’t do those he changed into running suicides. He was doing this while everyone else was at a water break. As people filtered back in I tried to release him from his obligation, but he wasn’t having it. I finally got him to shoot his two free throws however his temper was still raised.

I then partnered people up and we did a speed shooting drill where they shot from two feet away, but had to move around the free throw line before shooting from the other side. The team did a really great job of being supportive of their teammates as this was going on which was great to see. Brian, however, was in a world to himself. The team made between 5 and 9 of these shots in 30 seconds. I told them they were competing against themselves and didn’t even record their scores. This was the by product of a discussion Jack M had started. He was stating how he doesn’t like it when we’re competing, even if it’s just for a permission. This was quite interesting to hear. Jack had really toughened up in the Animal Rebounding drill between Monday and today, despite playing with bigger people, but it’s always good to be reminded about that with Jack.

Anyhow after we did the speed shooting drill, which we’ll do again, we did a drill we had done a long time ago, where it was 3 on 3 with the goal of the defense forcing offensive turn-overs. Things went OK, despite Brian moaning and moaning and moaning about his team until it was time for Brian’s team (on defense) to face David’s team on offense. And Brian went into full tilt meltdown. He was playing recklessly and could have easily hurt someone. He was just off the wall. We ran our suicides with Brian not fully participating.

We gathered around for our post-practice talk. I was a little more rah rah than normal. But Jack M wasn’t buying it. I asked to speak to Jack and Brian after practice. Unfortunately Brian had to leave quickly so I only got to speak to Jack. Jack actually did a great job of giving the “you have to be a more positive player” speech and used reasons I don’t normally use so clearly he’s heard this before and not just from me. I told him that I sincerely believe us to be a very good team and part of being a very good team is acting like it and that he should try acting like it, even if he doesn’t fully believe it since it makes a difference in how you play.

At some point I had decided that our starting five would be David, Tom, Brian, Scott, and Lucas (in # order). Despite Brian’s completely unacceptable behavior at practice I’m still going to start him. I will be talking with him before hand and telling him there will be serious consequences if he puts up a performance like he did at our last practice again. We’ll talk about how he can calm down if he starts to get frustrated, but going off and doing his own thing will not be OK. I’m going to use the “complement sandwich” strategy with him and hopefully it’ll go well.

My initial plan had been to announce our starting five, but state that if they come out in a strong zone that I would be using the line up of Jack M, Brian, David, Jack P, and Lucas (again in # order). Except that with Brian not showing as much ability to run the play as the 2, and Tom showing great ability, that would likely be the switch I’d want to make. The idea of announcing this switch was to give Jack and Jack some feeling of recognition. However, I don’t want to take away Brian’s sense, I think. So, Jack M will start tomorrow against WK and we’ll simply have David and Brian switch roles if we run Indiana.

If we’re going to win today, and going forward, we need David to play a great game. However, he seems to have been lacking in much of his normal confidence ever since the JCC game. A lot of it seems to be the fact that he’s been having trouble making free throws. I haven’t had a chance to work with him to see if there’s a flaw in his mechanics but I’m going to tell him that despite what may happen in practice with free throws that he’s a great player and he shouldn’t stress about it, and instead should just play good basketball.

It’s a big game today and I think we’re ready for it. Hopefully I’m right.