Tryouts Day 2

Day 2 of tryouts is in the books. Sammy and Brandon, the two likely cuts from yesterday, weren’t there, leaving us with 11 players. We started off with dribble suicides, which didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. I have a pretty good feel for who can dribble, Josh foremost among them, and who can’t, pretty much everyone else. After this we did Animal Rebounding, my absolute favorite drill. It’s my favorite because it teaches aggression, it teaches rebounding, it teaches how to get a shot off with three guys in your face. In Animal Rebounding you want points. You get a point every time you get a rebound, make a shot, steal the ball, block a shot, or cause two jump balls. Normally we play to 5, but to expedite things during tryouts we played to three. At three there is some definite luck involved, but upon watching the video the winners of our three groups, Josh, Seth, and Michael, were all worthy winners. We’re going to do this again tonight, and due to a football game I’m only expecting 8 or so, and we’ll play up to 5. Between the two games, I should have a good feel for their abilities in this game. I was encouraged that I heard a couple of players say they felt the game was fun. That’s a good thing.

After Animal Rebounding we did full court lay-ups. Basically everyone got the same range of scores, of 5-7, making it worthless. We did it for 45 seconds and it tells me that 45 seconds just isn’t long enough it seems to get a range. Though the drill was useful, since when I watched it on video I was able to get a sense of the kids’ layup form, most of which was poor.

I’ve ragged a little on their fundamentals, which in some ways is unfair. They are a B-level team and B-level team are going to have problems with fundamentals. And while I intellectually know the importance of teaching good fundamentals, I haven’t done the greatest job in the world of actually doing so. I have some structure changes to my practices that I think will encourage them to be used better, but I still recognize this as an area where I can coach better.

After full court lay-ups we did a 3 man weave, which was our first passing sort of drill. This was where a few kids showed some good basketball IQ, or at least good previous instruction, as they knew some of the subtle things to do, like running wide, to do the drill well.

We then ended with some extended 5 on 5, with some no dribble 5 on 5 in the last few minutes. They did it without complaint and did it in many ways more effectively than my 5th grade team did it at the END of last year, so that was all good.

Basically I have a team at this point and a fairly good sense of their strengths and weaknesses. I know I said that I was going to go kid by kid, but I don’t think it would change much from where I’m at today, to tomorrow. So when the team is finalized I’ll start going over the players.

So I have 8 definite yeses. I have one almost definite yes, Kevin, who just rubs me the wrong way in some sense. Not sure why, but as I watched the video last night he went from a maybe to a yes. But something about him & Grant, who does well on all of the objective stuff we do and when I watch him does well subjectively, raise flags for me. And they’re both nice kids, or at least can appear so at tryouts, so it’s not an attitude thing.

That leaves basically 1 spot for two kids. The two kids on the bubble or Leonardo and Quintin. Right now I’m leaning pretty strongly towards Quintin. I watched everything these two did very carefully on video and they each have their strengths and weaknesses, but overall it seems like Quintin slightly outshines him. In particular I like two things about Quintin. One is he’s always trying to play defense. I’d say Leonardo has better defensive skills, but he’s also less likely to hustle back, and he’s more likely to leave his man to attempt to make a steal. The second is that Quintin seems to have a good sense of how to move on offense. He was always moving around doing something productive, whether it was a cut or a screen, or balancing the court. I would say the biggest plus for Leonardo is his passing. It would appear to be top 4 or 5 of the whole group. I haven’t done a lot of passing stuff, but this has seemed true from what we have done. Hopefully both will be there tonight so I can gain that much more information on them. But unlike in the past two years I don’t feel the same dilmena about the final players I’m going to choose.