So unlike in past years where there was a break between baseball and basketball seasons, this year indoor baseball practices had already begun before basketball ended. This was the difference between doing travel and house league. So after the disappointment of basketball, I’m not exactly firing on all cylinders as we get ready for baseball. And the weather makes things worse. We played our first tournament at the end of April and we had exactly 1 outdoor practice before then. We’d seen kids hit a live baseball twice and never in any sort of game situation. At several practices we’d done pitching so I thought I’d had a good feel for that. And we spent a LOT LOT LOT of time working with groundballs so I thought we’d be OK there.
We come to our first tournament and it’s like 8 year olds playing 9 year olds. Except that our opponents were also only 8. In that first tournament we faced teams that play year round and boy did it show. That said we were on the short end of the talent stick. And it was painful. Our best pitcher in the first game pitched two innings of lights of pitching. And after that we were lost. We went through 4 pitchers in one inning at one point. It was not good. And our hitting didn’t have a chance against their pitching. And while our groundballs were OK our throwing resulted in error, after error, after error.
On the other hand, the house league team we were coaching overflowed with talent. It didn’t hurt that we had the best player that we’d seen in the 4 years of doing it. The kid pitched almost nothing but strikes and he could hit homerun after homerun. And half the team could pitch. We won only about half of our regular season games, but that was OK, or at least we thought it was. However, in the last couple of games we tried to switch on to playoff mentality. This was all similar to previous years. And our team couldn’t make the jump. We lost our last game, closely, a game we should have won easily. And in the first round of the playoffs we lost to a team we’d beaten handily the first two times we played them. It was a disappointing end to the season.
But the real thing was that while the travel team was struggling and struggling mightily it was good to have this other team in our pocket. Of course the house league season ended well before travel and so then it just became all about a team who hadn’t won a game. If I had to assign responsibility I’d say 80% of it lay with a lack of team talent. Most of the kids belonged on a B or C level travel team. We played nearly all A level teams. They simply couldn’t expect to match-up and they didn’t.
But that other 20% is the fault of Steve and I. Some of it is that we didn’t step up our coaching. We had many more opportunities, but we didn’t really take advantage of them until later on in the season. Not coincidentally as our coaching improved so did our team, though we did get an assist by playing teams who were B rather than A on a more regular basis. A good example is a player who we had who dropped his shoulder. First there is the issue that I am simply a poor hitting coach. Steve is much better than I and recognizing faults with hitting. But Steve, while able to diagnose the problem, isn’t very good at fixing it. So we had this kid who dropped his shoulder and we knew it. Finally during the last tournament of the year, I really started doing 1 on 1 work with him where we would do soft toss, meaning I was throwing to him from the side. If he would drop his shoulder, he’d have to step-out and do five practices swings, correctly. Good practice swings too not just half-hearted ones. And he made progress. It was good. But it also came too late.
Then there were the parents. Losing teams are almost always going to have difficult parents and our team was no exception. And, as I’ve already stated, we do bear some responsibility for the poor performance, which never helps. Much better to have irrationally irate parents since it’s much easier to wave off (though that’s still what Steve and I did to a large extent).
All this wasn’t too great, but what pushed me over the edge from being a long painful season to one filled with anger was what happened with Eric and Brian, who run the program for the Park District. The big issue came when Mark, a parent who was the team’s logistics guy, wanted to schedule an extra game. Except Steve and I weren’t available. I because of a genuine commitment, Steve because his commitment to a team waxes and wanes with the success of the team. I’m sure mine does as well, it’s just easier to notice in someone else. So we told Mark that we didn’t want to do the game. He then absolutely goes off on us, but more so me, in an email. Steve wants to call Mark that night and tell him off, but I convince him to call Brian instead. It appears that Eric and Brian have our backs. Except they don’t and the game ends up getting scheduled, after much consternation. Essentially we get left out to dry. Steve and I were particularly opposed to the game since we hadn’t won a game, but knew this would be a team we’d have a chance against. Sure enough we won. Certainly didn’t help our image with some of the parents. I gave serious consideration to resigning on principle, but decided that there was only a month left in the season so it wasn’t worth the hassle.
So we finished the season. And overall it was a positive end to the season. In particular we played very well in our last tournament and actually had a chance to move out of bracket play, so that was pretty cool considering how few games we were competitive, let alone won, the whole season. It was nice after a terrible season to end on a high note.
Our season ended with a July 4th tourney, as the team was designed to let people go to overnight camp. And when baseball ended my whole outlook lightened up. During basketball I gave serious consideration to officiating rather than coaching this fall. And I’ve gone through the process of becoming a patched basketball official. However, I felt that I needed to give coaching one more shot. I hope it’s a good experience. I know I’m a better coach now than when I started. The question is whether I’m good enough. And I simply don’t know. So we’ll see.
Try-outs are on Monday and it has occupied nearly the same mental space as it did last year. Last year I would think about it constantly. This year I’ve done a lot of work on improving my skills, but when I’m not doing that basketball hasn’t crept into my thoughts or sleep like it did last year. I don’t know if this is a good thing, as I learn how to better develop the stress, or a bad thing signifying that I’ve emotionally tuned out. Like I said we’ll see.
Showing posts with label Brian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brian. Show all posts
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Catching Up Part 1
My last post was a rather despondent post about losing Glencoe. It’s been a rocky coaching road I’ve had since then.
Long story short, that post proved not to be an overreaction. Later on in the month they played in the HP tournament, where they were knocked out in pool play (recalling that they were the defending champions). I had hoped that was going to be a wakeup call, but instead just further lost the team. And when I say the team, that’s not really fair. I really lost two of the triplets who played for me. They were 3 of the 5 best players on the team and the team leaders and caused some bad habits in a couple of the other players. The ethos of our practices was not good. And I accept full responsibility for it. I’m still learning and growing as a coach and to succeed need to invest time. I simply did not invest the time in the team, really either of the teams, that was needed to be as successful as I’d like. Part of that was coaching two teams. Part of that was a new job. Part of that with GL was the players I had and my failure to maintain a tone at practice that was needed. The management aspect of a team should be a strength. It’s very disappointing that it turn out otherwise.
In the end GL finished 3rd in league play, and bombed out in the second round of the playoffs, exactly what I thought they’d do. I nearly didn’t arrange for an end of season dinner, but I decided that no matter how the season had gone (and by some objective measures accounts it had gone well) I should have one. I announced there that I wouldn’t be coming back to the team. I received far more thanks than I was expecting. For instance, Lucas had slid into the bad habits group, but his parents both talked to me individually about how much they appreciated all I’d done and how I’d had the right priorities. This was, of course, an issue because my focus on player development over winning was not what the triplets’ father wanted. He wanted them to win. And win big. And if we’d have played zone, he would likely have been on board. But I think zone doesn’t teach the defensive skills that will help players at the next level.
Of course this goes back to one of weaknesses as a coach. While I say I value player development, I’m really not nearly as good as I’d like at teaching it. My real strength is on teaching team fundamentals as opposed to player fundamentals. So it’s not like individuals are ignored, but because I coach by myself I’ve tended to try and focus on things that have as many players as possible involved at a time to maximize our very limited practice time.
So that was GL.
And then there’s HP. While things weren’t going so well with GL in early February, I was pleased with where HP was at. While we weren’t winning a ton of games, we were competitive. And then Small Fry happened. Small Fry is an even more select program than the one I’m involved in and a whole bunch of my team’s players made that team. We had played well in group play during the HP tourney, coming from behind to almost win a game against an undefeated team (NF for those with good memories) and coming from 12 points behind with 3 minutes to win by 4, a nearly unheard of turnaround at this level. But that was with the whole team. Come Sunday and bracket play we lost more than half the team to Small Fry leaving us high and dry. And this is what it would be like going forward as the whole team placed more of a priority on Small Fry than HP. So we lost the next day, but not by a whole lot. I still felt good about things.
Until Brian and Eric, my bosses, talked to me. They wanted me to slow down play. Get the kids more in control. So I did what they said. They were the bosses after all. And we were not competitive in any of our remaining games. But I had decided that come the playoffs I was going to coach to give us the best chance of winning. Regardless of what they said.
So of course Small Fry had to strike again. There wasn’t supposed to be a conflict between the two playoffs, but there was. And so when this all came down I said I needed one of two kids, Zach or Danny, because I needed a ball handler. So Brian and the Small Fry guy divide up the players and I was supposed to get Danny. This would have been OK. Of course Danny decides to go to Small Fry instead. So we play a valiant effort, but lose. And that’s that. It was dispiriting, in a whole different way than GL.
I ended basketball in a really bad place. I needed the change of sport. I needed to go through it with another person, something I’d have with my co-coach Steve. I needed some success. I will cover baseball in my next update.
Long story short, that post proved not to be an overreaction. Later on in the month they played in the HP tournament, where they were knocked out in pool play (recalling that they were the defending champions). I had hoped that was going to be a wakeup call, but instead just further lost the team. And when I say the team, that’s not really fair. I really lost two of the triplets who played for me. They were 3 of the 5 best players on the team and the team leaders and caused some bad habits in a couple of the other players. The ethos of our practices was not good. And I accept full responsibility for it. I’m still learning and growing as a coach and to succeed need to invest time. I simply did not invest the time in the team, really either of the teams, that was needed to be as successful as I’d like. Part of that was coaching two teams. Part of that was a new job. Part of that with GL was the players I had and my failure to maintain a tone at practice that was needed. The management aspect of a team should be a strength. It’s very disappointing that it turn out otherwise.
In the end GL finished 3rd in league play, and bombed out in the second round of the playoffs, exactly what I thought they’d do. I nearly didn’t arrange for an end of season dinner, but I decided that no matter how the season had gone (and by some objective measures accounts it had gone well) I should have one. I announced there that I wouldn’t be coming back to the team. I received far more thanks than I was expecting. For instance, Lucas had slid into the bad habits group, but his parents both talked to me individually about how much they appreciated all I’d done and how I’d had the right priorities. This was, of course, an issue because my focus on player development over winning was not what the triplets’ father wanted. He wanted them to win. And win big. And if we’d have played zone, he would likely have been on board. But I think zone doesn’t teach the defensive skills that will help players at the next level.
Of course this goes back to one of weaknesses as a coach. While I say I value player development, I’m really not nearly as good as I’d like at teaching it. My real strength is on teaching team fundamentals as opposed to player fundamentals. So it’s not like individuals are ignored, but because I coach by myself I’ve tended to try and focus on things that have as many players as possible involved at a time to maximize our very limited practice time.
So that was GL.
And then there’s HP. While things weren’t going so well with GL in early February, I was pleased with where HP was at. While we weren’t winning a ton of games, we were competitive. And then Small Fry happened. Small Fry is an even more select program than the one I’m involved in and a whole bunch of my team’s players made that team. We had played well in group play during the HP tourney, coming from behind to almost win a game against an undefeated team (NF for those with good memories) and coming from 12 points behind with 3 minutes to win by 4, a nearly unheard of turnaround at this level. But that was with the whole team. Come Sunday and bracket play we lost more than half the team to Small Fry leaving us high and dry. And this is what it would be like going forward as the whole team placed more of a priority on Small Fry than HP. So we lost the next day, but not by a whole lot. I still felt good about things.
Until Brian and Eric, my bosses, talked to me. They wanted me to slow down play. Get the kids more in control. So I did what they said. They were the bosses after all. And we were not competitive in any of our remaining games. But I had decided that come the playoffs I was going to coach to give us the best chance of winning. Regardless of what they said.
So of course Small Fry had to strike again. There wasn’t supposed to be a conflict between the two playoffs, but there was. And so when this all came down I said I needed one of two kids, Zach or Danny, because I needed a ball handler. So Brian and the Small Fry guy divide up the players and I was supposed to get Danny. This would have been OK. Of course Danny decides to go to Small Fry instead. So we play a valiant effort, but lose. And that’s that. It was dispiriting, in a whole different way than GL.
I ended basketball in a really bad place. I needed the change of sport. I needed to go through it with another person, something I’d have with my co-coach Steve. I needed some success. I will cover baseball in my next update.
Monday, February 11, 2008
GL Update
It’s been a while since I’ve written an update on GL except for my short update. Basically Brian had gotten out of control at practice this had a negative effect overall on the team and their concentration. I had not been terribly happy with the team’s performance since winter break except for the MP2 game. We beat LV the following day 34-32, in a game we almost blew. That Tuesday we played our arch-rival JCC, and they basically were in control the whole game earning a 5 point victory. Last weekend we played HP. We took an easy 25-18 victory, brought only that close thanks to a late 3.
The common theme to all of these games is the lack of a killer instinct that defined us so well last season. It seems as though we were merely going through the motions, coasting more on talent than anything else. And frankly I’ve got to think that’s my coaching in some way. In some way I’ve either failed to find the right motivational buttons to push, or even worse, my coaching has made them worse. However, considering that HP has only got more aggressive as the season has gone on, I don’t think it’s that my coaching has made them worse.
So here I’ve been generally unhappy with the team. And it hasn’t meant much because we’ve been winning. Actually in some ways it’s worse because I’ve been unhappy with the team, and the team has been winning, meaning there’s a disconnect between how the team sees itself and how I’m seeing it. I resolved after HP game that something I needed to do was have more fun coaching the team. I was not having fun, and part of that was because of the attitude problems. But if I started having fun that would, I hoped, break the cycle and help mitigate the attitude issues I was having. Also of help with the attitude? Brian did not play against HP after I sent Dad a long email outlining his unacceptable behavior at just one practice. I was quite hopeful going into last Wednesday’s practice that we’d have a good practice before the HP tourney (we had no gym space on Monday). But Wednesday’s practice was canceled due to a snow storm, so we went the week before the HP tourney with-out a practice.
And so this weekend we had the HP tourney. And all of the things I’ve feared finally came to pass. We lost our first tourney game to an inferior team composed mainly of players from MP and MP2. We got down by 10. We attempted a comeback, with 2 three’s by Andrew being a big help, but came up 2 points short. We then got annihilated by LS. You would never know that we’d beaten them twice. Of course the next day they went on to beat AH, so clearly they’re a team which has improved considerably. The LS game was an example of a game where we were just outclassed. Those games don’t bother me. However, because of the tournament structure after we lost to LS we basically were eliminated from advancing. And so it goes back to the first game where we lost to a team that we beat. The good news, or at least I think it’s good news, is that we beat the final team in our pool. This team had beaten both of the other two teams and had the #1 seed out of our pool so it’s not like they were a bad team. I’m glad that we didn’t finish 0-3, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder if that won’t interfere with the wake-up call.
This weekend should be interesting. We play three teams all in the bottom half of the standings. Will we once again go out and play just good enough to win or will we play up to the talent level that we have?
I don’t know. I do know that coaching has, as of late, brought me very little joy. I have to write-up a few HP games, but basically the story is the same one that it’s been all season: they play their hearts out, even if they’re not always playing well, but that frequently just isn’t good enough and they lose. And worse than that is the fact that the games Brian has been at, HP has played particularly poorly. I keep feeling like we’re on the edge of getting over the hump, but we just can’t do it ever and that is incredibly frustrating.
So I have a talented team which is underperforming and another team which isn't underperforming but neither are they making progress. It's just a maddening combo. If it weren't for the fun I'm having with HP at practices and even during games, despite the losses, I shudder to think how I'd be feeling at the moment.
So it's not all bad, but there's a lot of bad accompanied by the feeling that as coach that the problems are in areas where I could be making a difference. Motivation is I feel one of the few areas that a coach can make an impact. And while a good coach can only make a slight difference in the winning or losing of a team, that's all HP would need: a slight positive difference. And so in the end the poor play of both teams falls on my shoulders and I just hate doing a poor job at something at which I try so hard and care so much about.
The common theme to all of these games is the lack of a killer instinct that defined us so well last season. It seems as though we were merely going through the motions, coasting more on talent than anything else. And frankly I’ve got to think that’s my coaching in some way. In some way I’ve either failed to find the right motivational buttons to push, or even worse, my coaching has made them worse. However, considering that HP has only got more aggressive as the season has gone on, I don’t think it’s that my coaching has made them worse.
So here I’ve been generally unhappy with the team. And it hasn’t meant much because we’ve been winning. Actually in some ways it’s worse because I’ve been unhappy with the team, and the team has been winning, meaning there’s a disconnect between how the team sees itself and how I’m seeing it. I resolved after HP game that something I needed to do was have more fun coaching the team. I was not having fun, and part of that was because of the attitude problems. But if I started having fun that would, I hoped, break the cycle and help mitigate the attitude issues I was having. Also of help with the attitude? Brian did not play against HP after I sent Dad a long email outlining his unacceptable behavior at just one practice. I was quite hopeful going into last Wednesday’s practice that we’d have a good practice before the HP tourney (we had no gym space on Monday). But Wednesday’s practice was canceled due to a snow storm, so we went the week before the HP tourney with-out a practice.
And so this weekend we had the HP tourney. And all of the things I’ve feared finally came to pass. We lost our first tourney game to an inferior team composed mainly of players from MP and MP2. We got down by 10. We attempted a comeback, with 2 three’s by Andrew being a big help, but came up 2 points short. We then got annihilated by LS. You would never know that we’d beaten them twice. Of course the next day they went on to beat AH, so clearly they’re a team which has improved considerably. The LS game was an example of a game where we were just outclassed. Those games don’t bother me. However, because of the tournament structure after we lost to LS we basically were eliminated from advancing. And so it goes back to the first game where we lost to a team that we beat. The good news, or at least I think it’s good news, is that we beat the final team in our pool. This team had beaten both of the other two teams and had the #1 seed out of our pool so it’s not like they were a bad team. I’m glad that we didn’t finish 0-3, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder if that won’t interfere with the wake-up call.
This weekend should be interesting. We play three teams all in the bottom half of the standings. Will we once again go out and play just good enough to win or will we play up to the talent level that we have?
I don’t know. I do know that coaching has, as of late, brought me very little joy. I have to write-up a few HP games, but basically the story is the same one that it’s been all season: they play their hearts out, even if they’re not always playing well, but that frequently just isn’t good enough and they lose. And worse than that is the fact that the games Brian has been at, HP has played particularly poorly. I keep feeling like we’re on the edge of getting over the hump, but we just can’t do it ever and that is incredibly frustrating.
So I have a talented team which is underperforming and another team which isn't underperforming but neither are they making progress. It's just a maddening combo. If it weren't for the fun I'm having with HP at practices and even during games, despite the losses, I shudder to think how I'd be feeling at the moment.
So it's not all bad, but there's a lot of bad accompanied by the feeling that as coach that the problems are in areas where I could be making a difference. Motivation is I feel one of the few areas that a coach can make an impact. And while a good coach can only make a slight difference in the winning or losing of a team, that's all HP would need: a slight positive difference. And so in the end the poor play of both teams falls on my shoulders and I just hate doing a poor job at something at which I try so hard and care so much about.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
GL Practice Report
If I haven't already I'm pretty damn close to losing GL and I am fairly despondent about that fact.
Monday, January 21, 2008
HP vs WG
After the very satisfying win against MP2, I was excited for HP’s game against WG. I know that they, based on their record, weren’t a great team. We would only have 7 players for the game, with Jack A at a soccer tournament, and family obligations for the twins and Gavin.
The good news was that WG wasn’t a big team, except for one player who was just an absolute monster. I knew he’d be a problem for us. The first quarter was a back and forth affair, ending up with us down 7-5.
Then in the second we took off scoring numerous baskets in transition and having the good fortune of having Adam, who has surprisingly emerged as our best free throw shooter, getting fouled on a couple of shots allowing him to go 3/4 from the line. Even better our defense was ferocious. We got their dominant player into foul trouble and the team just didn’t play well with out him. We took a 13-7 lead going into half. That’s correct: we didn’t allow a point the entire second quarter.
Unfortunately that’s all we had. Josh had sat out most of the first half after rolling his ankle in the first quarter, so he was fresh for the second half. Unfortunately their center, #50, took over the game. By the 4th quarter we were just sluggish. Our defense wasn’t as strong as we needed it to be. We were down by 5 with less than 30 seconds to go. We managed to get a lay-up. We then came VERY close to get a 5 second violation which would have set us up for a 3 point attempt, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. We then almost did get another 3 point chance at the end of the game, but Josh couldn’t make it happen and so we lost a disappointing game.
After feeling so good about the coaching I’d done with GL it was a particularly depressing game against WG. We committed a ridiculous amount of turnovers. Worse, I wasn’t on my coaching A game and Brian was there watching and commenting. In other words I didn’t look good in front of my boss. It was particularly frustrating. I went home upset at their lack of conditioning and upset with myself for not being a better tactical coach.
The good news was that WG wasn’t a big team, except for one player who was just an absolute monster. I knew he’d be a problem for us. The first quarter was a back and forth affair, ending up with us down 7-5.
Then in the second we took off scoring numerous baskets in transition and having the good fortune of having Adam, who has surprisingly emerged as our best free throw shooter, getting fouled on a couple of shots allowing him to go 3/4 from the line. Even better our defense was ferocious. We got their dominant player into foul trouble and the team just didn’t play well with out him. We took a 13-7 lead going into half. That’s correct: we didn’t allow a point the entire second quarter.
Unfortunately that’s all we had. Josh had sat out most of the first half after rolling his ankle in the first quarter, so he was fresh for the second half. Unfortunately their center, #50, took over the game. By the 4th quarter we were just sluggish. Our defense wasn’t as strong as we needed it to be. We were down by 5 with less than 30 seconds to go. We managed to get a lay-up. We then came VERY close to get a 5 second violation which would have set us up for a 3 point attempt, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. We then almost did get another 3 point chance at the end of the game, but Josh couldn’t make it happen and so we lost a disappointing game.
After feeling so good about the coaching I’d done with GL it was a particularly depressing game against WG. We committed a ridiculous amount of turnovers. Worse, I wasn’t on my coaching A game and Brian was there watching and commenting. In other words I didn’t look good in front of my boss. It was particularly frustrating. I went home upset at their lack of conditioning and upset with myself for not being a better tactical coach.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
GL Practices
I had a few simple goals with GL this week. We needed to work on a play to break the press, we needed to make some progress on our zone offense, and we needed continued work on man to man defense. Unfortunately with these as our goals it meant that we’d have slightly more drudgery than normal.
Monday we did our conditioning and I then taught the press break. Fairly good work was done on it and I was cautiously optimistic about how it would go on Wednesday. When we did it yesterday it seemed like they had mostly learned the play. There were a few refinements necessary, but overall they seem to have a good grasp on the basics. Unfortunately, for reasons I’ll discuss shortly, we didn’t actually get to try this against real defense, so we’ll be doing some live practice against WM. Hopefully it’ll go well.
Monday we also did Champs and Chumps with a contact lay-up drill. Scott, naturally, did well in this. While the whole team could benefit from this drill I was doing it mainly for him. When I commented to him on how well he was doing in this versus in the game he made some sort of excuse.
Overall Monday was an alright practice. Wednesday, however, was anything but alright. There was the initial problem that the gym was sweltering when we got in it. While they were doing our defensive continuous motion I took the time to open some windows. I was about to have the team do the defensive slide against the clock when I was called aside by a GL park district rep. Seems that the principal has been unhappy with our kids running through the school. I didn’t quite understand the complaint, but promised to address it with the team.
After doing our continuous motion I tried to do the work with the press break and it was silliness all around. It took far longer than it should have. It then took way too long to do our work on the man to man defense. The focus was poor. Finally, after a few sprints, I got most of the team to focus and so while our work wasn’t stellar it at least wasn’t poor.
We concluded practice with work on our zone offense. Unfortunately without having practiced it recently our skills had slip and we really had to go back to the basics. It was to my great disappointment that we only accomplished these three drills and didn’t get to do any of the more fun drills I had planned. We did get a little golf in there, and a little bubble, but that was it.
Fortunately we have our game Sunday just against WM, as our game against LV, who is currently in 1st place, was canceled. WM is one of the weaker teams and by not having a game which will push us to the limits first we should have a much better chance of pulling it out.
I plan on going with a starting five of David, Andrew, Scott, Dante, and a player to be named later.
A few notes on some players:
David: In my focus on my coaching decisions Sunday I didn’t give David his due. He scored an amazing 22 of 41 points for the team. He was on fire missing only a few of his shots and generally moving the ball around well. It was by far his best performance of the season and it certainly came at the right time.
Jack P: Missed our game Sunday to be at the Bulls game. This was not received well by some other players on the team who were also going to the Bulls game. Things got worse when he missed Monday’s practice because he and his dad both forgot. He’d have been the 5th starter were it not for this faux pas.
Brian: Even after I had settled down most of the players he refused to be settled down. He also flat out refused to play good defense in our shell drill, constantly insisting on cheating to try and steal the pass. At one point I stopped the practice and sent everybody for a water break except him to no avail. I also held him after practice when I got to the heart of the matter: he was frustrated by not having started. After his openly defiant attitude during practice (such that his brothers were basically telling him to just stop arguing) he knew he wasn’t going to start Sunday. However, we did agree that if he gave me a week of good practice after winter break that he’d get the start.
I am not excited by the prospect of playing against WM’s tall player and not excited about playing in their gym, with the spectators sitting so closely behind the bench, but I am confident that we should have a good chance to rebound after our loss.
Monday we did our conditioning and I then taught the press break. Fairly good work was done on it and I was cautiously optimistic about how it would go on Wednesday. When we did it yesterday it seemed like they had mostly learned the play. There were a few refinements necessary, but overall they seem to have a good grasp on the basics. Unfortunately, for reasons I’ll discuss shortly, we didn’t actually get to try this against real defense, so we’ll be doing some live practice against WM. Hopefully it’ll go well.
Monday we also did Champs and Chumps with a contact lay-up drill. Scott, naturally, did well in this. While the whole team could benefit from this drill I was doing it mainly for him. When I commented to him on how well he was doing in this versus in the game he made some sort of excuse.
Overall Monday was an alright practice. Wednesday, however, was anything but alright. There was the initial problem that the gym was sweltering when we got in it. While they were doing our defensive continuous motion I took the time to open some windows. I was about to have the team do the defensive slide against the clock when I was called aside by a GL park district rep. Seems that the principal has been unhappy with our kids running through the school. I didn’t quite understand the complaint, but promised to address it with the team.
After doing our continuous motion I tried to do the work with the press break and it was silliness all around. It took far longer than it should have. It then took way too long to do our work on the man to man defense. The focus was poor. Finally, after a few sprints, I got most of the team to focus and so while our work wasn’t stellar it at least wasn’t poor.
We concluded practice with work on our zone offense. Unfortunately without having practiced it recently our skills had slip and we really had to go back to the basics. It was to my great disappointment that we only accomplished these three drills and didn’t get to do any of the more fun drills I had planned. We did get a little golf in there, and a little bubble, but that was it.
Fortunately we have our game Sunday just against WM, as our game against LV, who is currently in 1st place, was canceled. WM is one of the weaker teams and by not having a game which will push us to the limits first we should have a much better chance of pulling it out.
I plan on going with a starting five of David, Andrew, Scott, Dante, and a player to be named later.
A few notes on some players:
David: In my focus on my coaching decisions Sunday I didn’t give David his due. He scored an amazing 22 of 41 points for the team. He was on fire missing only a few of his shots and generally moving the ball around well. It was by far his best performance of the season and it certainly came at the right time.
Jack P: Missed our game Sunday to be at the Bulls game. This was not received well by some other players on the team who were also going to the Bulls game. Things got worse when he missed Monday’s practice because he and his dad both forgot. He’d have been the 5th starter were it not for this faux pas.
Brian: Even after I had settled down most of the players he refused to be settled down. He also flat out refused to play good defense in our shell drill, constantly insisting on cheating to try and steal the pass. At one point I stopped the practice and sent everybody for a water break except him to no avail. I also held him after practice when I got to the heart of the matter: he was frustrated by not having started. After his openly defiant attitude during practice (such that his brothers were basically telling him to just stop arguing) he knew he wasn’t going to start Sunday. However, we did agree that if he gave me a week of good practice after winter break that he’d get the start.
I am not excited by the prospect of playing against WM’s tall player and not excited about playing in their gym, with the spectators sitting so closely behind the bench, but I am confident that we should have a good chance to rebound after our loss.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Baseball Interview
Today Steve and I interviewed for a position as travel coaches for a U9 HP tournament baseball team. I frankly am NOT excited about the prospect at all. Practices start end of January/beginning of February. We then play our first tournament at the end of April, then on Memorial Day, and then have 3 more in June (so basically every weekend), one on July 4th weekend and then we’re done.
I am not excited because I don’t feel like my baseball skills are up to coaching a travel team. I am not excited because for a little under two months I will have a THIRD team I am going to be responsible for and am going to lose more of my already precious free time. I’m doing this because Steve is incredibly psyched about the prospect.
But maybe we won’t get the job. We interviewed with Brian (basketball boss for me) and Kevin (runs the baseball league Steve and I have volunteered in). I’m not sure how happy Brian was with us. Kevin? Kevin loved us. So my guess is I’ll get a call Friday offering us the job.
And so suddenly rather than having a relaxing winter break as I expected I’m going to be cramming for baseball.
I am not excited because I don’t feel like my baseball skills are up to coaching a travel team. I am not excited because for a little under two months I will have a THIRD team I am going to be responsible for and am going to lose more of my already precious free time. I’m doing this because Steve is incredibly psyched about the prospect.
But maybe we won’t get the job. We interviewed with Brian (basketball boss for me) and Kevin (runs the baseball league Steve and I have volunteered in). I’m not sure how happy Brian was with us. Kevin? Kevin loved us. So my guess is I’ll get a call Friday offering us the job.
And so suddenly rather than having a relaxing winter break as I expected I’m going to be cramming for baseball.
Friday, October 26, 2007
GL Practice
After the tumultuous nature of the practice on Wednesday I was pleased to have a practice run without a hitch last night. I get to practice super early as I wanted to have a chance to just shoot around myself. And to my amazement, waiting in the gym 25 minutes early is Tom. We both just shoot around for a bit and I ask him who he thinks will be next person to come. He takes Cameron. I take the triplets. I was right, though Cameron did arrive fairly early.
Promptly at 7:30 we start practice and it is time for the Quiz part 2. It’s basically the same quiz as before except I changed the vocabulary section (and made it easier) and changed the Yes/No questions for the offense. I grade as they do continuous motion. I go through grading and I had already decided to give them a 1 question leeway. I also decide one question isn’t fair, so I don’t count that. In the end the team has earned 10 suicides (or rather 20 half suicides). Dante, in our free throw practicing, has made all of his practice free throws and he had told me at the first practice he worked over the summer to get up to 90%. After he shot his two free throws following continuous motion, I asked if he could do it under pressure. He said he didn’t know, so I decided to put him to the test. I tell the team that Dante will shoot 2 free throws and can knock-off 2 suicides for each one he makes. Dante goes ahead and makes both. It was beautiful. We run the first three suicides there.
After a water break we go into our shell drill. This time I let the offense move around, at half speed, but they cannot dribble. Brian, thinking he’s found a flaw, points out after one correction that there’s no point in guarding his man when he’s far beyond the 3 point line. I agree. We do a fairly good job with this, maintaining the right distance for on ball, 1 pass, and 2 passes even with the men in motion. One interesting moment: I had blown the whistle to make a coaching point. I make the point, and David quickly goes over to the team and whispers something quietly. I have them reset, give somebody the ball, and all of a sudden there’s a pass to a wide open Lucas for a shot, thanks to a screen David had set. I remind them that they need to call out screens. It was a nice thought by David.
After this, we go into Animal rebounding. I had divided them up into roughly centers/forwards and guards. In our first group, Scott came out on top, god bless his aggressive heart, with Justin finishing in last. In the second group it was Jack M who finished first, with Cameron finishing a strong second, and Andrew who finished in last. Someone, I forgot who, said that he thinks it was unfair since the two new players both finished last. I pointed out that Cameron finished second in his grouping, though I have to admit that the new comers are at a disadvantage there. Justin in particular looked like a deer in the headlights during the drill. I expect he’ll figure out a way to do better. More disconcerting to me was Brian who simply decided he wasn’t going to try. When it got down to 3 he put forth some effort and avoided finishing last, but his lack of effort there cost him a starting spot. I haven’t decided if we’ll do this again Thursday to have a chance to redeem himself, but giving up on a drill because it’s tough is simply not OK. Since I have a lot of kids who could make a case for themselves as starters, and more importantly finishers, a player doing something like this helps me focus. I think at this point we’re looking at a starting five of David, Scott, Lucas, Justin, and either Dante or Jack P.
Following Animal Rebounding, I introduced our new out of bounds play. I had each player run through the play once at each position they might be at. We’ll be spending a fair chunk of time at our next practice perfecting this. It was interesting that most of the team, when I said we’d have a new out of bounds play, were happy about this. David, however, liked the old play saying he got a lot of good shots (he did this privately, so I was happy to discuss it with him). This was, to a certain extent, true. However, I think any out of bounds play is going to work for David. My response was that I needed a play that could be understood and executed by the team, and which would result in a few direct scores.
Finally we concluded with some 2 on 3, 3 on 2. The 2 players did a MUCH better job of getting the ball across half court. Cameron, in particular, showed improvement at not picking up his ball. At tryouts he made a strong case for himself, but had been unimpressive at our first few practices. This practice was a reminder that I picked him to be on the team for a reason. If he’s inconsistent, hopefully as we move through the season he’ll develop some consistency.
We then concluded with our other half of suicides from the quiz. Justin failed to finish one of them on time so they had to re-run one. When someone who was standing on the opposite side of Justin and didn’t see this, asked who didn’t finished, I was glad that my immediate response was “the team”. I gave Brian a chance to give them some added time for the first two by making a sink or swim free throw and he missed. I then offered someone the chance to try and make two free throws to give them a minute for the last suicide, which would basically let them jog. Andrew took up the challenge and missed. I can’t decide if this kid thinks he’s better than he really is, or if he’s struggling to make the adjustment from the shorter hoops they use in Small Fry, what he played last season, to the 10 foot hoops we use. It’s probably a little bit of both.
After that it was time to go home. Except that I didn’t get to head straight home. Tom’s father forgot to come pick him up so Tom and I got to spend 15 minutes hanging out together. He’s a very serious young man. We started talking about shows we Tivo and he mentioned the Simpsons, Family Guy, “and of course the News”. We then talked a little bit about the wild fires in California. Wednesday when we were heading out of practice he mentioned how he barely ever had to run a suicide last year because he got a lot of permissions. I had agreed that this was true, and added it’s the reason he made the team this year because he’s such a hard worker. Thinking about it later, I realized that this was the wrong message to send to him. So when we were shooting around tonight before practice I told him that I wanted to change what I said last night. I told him that he made the team not only because he is a hard worker, but also because he is a good basketball player and in fact that Coach Jon had him as one of the top ten players out there. This is a kid that needs to hear that he’s got the basketball skills to keep up with everyone else.
I had announced, while giving them a chance to rest after a suicide that there would be no practice next Wednesday (Halloween). That gives us 1 practice before our first game. I have to admit to being a little nervous about this since our first game is against MP1, a team who we can beat, but who could also beat us. If we’re going to have a winning season, we’ll need to win games like this. Hopefully with David back in full force, and with the addition of our new players we’ll have a winning effort.
Promptly at 7:30 we start practice and it is time for the Quiz part 2. It’s basically the same quiz as before except I changed the vocabulary section (and made it easier) and changed the Yes/No questions for the offense. I grade as they do continuous motion. I go through grading and I had already decided to give them a 1 question leeway. I also decide one question isn’t fair, so I don’t count that. In the end the team has earned 10 suicides (or rather 20 half suicides). Dante, in our free throw practicing, has made all of his practice free throws and he had told me at the first practice he worked over the summer to get up to 90%. After he shot his two free throws following continuous motion, I asked if he could do it under pressure. He said he didn’t know, so I decided to put him to the test. I tell the team that Dante will shoot 2 free throws and can knock-off 2 suicides for each one he makes. Dante goes ahead and makes both. It was beautiful. We run the first three suicides there.
After a water break we go into our shell drill. This time I let the offense move around, at half speed, but they cannot dribble. Brian, thinking he’s found a flaw, points out after one correction that there’s no point in guarding his man when he’s far beyond the 3 point line. I agree. We do a fairly good job with this, maintaining the right distance for on ball, 1 pass, and 2 passes even with the men in motion. One interesting moment: I had blown the whistle to make a coaching point. I make the point, and David quickly goes over to the team and whispers something quietly. I have them reset, give somebody the ball, and all of a sudden there’s a pass to a wide open Lucas for a shot, thanks to a screen David had set. I remind them that they need to call out screens. It was a nice thought by David.
After this, we go into Animal rebounding. I had divided them up into roughly centers/forwards and guards. In our first group, Scott came out on top, god bless his aggressive heart, with Justin finishing in last. In the second group it was Jack M who finished first, with Cameron finishing a strong second, and Andrew who finished in last. Someone, I forgot who, said that he thinks it was unfair since the two new players both finished last. I pointed out that Cameron finished second in his grouping, though I have to admit that the new comers are at a disadvantage there. Justin in particular looked like a deer in the headlights during the drill. I expect he’ll figure out a way to do better. More disconcerting to me was Brian who simply decided he wasn’t going to try. When it got down to 3 he put forth some effort and avoided finishing last, but his lack of effort there cost him a starting spot. I haven’t decided if we’ll do this again Thursday to have a chance to redeem himself, but giving up on a drill because it’s tough is simply not OK. Since I have a lot of kids who could make a case for themselves as starters, and more importantly finishers, a player doing something like this helps me focus. I think at this point we’re looking at a starting five of David, Scott, Lucas, Justin, and either Dante or Jack P.
Following Animal Rebounding, I introduced our new out of bounds play. I had each player run through the play once at each position they might be at. We’ll be spending a fair chunk of time at our next practice perfecting this. It was interesting that most of the team, when I said we’d have a new out of bounds play, were happy about this. David, however, liked the old play saying he got a lot of good shots (he did this privately, so I was happy to discuss it with him). This was, to a certain extent, true. However, I think any out of bounds play is going to work for David. My response was that I needed a play that could be understood and executed by the team, and which would result in a few direct scores.
Finally we concluded with some 2 on 3, 3 on 2. The 2 players did a MUCH better job of getting the ball across half court. Cameron, in particular, showed improvement at not picking up his ball. At tryouts he made a strong case for himself, but had been unimpressive at our first few practices. This practice was a reminder that I picked him to be on the team for a reason. If he’s inconsistent, hopefully as we move through the season he’ll develop some consistency.
We then concluded with our other half of suicides from the quiz. Justin failed to finish one of them on time so they had to re-run one. When someone who was standing on the opposite side of Justin and didn’t see this, asked who didn’t finished, I was glad that my immediate response was “the team”. I gave Brian a chance to give them some added time for the first two by making a sink or swim free throw and he missed. I then offered someone the chance to try and make two free throws to give them a minute for the last suicide, which would basically let them jog. Andrew took up the challenge and missed. I can’t decide if this kid thinks he’s better than he really is, or if he’s struggling to make the adjustment from the shorter hoops they use in Small Fry, what he played last season, to the 10 foot hoops we use. It’s probably a little bit of both.
After that it was time to go home. Except that I didn’t get to head straight home. Tom’s father forgot to come pick him up so Tom and I got to spend 15 minutes hanging out together. He’s a very serious young man. We started talking about shows we Tivo and he mentioned the Simpsons, Family Guy, “and of course the News”. We then talked a little bit about the wild fires in California. Wednesday when we were heading out of practice he mentioned how he barely ever had to run a suicide last year because he got a lot of permissions. I had agreed that this was true, and added it’s the reason he made the team this year because he’s such a hard worker. Thinking about it later, I realized that this was the wrong message to send to him. So when we were shooting around tonight before practice I told him that I wanted to change what I said last night. I told him that he made the team not only because he is a hard worker, but also because he is a good basketball player and in fact that Coach Jon had him as one of the top ten players out there. This is a kid that needs to hear that he’s got the basketball skills to keep up with everyone else.
I had announced, while giving them a chance to rest after a suicide that there would be no practice next Wednesday (Halloween). That gives us 1 practice before our first game. I have to admit to being a little nervous about this since our first game is against MP1, a team who we can beat, but who could also beat us. If we’re going to have a winning season, we’ll need to win games like this. Hopefully with David back in full force, and with the addition of our new players we’ll have a winning effort.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
GL Tryouts Night 3: We Have a Team
Well it was the night to really see who had what. As I started tryouts, promptly at 8:15, all were there except Dante. We immediately kicked off into our 5 on 5 games. First with the fair teams. Andrew showed that he indeed deserved to make the team, as did Cameron. Jon also felt strongly positive about Dante. Tom, by virtue of his have shown up, made the team. Even better is that during one of the second set of games, Tom actually took a shot. He air balled it, but I was just so happy he actually shot the ball, as he’d become loath to do that by the end of last season.
The initial 5 on 5 was nice, but far more instructive were the uneven 5 on 5 teams. The second team made up of Brian, Cameron, Dante, Jack P, and Tom showed that they could run, at least for a bit, with a team of Andrew, David, Justin, Lucas, and Scott. At one point during the game Justin got the ball at the 3 point line, Dante was sticking back giving him space (as he’d been told to do last season by me). Justin decided to take the shot. It was gorgeous and a perfect swoosh. There were murmurs of approval. There was then a great moment (at least from my perspective) when I said, “We don’t settle for that shot after 1 pass”. The murmurs went away.
More interesting was the way Team 3 played. This had 3 players on the very close bubble: Jack M, Jake, and Noah. Noah and Jack M stood out above the others. In fact perhaps the sweetest play of the night was a pass Jack made to Noah cutting through the lane which resulted in Noah making an easy lay-up. Basically those two were competing for the last slot. Each team plays two games, with it being 1st vs 2nd, 3rd vs 4th followed by 2nd vs 4th and 1st vs 3rd.
I then sent them off for a water break and conferred with Jon. He reiterated his support for Cameron and Dante, which I both agreed with. Cameron in particular won me over with his speed on defense. I conferred with people online and with Jon in person and with all of them pushing Dante, and Dante doing much better than Jake, inside (though Jake is likely a better shooter) that suggestion was given and accepted. In the end Jon didn’t seem to have any feel for Jack, but felt that Noah would play well and admitted that he liked the family and that was likely coloring his view. I agreed Noah had a great family. However, by the end of the water break I felt that Jack was the better player and I had made the tough decision in my head.
I gathered everyone around and talked about how now was the time to be supportive of friends who didn’t make the team. How, if you made the team you needed to be committed otherwise you were stealing a place from someone else who could have been a good member of the team. I also reviewed what would happen. I would give them the note card, talk about the strengths and areas they could improve and they could either stay or go at that point.
When this was all said and done, Emily, my boss at the Park District, came into the gym upset with me for having done this. I didn’t back down, and raised the points that everyone found out equally, I told players they could walk outside the gym after they found if they wanted (and explicitly sat by the door, for just this purpose. Overall, I hope I did the right thing by these kids by giving some immediate feedback, but I don’t know. I do know I was respectful to and upbeat about every kid who didn’t make the team. Hopefully that means something, but having to confront ones peers, as they choose to do, couldn’t have been easy. It won’t be an option again for the future, which in some ways is nice, as it takes my unease out of the equation.
Notable Cuts
Kevin – My first cut. He took it really well and set the precedent of staying in the gym. I wished he had gone out and not been able to handle, seemingly, the news so well.
Noah – He could barely hold it together when I told him that he hadn’t made the team. I told him I really did think he had improved tremendously and if he kept working hard and improving that he’d stand a real good chance for next year. I specifically suggested that he play a bunch with his brother so he can play against someone bigger and work on that. I really like Noah, despite my aggravation over his lack of focus at practice. If the final decision had been between Noah and someone who hadn’t been on the team last year, I’d have given the nod to Noah. I really hope he works hard this coming year.
Daniel – This kid did something which surprised me each night at tryouts. He kept hanging on barely and was a surprisingly tough cut. I think in most years he’d have made a GL team. A real nice kid.
Godie – The other player from last year besides Noah to get cut. I think he knew it was coming. Wasn’t a whole lot to it. He’d really have to work hard and improve a bunch just catch up to where players were this year, let alone where they’ll be in a year.
Meet the Team
So while I still feel upset and confused about the cuts, I feel an equal amount of excitement over this year’s team. I think this team is better than HP’s 6B team, and in fact I am going to try and arrange a scrimmage early on just to prove that very point. I think we are, top to bottom, a better team than last year.
Me - Hopefully I’ll be able to be a good enough coach for the talent assembled. My friend Jeff asked me if the key to being a good team was coaching throughout the season or picking the right players at the start. I said I didn’t know. If it’s the latter I think I did a good job. If it’s the former, only time will tell. I will say that I am in a much better place professionally and given my recent success at work, and coaching last year’s basketball and baseball teams I don’t lack for confidence right now. At the same time I worked REALLY hard on preparing for tryouts which I’m pleased about. Confidence and hard work are good things, I would hope, to be in a coach.
Andrew – As I mentioned I started with Kevin, which was done semi randomly, and then went down the list alphabetically telling each player. For some reason, on impulse, when I got to Andrew I asked him what he saw as his strengths and weaknesses. He identified something which I don’t remember and shooting as his strengths. He identified rebounding as a weakness. I think I perhaps did this to get a sense of his personality as he was pretty quiet overall. Anyhow, after I did this and told him he’d made the team (I immediately told all the people who didn’t make it, as I just felt that was right) he let out the biggest sigh of relief. I’ll be interested to see how he fits into the team dynamic but I think I’m going to like him.
Brian – I haven’t really talked much about him, other than that he was a given. He’s a great shooter. His ball handling skills aren’t as great as I would like and he does make passes which get intercepted. The biggest deal is that he had a rough bout of injuries a year ago. Coming into last year’s tryouts he had just gotten a cast off after 4 weeks after breaking his ankle at camp. A week after practices started he broke his other ankle. I don’t think he’d full recovered by March. However, at this years tryouts he was quick, as he was at least years tryouts. Hopefully he’ll stay injury free this season. He is a rather large hot head and can really go off on himself, and others, though more often on himself (or at me because of himself). So there’s that whole side. But he’s also a kid who, if he likes them, will go out of his way for others. I wasn’t surprised he would talk up another player after Night 1, not to tell me how to do my job, but because he was worried that the kid had had a bad tryout. He is just thoughtful, being the only player on the team, for instance, to ask me when my birthday was. On his note card, I had listed two areas for improvement. I told him the first was based completely on last year and that was playing team basketball and that he hadn’t done anything to the contrary during tryouts. Of course that was also true last year which is why I put it on the card anyway. I also talked with him on his tendency to try and play defense in a way that allows him to steal passes, at the risk of leaving his man open. When we did the triangle passing drill on Day 1, I noticed him doing this, just as he had last year. The nice thing about Brian is that I this year I start with a huge amount of built up trust with him. I know on multiple occasions he’s said, when I’m not around, that I’m awesome and his best coach ever. This has, and will, make dealing with him easier than it would have been otherwise.
Cameron – Before I talk about Cameron now, let me post what I said about him last year during tryouts
Well that’s certainly not true any longer. Cameron has tremendous speed. He is, I believe, after Jack P and David our fastest player. Jon pointed out that you can’t teach speed like that and I had to agree. When it was time for Cameron to come up, I told him how glad I was to have seen him on the first day of tryouts cause he was the last player I cut last year. I told him that he’d improved tremendously and congratulations on making the team. My impression is that he’s more of a me first player right now rather than a team player. I am hopeful, and optimistic, that the general team ethos we have will rub off on him.
Dante – First I should say that when I was debating about whether or not to take Dante, I wasn’t fair to him. Of the three areas I was evaluating (athleticism, basketball skill, and attitude) I focused entirely on his short coming, athletic ability, rather than on his tremendous strength of attitude. I’m real glad several people focused on that and pointed it out to me. I mean the kid practically hugged me when I told him he made the team. I commented to him how his post play had really improved and he said he’d gone to a camp for that. I’ll have to ask him what camp that was since it did him a lot of good as he was a bit of a weak player inside last season and I gave him the Dirk Nowitzki award to recognize the fact that he had a pretty good mid-range shot. I told him that the big thing this season was going to be his speed. I wasn’t worried about it on offense, but was concerned about it on defense. He took this area to work on the best of anyone in that you could tell he genuinely wanted to improve on it. I told him he’d have to work hard to earn his minutes and he seemed excited by the challenge.
David – David should be the best player on the team. David should be the best player on either team in many games. He’s fast, can use either hand to dribble penetrate. Guarding him in practice is always a pain. Best of all he’s not selfish in the least. He, more than me, deserves credit for the unselfish ball we played last year. With his example, my encouragement fell on receptive ears. I will say that this tryout format allowed me to do something that I’m not sure I could have ever done otherwise and that is for me to tell David honestly how much I respect not only his basketball ability but also how he works hard to be better. I had never told him that last year. I had done so in other ways, and I think he knew that I knew how special he was but I felt it was important for me to vocalize it to him. His areas for improvement was that he needed to show more often that he was having fun playing basketball and to not feel the weight of the team on his shoulders. I told him how he knows that I don’t run the offense through one person and that already I could see people who had stepped up after he quit starting to defer to him (Lucas and Scott were both guilty of this) and that it didn’t have to be that way, so he could relax and just do his best. Finally, I told him that I was going to ask a lot from his defensively. I said that I was going to have to ask him to guard big guys this year as we have a bunch of people who can guard guards but fewer who can guard inside guys. He nodded his head in understanding. As our talk ended I commented how I was glad he’d come out as I’d heard a rumor that he was trying out for the JCC team and he chuckled in a way that told me that was not a serious consideration. That made me feel good.
Jack M – In the end Jack made the team because he’s short but he knows how to compensate for that as much as possible and he sees the court well. He is also surprisingly good at penetrating going left or right which takes defenders by surprise. I was tough on Jack. I called him over and asked him why he deserved to make the team. He talked about his ball handling and passing. I agreed with both of those areas. I asked him why maybe he wouldn’t make the team. He couldn’t come up with anything. I gave him a moment to think and he still couldn’t come up with anything. So I told him that he was one of the 10 most skilled players out there, but that I was concerned about what things would be like for him this season. How I was concerned that being a gamer the losing would bother him. I told him how he’d really stepped up for us last year when David left the team, but that there is a lot more talent on the team this year and he’d have to earn every minute he played. By this time he was incredibly choked up. I then told him he had made the team. He kind of spit out “I thought I wasn’t going to.” As I’ll talk about when I get to Tom, I didn’t really weigh the three factors equally, but I am glad to know that as a coach, I have enough credibility in Jack’s eye that even though I told him he was one of the 10 most skilled players that I would leave him off the team because of the other factors. I ended with Jack saying that I really had confidence that he’s older and more mature now and so I have confidence that he could handle these issues. I then repeated myself, not for effect, but more out of nervousness. Conciseness would have been better in this situation so it was unfortunate that I didn’t deliver this last point more effectively.
Jack P – It is little known but September 19th besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day is also “Give Jack a hard time at tryouts” or at least it was in GL. Unlike with Jack M, I told Jack P right off the bat that he’d made the team. I then told him that I’d considered not taking him after Night 2’s tryout. I then explained to him how it was ridiculous for me to even think about that. I told him how his speed and defense were too good to not have on the team, but that he was the lowest percentage shooter last season. And how missed shots drive me nuts. I will be explaining to everyone later how a missed shot is, in my eyes at least, the same as a turnover since we are giving up the ball every time we miss a shot. I told him that this season he was going to either have to improve his shooting percentage or we’d have to find other ways for him to contribute on offense. Jack just shook his head that he understood, but Jack is always a bit of sphinx when I talk seriously with him and so I’m not sure what was going on inside his head. I really wish if I knew it was “Coach is wrong and I’m going to show him” or “Coach is wrong and is an idiot” or “Ok I’ll have to do better” or “I’m awful”. I just don’t know. I do know that Jack was new to GL last school year and he had been a leader in Massachusetts so he’s got some good qualities there, even if he doesn’t yet have a firm place in the social structure here yet.
Justin – Poor Justin was the last kid to go. He actually talked some tonight and I think I’m going to really like him and will be a kid who I’m going to have to shield to some extent from his father. I told him how impressed I was with his shooting ability and that the 3 point shot he did was a beautiful shot. The admiration in my voice was clear. However, I also told him that he could ask people on the team about how I have sat people who have shot beautiful shots like that without working the ball. I also told him that I put on his note card as an area for improvement “It sometimes seems like you’re half a second behind what is happening” but that I wasn’t sure that was true at all. I said that I had detected something in his playing which bothered me but couldn’t place my finger on it yet but that we had a full season to figure it out. I also told him how I was real happy he came out for the team this year as I’d noticed how good he was when we played against him last year. Justin is going to be an incredible tool for us to have on offense. If he, Brian, and David can give us some credibility on the outside, causing other teams to guard us closely there, in particular Justin drawing out the big man, or forcing a team to go to zone, I think we can then use our speed to take advantage of them. The possibilities of Justin excite me.
Lucas – Lucas is a great kid. Where as last season I forced him to play post, he has grown more up than out and I’m not sure he’ll have the bulk to do that this season. I also know that we’re doing a much more sophisticated defense this year and that Lucas is going to struggle with that at first. Not a whole lot to say here as he was an easy pick as he just has a lot of good qualities, but nothing as outstanding (or negative) as some of the others. I had a real hard time, in fact, coming up with an area to work on and ended up putting “Being more of a leader on the floor” as he’s a real quiet kid but one everyone likes. He was, based on his name, the first kid to make the team. I’ll also point out that his father just LOVES me and his mother likes me a lot too. It’s nice having a couple of parents so firmly in your corner.
Scott – Scott told me he played guard a whole bunch at camp over the summer and kind of enjoyed it. I’m sure he did. I’m glad he’s willing to do that. I hope he’s still a scrappy kid as we need kids who can guard big kids. Sadly, like Lucas, he’s grown more up than out, and I don’t know if he’s big enough to play the post anymore. I hope he is though since he’s a tough defender, probably the best on the team after David. The neat thing about Scott right now is that he really doesn’t know just how good he is which makes him so absolutely enjoyable to coach since he’s got so much potential but works so hard.
Tom – Noah was probably a better basketball player during tryouts than Tom. However as I’ve said from the beginning Tom could make the team on attitude alone as long as he showed me SOMETHING. When talking about how I was looking for athleticism, basketball skills, and attitude, I talked extensively about attitude and didn’t really explain athleticism. Yet, when compiling the team I only really considered attitude as a secondary factor. It was ALMOST enough to keep Cameron and Jack off the team but in the end their talent won out. Noah was a mixed picture but overall positive in the attitude category and he didn’t make the team in favor of athleticism and skills. I’d like to think if we didn’t have so much talent I would follow my own dictum better, and in fact advocated that very position to Jon during his 4th grade tryouts for a couple of players. I don’t like it when my rhetoric and actions don’t match up so I will have to really rethink about this in the future, but for now it is simply a disappointment with myself. I think I would be less disappointed with myself if I’d considered this more in the case of Dante. I did think about it in Lucas’s case but he was a nearly automatic player so that doesn’t really count for anything. All that is a long way of saying, I think the world of Tom and he is the only evidence of my not having been completely hallow in what I said. I was quite concerned, as he’s a bit of a perfectionist, that he’d cut himself after he had a poor showing on Day 1. When I talked with Tom, I told him that while his shooting accuracy might not be there he had beautiful form and we’d work on his shooting this season together.
So that’s the team. I really do think they’re more talented than HP’s 6B team and if that’s true we’ve got a real chance of being better than the .500 team I thought we’d be. That said, practices don’t start for a month so in the meantime we’ll be focusing on HP which is meeting weekly.
The initial 5 on 5 was nice, but far more instructive were the uneven 5 on 5 teams. The second team made up of Brian, Cameron, Dante, Jack P, and Tom showed that they could run, at least for a bit, with a team of Andrew, David, Justin, Lucas, and Scott. At one point during the game Justin got the ball at the 3 point line, Dante was sticking back giving him space (as he’d been told to do last season by me). Justin decided to take the shot. It was gorgeous and a perfect swoosh. There were murmurs of approval. There was then a great moment (at least from my perspective) when I said, “We don’t settle for that shot after 1 pass”. The murmurs went away.
More interesting was the way Team 3 played. This had 3 players on the very close bubble: Jack M, Jake, and Noah. Noah and Jack M stood out above the others. In fact perhaps the sweetest play of the night was a pass Jack made to Noah cutting through the lane which resulted in Noah making an easy lay-up. Basically those two were competing for the last slot. Each team plays two games, with it being 1st vs 2nd, 3rd vs 4th followed by 2nd vs 4th and 1st vs 3rd.
I then sent them off for a water break and conferred with Jon. He reiterated his support for Cameron and Dante, which I both agreed with. Cameron in particular won me over with his speed on defense. I conferred with people online and with Jon in person and with all of them pushing Dante, and Dante doing much better than Jake, inside (though Jake is likely a better shooter) that suggestion was given and accepted. In the end Jon didn’t seem to have any feel for Jack, but felt that Noah would play well and admitted that he liked the family and that was likely coloring his view. I agreed Noah had a great family. However, by the end of the water break I felt that Jack was the better player and I had made the tough decision in my head.
I gathered everyone around and talked about how now was the time to be supportive of friends who didn’t make the team. How, if you made the team you needed to be committed otherwise you were stealing a place from someone else who could have been a good member of the team. I also reviewed what would happen. I would give them the note card, talk about the strengths and areas they could improve and they could either stay or go at that point.
When this was all said and done, Emily, my boss at the Park District, came into the gym upset with me for having done this. I didn’t back down, and raised the points that everyone found out equally, I told players they could walk outside the gym after they found if they wanted (and explicitly sat by the door, for just this purpose. Overall, I hope I did the right thing by these kids by giving some immediate feedback, but I don’t know. I do know I was respectful to and upbeat about every kid who didn’t make the team. Hopefully that means something, but having to confront ones peers, as they choose to do, couldn’t have been easy. It won’t be an option again for the future, which in some ways is nice, as it takes my unease out of the equation.
Notable Cuts
Kevin – My first cut. He took it really well and set the precedent of staying in the gym. I wished he had gone out and not been able to handle, seemingly, the news so well.
Noah – He could barely hold it together when I told him that he hadn’t made the team. I told him I really did think he had improved tremendously and if he kept working hard and improving that he’d stand a real good chance for next year. I specifically suggested that he play a bunch with his brother so he can play against someone bigger and work on that. I really like Noah, despite my aggravation over his lack of focus at practice. If the final decision had been between Noah and someone who hadn’t been on the team last year, I’d have given the nod to Noah. I really hope he works hard this coming year.
Daniel – This kid did something which surprised me each night at tryouts. He kept hanging on barely and was a surprisingly tough cut. I think in most years he’d have made a GL team. A real nice kid.
Godie – The other player from last year besides Noah to get cut. I think he knew it was coming. Wasn’t a whole lot to it. He’d really have to work hard and improve a bunch just catch up to where players were this year, let alone where they’ll be in a year.
Meet the Team
So while I still feel upset and confused about the cuts, I feel an equal amount of excitement over this year’s team. I think this team is better than HP’s 6B team, and in fact I am going to try and arrange a scrimmage early on just to prove that very point. I think we are, top to bottom, a better team than last year.
Me - Hopefully I’ll be able to be a good enough coach for the talent assembled. My friend Jeff asked me if the key to being a good team was coaching throughout the season or picking the right players at the start. I said I didn’t know. If it’s the latter I think I did a good job. If it’s the former, only time will tell. I will say that I am in a much better place professionally and given my recent success at work, and coaching last year’s basketball and baseball teams I don’t lack for confidence right now. At the same time I worked REALLY hard on preparing for tryouts which I’m pleased about. Confidence and hard work are good things, I would hope, to be in a coach.
Andrew – As I mentioned I started with Kevin, which was done semi randomly, and then went down the list alphabetically telling each player. For some reason, on impulse, when I got to Andrew I asked him what he saw as his strengths and weaknesses. He identified something which I don’t remember and shooting as his strengths. He identified rebounding as a weakness. I think I perhaps did this to get a sense of his personality as he was pretty quiet overall. Anyhow, after I did this and told him he’d made the team (I immediately told all the people who didn’t make it, as I just felt that was right) he let out the biggest sigh of relief. I’ll be interested to see how he fits into the team dynamic but I think I’m going to like him.
Brian – I haven’t really talked much about him, other than that he was a given. He’s a great shooter. His ball handling skills aren’t as great as I would like and he does make passes which get intercepted. The biggest deal is that he had a rough bout of injuries a year ago. Coming into last year’s tryouts he had just gotten a cast off after 4 weeks after breaking his ankle at camp. A week after practices started he broke his other ankle. I don’t think he’d full recovered by March. However, at this years tryouts he was quick, as he was at least years tryouts. Hopefully he’ll stay injury free this season. He is a rather large hot head and can really go off on himself, and others, though more often on himself (or at me because of himself). So there’s that whole side. But he’s also a kid who, if he likes them, will go out of his way for others. I wasn’t surprised he would talk up another player after Night 1, not to tell me how to do my job, but because he was worried that the kid had had a bad tryout. He is just thoughtful, being the only player on the team, for instance, to ask me when my birthday was. On his note card, I had listed two areas for improvement. I told him the first was based completely on last year and that was playing team basketball and that he hadn’t done anything to the contrary during tryouts. Of course that was also true last year which is why I put it on the card anyway. I also talked with him on his tendency to try and play defense in a way that allows him to steal passes, at the risk of leaving his man open. When we did the triangle passing drill on Day 1, I noticed him doing this, just as he had last year. The nice thing about Brian is that I this year I start with a huge amount of built up trust with him. I know on multiple occasions he’s said, when I’m not around, that I’m awesome and his best coach ever. This has, and will, make dealing with him easier than it would have been otherwise.
Cameron – Before I talk about Cameron now, let me post what I said about him last year during tryouts
Cameron is a blob. He doesn’t do anything great, but he doesn’t do anything poorly either.
Well that’s certainly not true any longer. Cameron has tremendous speed. He is, I believe, after Jack P and David our fastest player. Jon pointed out that you can’t teach speed like that and I had to agree. When it was time for Cameron to come up, I told him how glad I was to have seen him on the first day of tryouts cause he was the last player I cut last year. I told him that he’d improved tremendously and congratulations on making the team. My impression is that he’s more of a me first player right now rather than a team player. I am hopeful, and optimistic, that the general team ethos we have will rub off on him.
Dante – First I should say that when I was debating about whether or not to take Dante, I wasn’t fair to him. Of the three areas I was evaluating (athleticism, basketball skill, and attitude) I focused entirely on his short coming, athletic ability, rather than on his tremendous strength of attitude. I’m real glad several people focused on that and pointed it out to me. I mean the kid practically hugged me when I told him he made the team. I commented to him how his post play had really improved and he said he’d gone to a camp for that. I’ll have to ask him what camp that was since it did him a lot of good as he was a bit of a weak player inside last season and I gave him the Dirk Nowitzki award to recognize the fact that he had a pretty good mid-range shot. I told him that the big thing this season was going to be his speed. I wasn’t worried about it on offense, but was concerned about it on defense. He took this area to work on the best of anyone in that you could tell he genuinely wanted to improve on it. I told him he’d have to work hard to earn his minutes and he seemed excited by the challenge.
David – David should be the best player on the team. David should be the best player on either team in many games. He’s fast, can use either hand to dribble penetrate. Guarding him in practice is always a pain. Best of all he’s not selfish in the least. He, more than me, deserves credit for the unselfish ball we played last year. With his example, my encouragement fell on receptive ears. I will say that this tryout format allowed me to do something that I’m not sure I could have ever done otherwise and that is for me to tell David honestly how much I respect not only his basketball ability but also how he works hard to be better. I had never told him that last year. I had done so in other ways, and I think he knew that I knew how special he was but I felt it was important for me to vocalize it to him. His areas for improvement was that he needed to show more often that he was having fun playing basketball and to not feel the weight of the team on his shoulders. I told him how he knows that I don’t run the offense through one person and that already I could see people who had stepped up after he quit starting to defer to him (Lucas and Scott were both guilty of this) and that it didn’t have to be that way, so he could relax and just do his best. Finally, I told him that I was going to ask a lot from his defensively. I said that I was going to have to ask him to guard big guys this year as we have a bunch of people who can guard guards but fewer who can guard inside guys. He nodded his head in understanding. As our talk ended I commented how I was glad he’d come out as I’d heard a rumor that he was trying out for the JCC team and he chuckled in a way that told me that was not a serious consideration. That made me feel good.
Jack M – In the end Jack made the team because he’s short but he knows how to compensate for that as much as possible and he sees the court well. He is also surprisingly good at penetrating going left or right which takes defenders by surprise. I was tough on Jack. I called him over and asked him why he deserved to make the team. He talked about his ball handling and passing. I agreed with both of those areas. I asked him why maybe he wouldn’t make the team. He couldn’t come up with anything. I gave him a moment to think and he still couldn’t come up with anything. So I told him that he was one of the 10 most skilled players out there, but that I was concerned about what things would be like for him this season. How I was concerned that being a gamer the losing would bother him. I told him how he’d really stepped up for us last year when David left the team, but that there is a lot more talent on the team this year and he’d have to earn every minute he played. By this time he was incredibly choked up. I then told him he had made the team. He kind of spit out “I thought I wasn’t going to.” As I’ll talk about when I get to Tom, I didn’t really weigh the three factors equally, but I am glad to know that as a coach, I have enough credibility in Jack’s eye that even though I told him he was one of the 10 most skilled players that I would leave him off the team because of the other factors. I ended with Jack saying that I really had confidence that he’s older and more mature now and so I have confidence that he could handle these issues. I then repeated myself, not for effect, but more out of nervousness. Conciseness would have been better in this situation so it was unfortunate that I didn’t deliver this last point more effectively.
Jack P – It is little known but September 19th besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day is also “Give Jack a hard time at tryouts” or at least it was in GL. Unlike with Jack M, I told Jack P right off the bat that he’d made the team. I then told him that I’d considered not taking him after Night 2’s tryout. I then explained to him how it was ridiculous for me to even think about that. I told him how his speed and defense were too good to not have on the team, but that he was the lowest percentage shooter last season. And how missed shots drive me nuts. I will be explaining to everyone later how a missed shot is, in my eyes at least, the same as a turnover since we are giving up the ball every time we miss a shot. I told him that this season he was going to either have to improve his shooting percentage or we’d have to find other ways for him to contribute on offense. Jack just shook his head that he understood, but Jack is always a bit of sphinx when I talk seriously with him and so I’m not sure what was going on inside his head. I really wish if I knew it was “Coach is wrong and I’m going to show him” or “Coach is wrong and is an idiot” or “Ok I’ll have to do better” or “I’m awful”. I just don’t know. I do know that Jack was new to GL last school year and he had been a leader in Massachusetts so he’s got some good qualities there, even if he doesn’t yet have a firm place in the social structure here yet.
Justin – Poor Justin was the last kid to go. He actually talked some tonight and I think I’m going to really like him and will be a kid who I’m going to have to shield to some extent from his father. I told him how impressed I was with his shooting ability and that the 3 point shot he did was a beautiful shot. The admiration in my voice was clear. However, I also told him that he could ask people on the team about how I have sat people who have shot beautiful shots like that without working the ball. I also told him that I put on his note card as an area for improvement “It sometimes seems like you’re half a second behind what is happening” but that I wasn’t sure that was true at all. I said that I had detected something in his playing which bothered me but couldn’t place my finger on it yet but that we had a full season to figure it out. I also told him how I was real happy he came out for the team this year as I’d noticed how good he was when we played against him last year. Justin is going to be an incredible tool for us to have on offense. If he, Brian, and David can give us some credibility on the outside, causing other teams to guard us closely there, in particular Justin drawing out the big man, or forcing a team to go to zone, I think we can then use our speed to take advantage of them. The possibilities of Justin excite me.
Lucas – Lucas is a great kid. Where as last season I forced him to play post, he has grown more up than out and I’m not sure he’ll have the bulk to do that this season. I also know that we’re doing a much more sophisticated defense this year and that Lucas is going to struggle with that at first. Not a whole lot to say here as he was an easy pick as he just has a lot of good qualities, but nothing as outstanding (or negative) as some of the others. I had a real hard time, in fact, coming up with an area to work on and ended up putting “Being more of a leader on the floor” as he’s a real quiet kid but one everyone likes. He was, based on his name, the first kid to make the team. I’ll also point out that his father just LOVES me and his mother likes me a lot too. It’s nice having a couple of parents so firmly in your corner.
Scott – Scott told me he played guard a whole bunch at camp over the summer and kind of enjoyed it. I’m sure he did. I’m glad he’s willing to do that. I hope he’s still a scrappy kid as we need kids who can guard big kids. Sadly, like Lucas, he’s grown more up than out, and I don’t know if he’s big enough to play the post anymore. I hope he is though since he’s a tough defender, probably the best on the team after David. The neat thing about Scott right now is that he really doesn’t know just how good he is which makes him so absolutely enjoyable to coach since he’s got so much potential but works so hard.
Tom – Noah was probably a better basketball player during tryouts than Tom. However as I’ve said from the beginning Tom could make the team on attitude alone as long as he showed me SOMETHING. When talking about how I was looking for athleticism, basketball skills, and attitude, I talked extensively about attitude and didn’t really explain athleticism. Yet, when compiling the team I only really considered attitude as a secondary factor. It was ALMOST enough to keep Cameron and Jack off the team but in the end their talent won out. Noah was a mixed picture but overall positive in the attitude category and he didn’t make the team in favor of athleticism and skills. I’d like to think if we didn’t have so much talent I would follow my own dictum better, and in fact advocated that very position to Jon during his 4th grade tryouts for a couple of players. I don’t like it when my rhetoric and actions don’t match up so I will have to really rethink about this in the future, but for now it is simply a disappointment with myself. I think I would be less disappointed with myself if I’d considered this more in the case of Dante. I did think about it in Lucas’s case but he was a nearly automatic player so that doesn’t really count for anything. All that is a long way of saying, I think the world of Tom and he is the only evidence of my not having been completely hallow in what I said. I was quite concerned, as he’s a bit of a perfectionist, that he’d cut himself after he had a poor showing on Day 1. When I talked with Tom, I told him that while his shooting accuracy might not be there he had beautiful form and we’d work on his shooting this season together.
So that’s the team. I really do think they’re more talented than HP’s 6B team and if that’s true we’ve got a real chance of being better than the .500 team I thought we’d be. That said, practices don’t start for a month so in the meantime we’ll be focusing on HP which is meeting weekly.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Playoffs: NF1
We have our first playoff game against NF1. This team finished in 7th place, despite, I learn, being made up of 3rd graders. I had told the team at our last practice that we would be doing hockey subs for the last time. After that game I told them that I would be making no promises about playing time. We would be having 8 players for the game as Jack M had to play for his AAU team. Brian, who I was convinced was out for the rest of the season? He had been at practice the night before and I could observe no ill effects. His did had told me he would be able to play but I’d been skeptical. Turns out that his dad was very much correct.
The other team got into early foul trouble, but we couldn’t hit any of our shots either at the free throw line or in the field and so the game was pretty close in the first quarter. A great example of this was on our very first possession we took off a minute fifteen from the clock, with multiple shots, passes, rebounds, but not a basket to be found. It was a great offensive possession, with good defense, but shots just weren’t falling.
Going into the second quarter, up by just 1, I hoped we could open up the game some. We do extend our lead to 5 or 6 points, but despite even throwing some presses at them we just can’t seem to get anything going. They’re playing very well.
The third quarter is more of the same. They’re throwing a pretty good trapping 2-1-2 against us that does produce some turnovers. Our biggest problem is at point guard. We simply don’t have anyone who can really make things happen. Brian and Jack P are the ones playing point and both have their pluses and minuses. Brian is simply not as explosive and fast as we’re used to at point and so he can often get snared by their trap. Jack, on the other hand, is certainly fast enough, but his court vision isn’t so great and so he’ll often miss open passes or become too determined to shoot. Having neither David or Jack M, our two main point guards, was quite detrimental to our efforts and prevented us from ever gaining control of the game.
In the fourth quarter we blow the game open. Their best player fouls out about half way into the quarter and we finally hunker down and our shots start to fall. Scott also basically took control of the game, getting the rebound and dribbling down the court, beating everyone, for a lay-up a couple of times. It was just as David used to do. We end up winning by 15. However, despite the fact that we were basically in the lead the whole game, it was quite nerve racking for me as a coach. The kids on the other hand were never too concerned which might explain why it was so close for so long. I can’t really be upset with them for not being too concerned since:
1. I had stressed so much that we were a much better team than they were
2. Their unflappable nature is why we are so good in close games.
The other reason why it was so close was of course the fact that they were playing their best players as much as possible, where as I was playing all of my kids equally. After the game one of their parents commented to me, “You guys really miss [David]” as I’d told them before the game how he’d quit the team. It was quite clear from his tone that he felt like we wouldn’t be able to win it with-out David. While based on what he saw I couldn’t blame him for his assessment, I knew we were a better team than what we’d shown that day.
I also felt much better when I went home and did the numbers. I found out that we shot nearly a season low from the field. This meant that if our shots had dropped at a more typical rate we’d have won this game far before the fourth quarter.
Going into Sunday we were going to play MP2 and then (hopefully) the winner of the MP1-LS game. I felt very good about our chances and knew that it would be two tough games, but felt that the championship was in reach.
My day was not done, however. The coach of the 5th and 6th grade teams had games which conflicted and so I had been drafted to coach the 6th grade team until he could get to the game. I was actually more nervous about this game than my own as I’d only known this team from one practice of an hour and a half. I’m proud to report that when I turned over the game in the 3rd quarter the team was up by 5 to a team that previously defeated them by 30. They would later go on to lose by 4, and while it’d have happened no matter who was coaching it sure did make me look good :).
The other team got into early foul trouble, but we couldn’t hit any of our shots either at the free throw line or in the field and so the game was pretty close in the first quarter. A great example of this was on our very first possession we took off a minute fifteen from the clock, with multiple shots, passes, rebounds, but not a basket to be found. It was a great offensive possession, with good defense, but shots just weren’t falling.
Going into the second quarter, up by just 1, I hoped we could open up the game some. We do extend our lead to 5 or 6 points, but despite even throwing some presses at them we just can’t seem to get anything going. They’re playing very well.
The third quarter is more of the same. They’re throwing a pretty good trapping 2-1-2 against us that does produce some turnovers. Our biggest problem is at point guard. We simply don’t have anyone who can really make things happen. Brian and Jack P are the ones playing point and both have their pluses and minuses. Brian is simply not as explosive and fast as we’re used to at point and so he can often get snared by their trap. Jack, on the other hand, is certainly fast enough, but his court vision isn’t so great and so he’ll often miss open passes or become too determined to shoot. Having neither David or Jack M, our two main point guards, was quite detrimental to our efforts and prevented us from ever gaining control of the game.
In the fourth quarter we blow the game open. Their best player fouls out about half way into the quarter and we finally hunker down and our shots start to fall. Scott also basically took control of the game, getting the rebound and dribbling down the court, beating everyone, for a lay-up a couple of times. It was just as David used to do. We end up winning by 15. However, despite the fact that we were basically in the lead the whole game, it was quite nerve racking for me as a coach. The kids on the other hand were never too concerned which might explain why it was so close for so long. I can’t really be upset with them for not being too concerned since:
1. I had stressed so much that we were a much better team than they were
2. Their unflappable nature is why we are so good in close games.
The other reason why it was so close was of course the fact that they were playing their best players as much as possible, where as I was playing all of my kids equally. After the game one of their parents commented to me, “You guys really miss [David]” as I’d told them before the game how he’d quit the team. It was quite clear from his tone that he felt like we wouldn’t be able to win it with-out David. While based on what he saw I couldn’t blame him for his assessment, I knew we were a better team than what we’d shown that day.
I also felt much better when I went home and did the numbers. I found out that we shot nearly a season low from the field. This meant that if our shots had dropped at a more typical rate we’d have won this game far before the fourth quarter.
Going into Sunday we were going to play MP2 and then (hopefully) the winner of the MP1-LS game. I felt very good about our chances and knew that it would be two tough games, but felt that the championship was in reach.
My day was not done, however. The coach of the 5th and 6th grade teams had games which conflicted and so I had been drafted to coach the 6th grade team until he could get to the game. I was actually more nervous about this game than my own as I’d only known this team from one practice of an hour and a half. I’m proud to report that when I turned over the game in the 3rd quarter the team was up by 5 to a team that previously defeated them by 30. They would later go on to lose by 4, and while it’d have happened no matter who was coaching it sure did make me look good :).
Friday, March 23, 2007
End of Season Wrap-Up
After our double header our next game is against MP2. We completely dismantle them and based on their poor showing of sportsmanship at the HP tourney, I let the team score 50 for a final score of 50-31. Not sure what got into me, but there you go.
We then have a weekend off, because of President’s Day. That is when a bit of drama arises, though it could have been far more disastrous than it was. Our next game is against NF1. While we are waiting there, I learn that David won’t be at the game due to conflicts with another team from his caregiver. As we’re standing around I learn from Brian who sort of lets it slip that this might not be a one time thing but instead he might have to quit the team. As I have heard nothing along these lines I don’t let it bother me.
The game against NF is unexceptional. We go out do our thing and win. This was the first game where I went with what I called hockey subs. We had only 8 players (Tom had gotten very sick and was basically out for a month) so I divided the team into two groups of four. Every half a quarter I would yank a group and put in a new group with one player from the other shift. This was done as a way to give players equal playing time. Well David showed up from his other game just before the 4th quarter. I call him over to sit on our bench. He asks if he could play and I say of course, since I can understand his need to miss a game because of conflicts. At the end of the game their coach’s weren’t happy about this. My response simply was that I wanted every player on my team to have a chance to play. I had even alerted them ahead of time that I normally wouldn’t play him in the 4th in a game like that, but it was an unusual circumstance. Their moaning was a bit unjustified considering that he scored all of two points.
That game was on a Saturday. However, MP needed us to reschedule our Sunday game and after a lot of emails it got set for the last Sunday of the season as a double header.
We end up having a couple of weeks off then with-out a game as our game against WK has to be canceled as there is no time when we can reschedule the game. As they were the ones unable to play they have to forfeit to us, but I still rather would have played the game. Instead, the WK coach and I setup a scrimmage after the official end of the season between our team and his A team. His A team who is dominating the division. During this time it becomes clear from Scott and Brian that David will not be playing for us again. Does David or Dad ever bother to contact me? Not until March 10th, 3 weeks, essentially after it has been decided that David will quit the team, does their Dad bother to call me to let me know about this decision. I am more upset by this lack of communication than anything.
On March 11th we have our end of season double header after having been out of action for a couple of weeks. Our first game is against LS. I go with hockey subs again. After the first quarter we gain a lead and hold onto it. It is a great game to watch as we can’t quite ever put LS away but do manage to hold on for the win.
We have a few hours off before our next game against MP for the regular season championship. I am pretty exhausted as the night before I had a wedding which I didn’t get home from until after 1 o’clock (and could have stayed later). This combined with Daylight Savings means I am not at the top of my game for the first game and by the second game I am extremely exhausted. At the start of the game we’re missing Brian, Scott, and Lucas who are, I later learn, stuck in traffic due to a horrendous accident.
Anyway, we start off the game very strongly. Gordie, who missed our earlier game due to having his house league championships, comes out on fire and scores a couple of early baskets. MP gets their composure back and evens it up by the end of the first quarter. After that it’s a seesaw game until the third quarter when they build up a lead. This momentum carries into the fourth and the game has slipped away from us. This is where my coaching should have been better. One of our biggest problems though, throughout the game, was picking up our men on defense. This led to MANY easy baskets for them and was really pretty inexcusable at this point in the season.
More seriously is that early in the 4th Brian collapsed in absolute agony with his ankle. Normally when a player gets injured I go and see how they’re doing, give them a couple moments to collect themselves and then help them off the court of have them walk off. Despite my being out of it, it was quite clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. I then proceed to literally carry him off the court. Play resumes while I comfort him on the sideline. His mom is there and it’s quickly decided that he should go to the hospital. I write off Brian for the rest of the season at that point considering his past history with the ankles (having broken both of them in the past year).
The next day we have our scrimmage against WK. As predicted they are bigger, faster, and stronger than we are. We get blown-out. However, the team never gives up. Even down by 20+ we’re still scrapping away. The dismantling we faced exposed quite a few weaknesses of ours, most notably against the zone.
We end the season in second place. Overall we’d had a good season and I’m optimistic about our chances entering the play-offs. While MP will likely be a problem for us, I still believe we can take them. Despite the loss of David the team remains upbeat and confident about our chances.
We then have a weekend off, because of President’s Day. That is when a bit of drama arises, though it could have been far more disastrous than it was. Our next game is against NF1. While we are waiting there, I learn that David won’t be at the game due to conflicts with another team from his caregiver. As we’re standing around I learn from Brian who sort of lets it slip that this might not be a one time thing but instead he might have to quit the team. As I have heard nothing along these lines I don’t let it bother me.
The game against NF is unexceptional. We go out do our thing and win. This was the first game where I went with what I called hockey subs. We had only 8 players (Tom had gotten very sick and was basically out for a month) so I divided the team into two groups of four. Every half a quarter I would yank a group and put in a new group with one player from the other shift. This was done as a way to give players equal playing time. Well David showed up from his other game just before the 4th quarter. I call him over to sit on our bench. He asks if he could play and I say of course, since I can understand his need to miss a game because of conflicts. At the end of the game their coach’s weren’t happy about this. My response simply was that I wanted every player on my team to have a chance to play. I had even alerted them ahead of time that I normally wouldn’t play him in the 4th in a game like that, but it was an unusual circumstance. Their moaning was a bit unjustified considering that he scored all of two points.
That game was on a Saturday. However, MP needed us to reschedule our Sunday game and after a lot of emails it got set for the last Sunday of the season as a double header.
We end up having a couple of weeks off then with-out a game as our game against WK has to be canceled as there is no time when we can reschedule the game. As they were the ones unable to play they have to forfeit to us, but I still rather would have played the game. Instead, the WK coach and I setup a scrimmage after the official end of the season between our team and his A team. His A team who is dominating the division. During this time it becomes clear from Scott and Brian that David will not be playing for us again. Does David or Dad ever bother to contact me? Not until March 10th, 3 weeks, essentially after it has been decided that David will quit the team, does their Dad bother to call me to let me know about this decision. I am more upset by this lack of communication than anything.
On March 11th we have our end of season double header after having been out of action for a couple of weeks. Our first game is against LS. I go with hockey subs again. After the first quarter we gain a lead and hold onto it. It is a great game to watch as we can’t quite ever put LS away but do manage to hold on for the win.
We have a few hours off before our next game against MP for the regular season championship. I am pretty exhausted as the night before I had a wedding which I didn’t get home from until after 1 o’clock (and could have stayed later). This combined with Daylight Savings means I am not at the top of my game for the first game and by the second game I am extremely exhausted. At the start of the game we’re missing Brian, Scott, and Lucas who are, I later learn, stuck in traffic due to a horrendous accident.
Anyway, we start off the game very strongly. Gordie, who missed our earlier game due to having his house league championships, comes out on fire and scores a couple of early baskets. MP gets their composure back and evens it up by the end of the first quarter. After that it’s a seesaw game until the third quarter when they build up a lead. This momentum carries into the fourth and the game has slipped away from us. This is where my coaching should have been better. One of our biggest problems though, throughout the game, was picking up our men on defense. This led to MANY easy baskets for them and was really pretty inexcusable at this point in the season.
More seriously is that early in the 4th Brian collapsed in absolute agony with his ankle. Normally when a player gets injured I go and see how they’re doing, give them a couple moments to collect themselves and then help them off the court of have them walk off. Despite my being out of it, it was quite clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. I then proceed to literally carry him off the court. Play resumes while I comfort him on the sideline. His mom is there and it’s quickly decided that he should go to the hospital. I write off Brian for the rest of the season at that point considering his past history with the ankles (having broken both of them in the past year).
The next day we have our scrimmage against WK. As predicted they are bigger, faster, and stronger than we are. We get blown-out. However, the team never gives up. Even down by 20+ we’re still scrapping away. The dismantling we faced exposed quite a few weaknesses of ours, most notably against the zone.
We end the season in second place. Overall we’d had a good season and I’m optimistic about our chances entering the play-offs. While MP will likely be a problem for us, I still believe we can take them. Despite the loss of David the team remains upbeat and confident about our chances.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
December 15th Practice Report
So going into practice I knew it was going to be a smaller group than usual. Last week Lucas’s father had told me that they had unbelievable seats for the Bulls game and would be unable to make it. I also got an email during the day letting me know that Jack P would not be making it since he had the stomach flu.
When I get to practice first I find that the H’s are already there. And I soon see that Jack M has been drafted by the house league team and is in there doing some drill with the team. I also find out that the kid who so wow’ed me last week is actually in 6th grade and has a younger brother who is actually on Gordie’s team. Kind of disappointing as if I were coaching the 4th grade next year I don’t have this uber-stud to look forward to. But it does explain how he could come and start for my team.
Their practice comes to an end. For maybe 3 possessions in a row the game looked something like this: Gordie gets the ball and blows by all the defenders and scores a basket. Jack then gets the ball and does the same. This was better, however, than the 6th grader who decided to repeatedly steal the ball from 4th graders, and he wasn’t even doing it from Jack and Gordie, who at least deserved that kind of treatment. The range of skills on a house league team is so great. And it’s not quite like in baseball where the damage one start player is limited to the 2 innings of strikes or homerun he hits every 9 or 10 batters. A star player can be a huge difference every single moment on the court. It’s why basketball is so much more a team game than baseball.
Our practice starts a little late since I have to not only raise the baskets from their 8 feet, or even 7.5 feet, to 10 feet, but there’s also a rope wall that is hanging so low as to be an impediment. I manage to jury-rig a solution to that problem. We start practice at 6:05 and Dante is still not there. I give a quick introduction to our practice and right as we are about to start our continuous motion Dante arrives. The return of our doggie bags was ABYSMAL. I’m thinking if that keeps up we’ll do an early practice suicide for those who don’t bring the card to just reinforce the causation.
As we’re doing our continuous motion, Jack M is clearly lagging. I think he played a bit too hard in the scrimmage before. I give him a break as it’s understandable. However, he gets credit this once. Just as we’re about to start the continuous motion drill, Brian tells me that he “pulled his groin” during gym. Let’s just say that this injury will prove to effect him at irregular times during practice. I do tell him he can take the drill “slowly”. Basically he doesn’t like this drill. Noah, who also always struggles with the drill, is at least clever enough to ask, nay plead, for Princeton, since that doesn’t require quite as much running. One change we did was at the end of continuous motion I let them show me “cool” passes. Saw things like no look behind the back, jump and through the legs, and some other neat things. The players enjoyed that variation. It’ll come back as an occasional treat.
I forget to have them do their two free throws after I call a water break. We then go into our screening drill. The second time through I modify it to a game of 2-on-2. Tom continues to be a model of paying attention when out. Dante and Lucas also do good job here. Scott’s, Gordie’s, and Jack P’s performances are mixed. In that not so good category are Noah, Brian, David, and Jack M. The focus of this practice, I stated, was fakes. So I would often ask one of the players who was out how many fakes there were.
Next we did our transition drill, where they line up on the free throw line extended. We started with 3 on 3 and Jack P and Brian were the two I chose to sit out. They decided to take this opportunity to go to sleep. Brian complained for the millionth time how tired he was. He’d been complaining the whole practice and I started to lose my patience. During this drill David was far less on top of things than he normally is. I reminded the team how we’d been doing a good job of spacing the court on a fast break, and discussed a little more how to defend the fast break. The drill went well and at the end of it I had the team shoot two free throws.
We then came back in and played a game of golf and again we shot two free throws. There can be no doubt at this point that they have learned pretty well how to shoot from the elbows as a much higher percentage of shots go in than before and the games are taking longer to play since a high percentage of missed shots are rebounded. I think it might be time to play a new shooting game. After golf we did two more free throws. It seemed like an awful lot of our free throws were made during practice. I didn’t monitor this closely enough to see if there was any cheating going on, whether in the shooting or in the recording of how many made shots they had.
We then did our 3 on 3 “no excuses” drill where you play 3 on 3 and if your man scores on you than you sit out. Of particular note from this: Jack M has a deadly drive. It seemed like his man was constantly being the one who was sitting out after Jack drove right by him. At one point there was a long time without anyone scoring. Scott decided to let his man have a ridiculously open lay-up so someone would sit out. I then had him skip his turn to go back in the first time to emphasize we play defense 100% of the time. We’re also going to have to watch to make sure that our offense doesn’t become the Jack/David show. David made an observation of how Tom is so happy go lucky (he used slightly different words but not by much) in the classroom and he’s so depressing at practice. This after Tom admitted that it was really his fault that someone else’s man scored and so he came out of the game. I think of Tom as a pretty easy going guy so it’s interesting to have heard David’s observations, as the 4th grade view of the world is always interesting.
We then ran our suicides. I ended the 3 on 3 game a little earlier than I probably had to and rather than do the “what did you notice that everyone did well” bit, because I didn’t think about it, I just ended practice 5 minutes early. As practice ends I pull Brian to the side. His nonstop griping continued throughout practice and his effort in everything was not 100%. I explained to him that I had planned on starting him, but after his practice and complaining I would not be. In retrospect I am not sure if the better idea wouldn’t have been to state “you’re pretty close to earning a start, however practices like this don’t help.” Still gets the message across, but isn’t quite as in your face. Brian didn’t take the news well, which was expected. If looks could kill, I’d have been dead thanks to all the daggers his eyes shot at me. His caretaker asked me what happened, but there were lots of kids around and so I just said that she could ask him. A minute or two later I had a chance to get her by herself and explained what had happened. She was not exactly surprised. She was glad to hear it though, which even if it wasn’t a parent it was nice to have had the support.
I think Scott will be getting the nod in Brian’s place so we’ll go out with a lineup of David, Gordie, Scott, Lucas, Dante. Hopefully it’ll be another easy victory and everyone can get some quality playing time.
When I get to practice first I find that the H’s are already there. And I soon see that Jack M has been drafted by the house league team and is in there doing some drill with the team. I also find out that the kid who so wow’ed me last week is actually in 6th grade and has a younger brother who is actually on Gordie’s team. Kind of disappointing as if I were coaching the 4th grade next year I don’t have this uber-stud to look forward to. But it does explain how he could come and start for my team.
Their practice comes to an end. For maybe 3 possessions in a row the game looked something like this: Gordie gets the ball and blows by all the defenders and scores a basket. Jack then gets the ball and does the same. This was better, however, than the 6th grader who decided to repeatedly steal the ball from 4th graders, and he wasn’t even doing it from Jack and Gordie, who at least deserved that kind of treatment. The range of skills on a house league team is so great. And it’s not quite like in baseball where the damage one start player is limited to the 2 innings of strikes or homerun he hits every 9 or 10 batters. A star player can be a huge difference every single moment on the court. It’s why basketball is so much more a team game than baseball.
Our practice starts a little late since I have to not only raise the baskets from their 8 feet, or even 7.5 feet, to 10 feet, but there’s also a rope wall that is hanging so low as to be an impediment. I manage to jury-rig a solution to that problem. We start practice at 6:05 and Dante is still not there. I give a quick introduction to our practice and right as we are about to start our continuous motion Dante arrives. The return of our doggie bags was ABYSMAL. I’m thinking if that keeps up we’ll do an early practice suicide for those who don’t bring the card to just reinforce the causation.
As we’re doing our continuous motion, Jack M is clearly lagging. I think he played a bit too hard in the scrimmage before. I give him a break as it’s understandable. However, he gets credit this once. Just as we’re about to start the continuous motion drill, Brian tells me that he “pulled his groin” during gym. Let’s just say that this injury will prove to effect him at irregular times during practice. I do tell him he can take the drill “slowly”. Basically he doesn’t like this drill. Noah, who also always struggles with the drill, is at least clever enough to ask, nay plead, for Princeton, since that doesn’t require quite as much running. One change we did was at the end of continuous motion I let them show me “cool” passes. Saw things like no look behind the back, jump and through the legs, and some other neat things. The players enjoyed that variation. It’ll come back as an occasional treat.
I forget to have them do their two free throws after I call a water break. We then go into our screening drill. The second time through I modify it to a game of 2-on-2. Tom continues to be a model of paying attention when out. Dante and Lucas also do good job here. Scott’s, Gordie’s, and Jack P’s performances are mixed. In that not so good category are Noah, Brian, David, and Jack M. The focus of this practice, I stated, was fakes. So I would often ask one of the players who was out how many fakes there were.
Next we did our transition drill, where they line up on the free throw line extended. We started with 3 on 3 and Jack P and Brian were the two I chose to sit out. They decided to take this opportunity to go to sleep. Brian complained for the millionth time how tired he was. He’d been complaining the whole practice and I started to lose my patience. During this drill David was far less on top of things than he normally is. I reminded the team how we’d been doing a good job of spacing the court on a fast break, and discussed a little more how to defend the fast break. The drill went well and at the end of it I had the team shoot two free throws.
We then came back in and played a game of golf and again we shot two free throws. There can be no doubt at this point that they have learned pretty well how to shoot from the elbows as a much higher percentage of shots go in than before and the games are taking longer to play since a high percentage of missed shots are rebounded. I think it might be time to play a new shooting game. After golf we did two more free throws. It seemed like an awful lot of our free throws were made during practice. I didn’t monitor this closely enough to see if there was any cheating going on, whether in the shooting or in the recording of how many made shots they had.
We then did our 3 on 3 “no excuses” drill where you play 3 on 3 and if your man scores on you than you sit out. Of particular note from this: Jack M has a deadly drive. It seemed like his man was constantly being the one who was sitting out after Jack drove right by him. At one point there was a long time without anyone scoring. Scott decided to let his man have a ridiculously open lay-up so someone would sit out. I then had him skip his turn to go back in the first time to emphasize we play defense 100% of the time. We’re also going to have to watch to make sure that our offense doesn’t become the Jack/David show. David made an observation of how Tom is so happy go lucky (he used slightly different words but not by much) in the classroom and he’s so depressing at practice. This after Tom admitted that it was really his fault that someone else’s man scored and so he came out of the game. I think of Tom as a pretty easy going guy so it’s interesting to have heard David’s observations, as the 4th grade view of the world is always interesting.
We then ran our suicides. I ended the 3 on 3 game a little earlier than I probably had to and rather than do the “what did you notice that everyone did well” bit, because I didn’t think about it, I just ended practice 5 minutes early. As practice ends I pull Brian to the side. His nonstop griping continued throughout practice and his effort in everything was not 100%. I explained to him that I had planned on starting him, but after his practice and complaining I would not be. In retrospect I am not sure if the better idea wouldn’t have been to state “you’re pretty close to earning a start, however practices like this don’t help.” Still gets the message across, but isn’t quite as in your face. Brian didn’t take the news well, which was expected. If looks could kill, I’d have been dead thanks to all the daggers his eyes shot at me. His caretaker asked me what happened, but there were lots of kids around and so I just said that she could ask him. A minute or two later I had a chance to get her by herself and explained what had happened. She was not exactly surprised. She was glad to hear it though, which even if it wasn’t a parent it was nice to have had the support.
I think Scott will be getting the nod in Brian’s place so we’ll go out with a lineup of David, Gordie, Scott, Lucas, Dante. Hopefully it’ll be another easy victory and everyone can get some quality playing time.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Looking Back and Ahead
As I setup this blog it was interesting to see how my impressions have stayed the same or changed since the tryouts.
For instance, I successfully nailed Brian (who I had spelled Bryan) as a kid with a bit of an attitude after the first tryouts. So far this seems accurate. I also predicted I would need to use Tom as a guard/forward simultaneously and this too has proven correct, however I proved to be overly pessimistic about how successful this would be . I thought more highly of Noah during tryouts than I do now. I also foresaw some of the problems with Gordie that have cropped up (as I’d completely forgotten how borderline he was in making the team). Fortunately, I made the right call there as Gordie has not really been a problem even if there have been problems (if that makes any sense).
I so foresaw the idea we’d only have 7 players at some game. Of course I thought it would be in February. Does that mean in February we’re going to end up with 5 or 6? Please let that not be true.
I had an opinion of Jack M that more closely resembles how I feel he plays during games than how he practices. Seems like he’s a kid who really needs stress to play as well as he can.
I did not work on zone busting as early as I had originally planned to.
I completely conflated Gordie and Noah in my mind at the time, though reading back on it I was able to put the right name to the right kid.
I haven’t done as good of a job of reinforcing some of the skills we did that first week through-out the season. Working on the proper grip, for instance, or doing the jumps, or wrist flexes, are all activities I should do for 30 seconds here or there. That’s one reason for the scavenger hunt, which was a successful solution to this problem.
I also now know the results of all of the weekend’s games. First, HP won two games on Sunday, including one against a team that had won the previous week. I thought they were a fairly good team, and they showed it, as playing two games on one day is not an easy feat. MP1 defeated MP2. MP2 is our next opponent and has scored more points then our previous two opponents. I really anticipate it should be a good game. If we can win that by a decisive margin of victory I am going to start to believe we have something special. In particular, I’m looking forward to seeing how our defense does. It was “easy” to defend against NF2 and HP, neither of whom have shown that they score points (HP won its game 19-18 and 19-13, while NF2 had only scored 8 points the previous game). If we can limit MP2’s points, as they have scored 40 and 24 in their first two games, I will grow very encouraged about our prospects.
For instance, I successfully nailed Brian (who I had spelled Bryan) as a kid with a bit of an attitude after the first tryouts. So far this seems accurate. I also predicted I would need to use Tom as a guard/forward simultaneously and this too has proven correct, however I proved to be overly pessimistic about how successful this would be . I thought more highly of Noah during tryouts than I do now. I also foresaw some of the problems with Gordie that have cropped up (as I’d completely forgotten how borderline he was in making the team). Fortunately, I made the right call there as Gordie has not really been a problem even if there have been problems (if that makes any sense).
I so foresaw the idea we’d only have 7 players at some game. Of course I thought it would be in February. Does that mean in February we’re going to end up with 5 or 6? Please let that not be true.
I had an opinion of Jack M that more closely resembles how I feel he plays during games than how he practices. Seems like he’s a kid who really needs stress to play as well as he can.
I did not work on zone busting as early as I had originally planned to.
I completely conflated Gordie and Noah in my mind at the time, though reading back on it I was able to put the right name to the right kid.
I haven’t done as good of a job of reinforcing some of the skills we did that first week through-out the season. Working on the proper grip, for instance, or doing the jumps, or wrist flexes, are all activities I should do for 30 seconds here or there. That’s one reason for the scavenger hunt, which was a successful solution to this problem.
I also now know the results of all of the weekend’s games. First, HP won two games on Sunday, including one against a team that had won the previous week. I thought they were a fairly good team, and they showed it, as playing two games on one day is not an easy feat. MP1 defeated MP2. MP2 is our next opponent and has scored more points then our previous two opponents. I really anticipate it should be a good game. If we can win that by a decisive margin of victory I am going to start to believe we have something special. In particular, I’m looking forward to seeing how our defense does. It was “easy” to defend against NF2 and HP, neither of whom have shown that they score points (HP won its game 19-18 and 19-13, while NF2 had only scored 8 points the previous game). If we can limit MP2’s points, as they have scored 40 and 24 in their first two games, I will grow very encouraged about our prospects.
Friday, December 1, 2006
Snow Day
Well it’s a snow day here and that means no practice tonight. Love it as a teacher, hate it as a coach. So this means we are once again losing practice time. It really is adding up at this point and I grow very concerned about our longer term prospects.
The big question, then, is who to start, and what kind of rotation I want to do, for Sunday’s game. Jack M, Jack P, Scott, Tom, Dante, and David all can make a legitimate case for starting. Of that group, in some ways I want to bring Jack P off the bench, since he’s the most versatile of that group after David, who I am obviously going to start. But I still think Jack could be our third best overall player. How do you sit your third best overall player?
If, instead, I went based off of skill that would lead to Tom sitting. However, I don’t like how that leaves us for subs. Brian and Lucas are going to each see minimal playing time, most likely 3 or 4 minutes in each half. I basically want Lucas playing the 4 position, for reasons previously mentioned. Brian, is an unknown. Before his injury I’d had him penciled in as a starter. Now, besides not having a real feel for how I want things done (not the biggest minus considering we play just a step above organized chaos) , he’s still getting his feel for running, jumping, shooting, etc back. The kid has spent, essentially, the last 3 months with a broken ankle on one of his feet. It’s got to have an effect on his body if not his psyche.
With Noah not being there, that leaves Gordie and one other player as my main substitutes and Gordie is essentially only good in the guard positions. Despite the fact that the 3 spot is nearly a guard on our team, he doesn’t seem so comfortable with it. The problem is that at some point, Dante is going to need to rest. When he does I will need a center and that leaves me two choices, basically, Jack P and David. Both have their pluses and minuses. Jack P is serviceable there, but since he’s inside more he ends up with higher percentage shots (he took a whole lot of shots at our last game). David can man the position better, but then again he can do most things better and so limiting his touches of the ball seems counter productive. Perhaps I’m over thinking the whole thing, as if they’re doing the offense right, which they won’t, even the center is on or near the perimeter a fair amount.
One could make an argument that having David, as point guard, Tom, as the other guard, some combination of Scott and Jack P as forwards, and Dante as center is our best unit. In fact, I would be willing to make that argument. However, I just can’t bring myself to not start Jack M. First, he earned it by how well he played last week. Second, considering how well he played last week, it would have an especially damaging effect on a player who is somewhat delicate to begin with. So Jack gets the start. Further, having Jack bring the ball up means Jack is less likely to take a silly shot when he gets the ball, so it makes sense for him to play point, rather than David who is our best point guard.
As I would like to use Tom more as a guard and less as a 3, I think Scott will get the start as the three, Jack as the 4, and Dante as the five. As I like to remind the team, it’s a long season so I will have time to play around with that. This is one of those times that writing things down has helped to clarify my thoughts. And while it’s perhaps not my favorite starting five, I do think it will be our best starting five.
The big question, then, is who to start, and what kind of rotation I want to do, for Sunday’s game. Jack M, Jack P, Scott, Tom, Dante, and David all can make a legitimate case for starting. Of that group, in some ways I want to bring Jack P off the bench, since he’s the most versatile of that group after David, who I am obviously going to start. But I still think Jack could be our third best overall player. How do you sit your third best overall player?
If, instead, I went based off of skill that would lead to Tom sitting. However, I don’t like how that leaves us for subs. Brian and Lucas are going to each see minimal playing time, most likely 3 or 4 minutes in each half. I basically want Lucas playing the 4 position, for reasons previously mentioned. Brian, is an unknown. Before his injury I’d had him penciled in as a starter. Now, besides not having a real feel for how I want things done (not the biggest minus considering we play just a step above organized chaos) , he’s still getting his feel for running, jumping, shooting, etc back. The kid has spent, essentially, the last 3 months with a broken ankle on one of his feet. It’s got to have an effect on his body if not his psyche.
With Noah not being there, that leaves Gordie and one other player as my main substitutes and Gordie is essentially only good in the guard positions. Despite the fact that the 3 spot is nearly a guard on our team, he doesn’t seem so comfortable with it. The problem is that at some point, Dante is going to need to rest. When he does I will need a center and that leaves me two choices, basically, Jack P and David. Both have their pluses and minuses. Jack P is serviceable there, but since he’s inside more he ends up with higher percentage shots (he took a whole lot of shots at our last game). David can man the position better, but then again he can do most things better and so limiting his touches of the ball seems counter productive. Perhaps I’m over thinking the whole thing, as if they’re doing the offense right, which they won’t, even the center is on or near the perimeter a fair amount.
One could make an argument that having David, as point guard, Tom, as the other guard, some combination of Scott and Jack P as forwards, and Dante as center is our best unit. In fact, I would be willing to make that argument. However, I just can’t bring myself to not start Jack M. First, he earned it by how well he played last week. Second, considering how well he played last week, it would have an especially damaging effect on a player who is somewhat delicate to begin with. So Jack gets the start. Further, having Jack bring the ball up means Jack is less likely to take a silly shot when he gets the ball, so it makes sense for him to play point, rather than David who is our best point guard.
As I would like to use Tom more as a guard and less as a 3, I think Scott will get the start as the three, Jack as the 4, and Dante as the five. As I like to remind the team, it’s a long season so I will have time to play around with that. This is one of those times that writing things down has helped to clarify my thoughts. And while it’s perhaps not my favorite starting five, I do think it will be our best starting five.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
November 27 Practice Report
With the long weekend, and my feeling guilty over not doing work I should have for school, I actually spent a lot of time preparing for Monday’s practice. I always go into practice with a game plan, but I was super prepared.
And of course I step into practice and am dealt my first surprise. Who is sitting there lacing up, but Brian. A pleasant surprise. He tells me that David was not feeling well and so would not be at practice. One of the things I had planned was that at the end of practice instead of doing an open ended complement of somebody, each player would have one person to watch and that way everyone would get a complement at the end of practice. Having Brian there, but not David, meant I simply did a switch on those things, as well as some premade teams I’d made.
We start practice talking about all of the good things that went on during our commanding victory. I let them do most of the talking and they hit on all of the major points behind our victory. It was good. I then talk about how we didn’t do a few things so well and that’s what we’d be spending our time doing at practice this week. That included, most importantly, our offense against the zone.
We then did our continuous motion drill with the dribbling. I explained that we would be running “Princeton” our team continuous motion, on Friday. I think that several of the players on the team might have had a little too much turkey. Brian was winded after about 2 minutes. He explained that he’d never had to run so much in his life, which made me laugh. This second ankle injury seems to have really caused some changes to his style. Where as before he was one of the quickest and fastest players on the team, he is now much slower than many of the other players. I had talked to him before practice started about how I didn’t expect him to be full speed all at once and I understood it would take some time for him to catch up to some of the things we’d done. I really hope that he didn’t rush back too quickly. Noah also seemed to have been particularly slow. He won’t be at Sunday’s game so he’ll have a few practices to get back into shape.
I then dismissed them to a quick water break. Brian asked if I would watch his free throw shooting. And it was then that I remembered how I want everyone to be doing free throw shooting after running. DOH! All my preparation and I still forgot that I’d been wanting to do that.
After our water break, where I reminded them that one of the reasons we won was because they got tired in the second half and we didn’t, we did a screen drill. The only time we’d practiced it before was at our 5 man practice. For the drill we practiced going from a low post to screening high. We talked about the options that can come from a screen based on what the defender does. Overall the drill worked fairly well. Most of the team had trouble defending off the screen, in fact Scott was the only player to do well, so next time we run this drill, either on Friday or next Monday, we will talk about how to defend it some, rather than just focusing on the offensive side of it.
We then went into our fast break drill where they line up on the free throw line extended, I pass the ball to a player, and yell out the name of a defensive player. The defensive player then touches the baseline before going back to defense. I really need to start naming the drills, such as this, that we’re going to be returning to from time to time. Suggestions would be welcome. A big focus here was how to defend short handed. We talked about creating a “high-low”. Overall the offenses got better as we ran this more, which is a good thing. We are such a fast team that it’s hard to get too much of a fast break on us as we get back quickly. There will always be some opportunities but hopefully the player will “hear footsteps” and miss the shot. Brian actually directed the fast break well when it was his turn. Jack M, however, did not do such a good job. He had an open wingman but instead decided to try and drive, which considering he was tightly guarded by Gordie, didn’t work so well. This was but one example of his being slightly clueless. I don’t get how a player can perform so poorly in practice, even in gamesque situations such as this, and then do so well in a game. Perhaps he just played the game of his career? I guess I’ll find out.
Following this we spent some time on our in bounds drill. And it was AWFUL. This was something we did poorly at during the game and we got the ball in bounds more through luck than any sort of coordinated play. This is our one fixed play. I worked hard at making sure players only really focused on one position so they’d remember what to do, and still, it was bad. I’m not sure I can find a much simpler inbounds play, though I will look for one for next week as maybe we need to make a switch. I dunno.
Finally, we worked on our zone offense play. This, not surprisingly, caused some confusion, but that’s what I expected. I don’t think the play will be ready for Sunday, so hopefully Northfield doesn’t run too much of a zone.
We ended practice with a quick game of golf and then we ran our suicides. Since there were a couple of house league teams who were wanting to get on the court, rather than talk inside the gym, I took the team outside and we did our end of practice wrap-up in our half-time huddle area. Jack M, as seems to be typical of him, couldn’t find something nice to say about his player to watch, Brian, so I ended up supplying the positive there. This format didn’t work as well as I expected. I’ll give it another go at some point, but if we’re going to do positives, I think we’ll likely go to the more wide open format, even if that excludes some people some of the time. I reminded them about the game time, and informed them of a possible change in times. Gordie let me know that he’s playing on a house league team and didn’t want the game time to change so he could play in that game as well. Evidently his father is coaching the house league team none-the-less. I then asked how many other players were playing on a house league team and learned that exactly zero other players were. In some ways I think that’s too bad, as having the range of abilities is something I like about house league baseball as I really think it can often help the mediocre players see how to step it up some.
Overall, this was a bit of a “blah” practice. Nothing went too well, nothing too poorly. I was all pumped up coming in to it, and as mentioned had planned it more, so I’m a little surprised about it. Perhaps there wasn’t enough competition in it? Too much learning? I don’t think there was much more standing around time than normal, so I don’t think that was it. I dunno. I do know that I am glad that Brian had been gone for the first six weeks. The kid likes to challenge my authority. I am going to have to put the smack down on that mighty soon, as I will not let the atmosphere which has been built suffer at his hands.
For Friday, I think we’re going to focus on the zone offense again. I will work on finding some sort of competition to play in the middle of practice, and we will work on a full court press. In many ways breaking the press is more important to us now than doing the press, but I know that learning the press will take time and so it’s best to introduce it now and keep working on it for a while until they’re ready to actually run it in a game. I’m trying not to look past our next game, against NF1, but to a certain extent I am doing just that as I think getting them ready for our game in two weeks against MP1.
And of course I step into practice and am dealt my first surprise. Who is sitting there lacing up, but Brian. A pleasant surprise. He tells me that David was not feeling well and so would not be at practice. One of the things I had planned was that at the end of practice instead of doing an open ended complement of somebody, each player would have one person to watch and that way everyone would get a complement at the end of practice. Having Brian there, but not David, meant I simply did a switch on those things, as well as some premade teams I’d made.
We start practice talking about all of the good things that went on during our commanding victory. I let them do most of the talking and they hit on all of the major points behind our victory. It was good. I then talk about how we didn’t do a few things so well and that’s what we’d be spending our time doing at practice this week. That included, most importantly, our offense against the zone.
We then did our continuous motion drill with the dribbling. I explained that we would be running “Princeton” our team continuous motion, on Friday. I think that several of the players on the team might have had a little too much turkey. Brian was winded after about 2 minutes. He explained that he’d never had to run so much in his life, which made me laugh. This second ankle injury seems to have really caused some changes to his style. Where as before he was one of the quickest and fastest players on the team, he is now much slower than many of the other players. I had talked to him before practice started about how I didn’t expect him to be full speed all at once and I understood it would take some time for him to catch up to some of the things we’d done. I really hope that he didn’t rush back too quickly. Noah also seemed to have been particularly slow. He won’t be at Sunday’s game so he’ll have a few practices to get back into shape.
I then dismissed them to a quick water break. Brian asked if I would watch his free throw shooting. And it was then that I remembered how I want everyone to be doing free throw shooting after running. DOH! All my preparation and I still forgot that I’d been wanting to do that.
After our water break, where I reminded them that one of the reasons we won was because they got tired in the second half and we didn’t, we did a screen drill. The only time we’d practiced it before was at our 5 man practice. For the drill we practiced going from a low post to screening high. We talked about the options that can come from a screen based on what the defender does. Overall the drill worked fairly well. Most of the team had trouble defending off the screen, in fact Scott was the only player to do well, so next time we run this drill, either on Friday or next Monday, we will talk about how to defend it some, rather than just focusing on the offensive side of it.
We then went into our fast break drill where they line up on the free throw line extended, I pass the ball to a player, and yell out the name of a defensive player. The defensive player then touches the baseline before going back to defense. I really need to start naming the drills, such as this, that we’re going to be returning to from time to time. Suggestions would be welcome. A big focus here was how to defend short handed. We talked about creating a “high-low”. Overall the offenses got better as we ran this more, which is a good thing. We are such a fast team that it’s hard to get too much of a fast break on us as we get back quickly. There will always be some opportunities but hopefully the player will “hear footsteps” and miss the shot. Brian actually directed the fast break well when it was his turn. Jack M, however, did not do such a good job. He had an open wingman but instead decided to try and drive, which considering he was tightly guarded by Gordie, didn’t work so well. This was but one example of his being slightly clueless. I don’t get how a player can perform so poorly in practice, even in gamesque situations such as this, and then do so well in a game. Perhaps he just played the game of his career? I guess I’ll find out.
Following this we spent some time on our in bounds drill. And it was AWFUL. This was something we did poorly at during the game and we got the ball in bounds more through luck than any sort of coordinated play. This is our one fixed play. I worked hard at making sure players only really focused on one position so they’d remember what to do, and still, it was bad. I’m not sure I can find a much simpler inbounds play, though I will look for one for next week as maybe we need to make a switch. I dunno.
Finally, we worked on our zone offense play. This, not surprisingly, caused some confusion, but that’s what I expected. I don’t think the play will be ready for Sunday, so hopefully Northfield doesn’t run too much of a zone.
We ended practice with a quick game of golf and then we ran our suicides. Since there were a couple of house league teams who were wanting to get on the court, rather than talk inside the gym, I took the team outside and we did our end of practice wrap-up in our half-time huddle area. Jack M, as seems to be typical of him, couldn’t find something nice to say about his player to watch, Brian, so I ended up supplying the positive there. This format didn’t work as well as I expected. I’ll give it another go at some point, but if we’re going to do positives, I think we’ll likely go to the more wide open format, even if that excludes some people some of the time. I reminded them about the game time, and informed them of a possible change in times. Gordie let me know that he’s playing on a house league team and didn’t want the game time to change so he could play in that game as well. Evidently his father is coaching the house league team none-the-less. I then asked how many other players were playing on a house league team and learned that exactly zero other players were. In some ways I think that’s too bad, as having the range of abilities is something I like about house league baseball as I really think it can often help the mediocre players see how to step it up some.
Overall, this was a bit of a “blah” practice. Nothing went too well, nothing too poorly. I was all pumped up coming in to it, and as mentioned had planned it more, so I’m a little surprised about it. Perhaps there wasn’t enough competition in it? Too much learning? I don’t think there was much more standing around time than normal, so I don’t think that was it. I dunno. I do know that I am glad that Brian had been gone for the first six weeks. The kid likes to challenge my authority. I am going to have to put the smack down on that mighty soon, as I will not let the atmosphere which has been built suffer at his hands.
For Friday, I think we’re going to focus on the zone offense again. I will work on finding some sort of competition to play in the middle of practice, and we will work on a full court press. In many ways breaking the press is more important to us now than doing the press, but I know that learning the press will take time and so it’s best to introduce it now and keep working on it for a while until they’re ready to actually run it in a game. I’m trying not to look past our next game, against NF1, but to a certain extent I am doing just that as I think getting them ready for our game in two weeks against MP1.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
10-20 Practice Report
On Wednesday I received an email from the H’s nanny (interesting tangent: on my e-mail list the H’s have five people on the list: father, step-mother, mother, and two nannies, who are sisters). Anyhow, I get an email from the H’s nanny telling me that Brian is going to be out with a broken ankle. That was clearly not the news I wanted to hear. I send a response asking for how long he is going to be out. If you recall, Brian had broken his ankle before and step mom was concerned about him not being at full speed at tryouts. I originally had guessed that he had re-broken the ankle. Turns out, it was the other ankle in a soccer accident. So this puts us down to 9 players. I also learn in the same email that they will be a little late coming to practice because of a birthday party.
So I arrive at the school, which is a different one than we practiced at on Monday, and I find the door locked. After being told on Monday that I was unexpected at the school, I had sent Emily an email. She assured me that all was taken care of and this was a mistake on their part. Anyhow, I finally get the attention of the janitor. I explain who we are. He starts telling me that he is the only there, we weren’t expected, and he is leaving at 7 (our practice was from 6-7:30). I walk with him to the school reservation schedule and not only does the Park District have the gym from 6-7:30 it has it until 9 o’clock. Janitor is still saying how he can’t stay. I thank him for letting us in and ask him to call somebody to see what can be done. He mutters and demurs, and I say there must be somebody he can call and thank him for his help, while expressing understanding how he doesn’t want to stay late. We part ways without formal resolution.
I get my first look at our Friday gym. Where as we practice at a middle school on Mondays, and so we have a gym that is plenty large, we practice at a 3rd and 4th grade school on Friday. This means that the court is perhaps ¾ of a high school size. It’s not ideal and so it means that drills and concepts that require a full length court will have to be run on Monday, while Fridays will likely be activities that only require a half court, at most.
When 6 rolls around we have the expected seven players. Dante, Jack P, and Lucas brought back their “doggie bag” while Tom wrote it out on a separate piece of paper saying he had done it. Each of them earned a permission (Jack M’s mom brought it when she picked him up). I reminded the rest of the team, when the H’s arrived, that they must bring the card. Failure, in the future, to do so would mean a suicide.
I get ready to start practice and I discover that I have left my practice plan in the car. Whoops. I actually had enough time I could have gone out to my car to get it, but decide that I know what I wanted to do well enough to go without the written form. We start off reviewing pivoting and do the ball holding drill. Something I noticed during the ball holding drill is that my ability to notice quickly what they were doing right and wrong had definitely picked up since Monday. Good to know practice is making me a better coach as well (as when I had run practice with my semi-competitive high school team we simply didn’t have enough practices to worry about much more than doing some basic team drills). The H’s arrived at 6:10 rather than 6:15 so that was good. The H’s arrived at 6:10 rather than 6:15 so that was good. After the H’s joined us we went into our continuous motion drill. As we have 9 players it meant that I got to run the drill with somebody. Obviously this makes it harder to simultaneously coach. I am thinking of doing a non-partner continuous motion drill tomorrow, but these kind of drills tend to be more complex and I worry that they’re not ready for such drills, so I think it’s likely that for the time being I will be getting some extra exercise. During the drill it was clear that Jack M was struggling. Dante and David continued at a fast steady pace the entire time. The stars, however, were Gordie and Tom who did the best job of doing no look passes. That is one of the major goals of what I have been trying to do, besides conditioning, with the continuous motion drills.
After a water break we had further practice with looking up when moving. Actually, first we did dribbling in place. Worked hard on the correct dribbling position with both hands. David and Jack P did the best job. Jack M and Dante struggled more, with Noah not far behind. Let me say at this point that I was wrong about Noah. Like completely wrong. I had a real hard time at the first practice with telling apart Jack and Noah and so it’s entirely possible that I had imputed on Noah problems that were not really his alone, but instead an amalgamation.
After practicing dribbling in place, something I did as a low activity cool down after the continuous motion as well, we went into half court diagonals. I would stand at the opposite side free throw line and they were expected to shout out how many fingers I was holding up. Tom and the Jacks had the hardest time remembering to keep their heads up.
After doing this several times we played a game of “Dribble Knock away”. Basically, while dribbling they had to try and knock away the balls of fellow players. If a player lost control of his ball then he was out. The court got increasingly smaller as more players were out. Obviously the idea was to promote dribbling with your head up since you had to be aware of your surrounding. At that it was mostly successful. We played two rounds. Dante was the first player out (or perhaps the second player out the second game) which combined with his form means he wasn’t quite as good of a ball handler as I had expected. He is also SLOW. So he has endurance, but it is slow. It will be vitally important for Dante to hustle always to take advantage of his strength of endurance. Lucas won the first game with Jack M winning the second game. David H got second in both rounds, and was also the best at knocking players out. Good to see I had him accurately pegged as our best ball handler.
Honestly? Not quite sure what we did next. I feel like we did some sort of moving activity as I seem to recall another water break here before we went into our defensive stance activity. Dunno. After practicing our defensive stance we then did an activity where a defender had to stay a fixed distance away from a dribbler. I realized after we did this one time that I hadn’t really taught them how to move in the defensive stance.
So we went back and did some jumping. Taught two kinds of jumps. The first was quick jumps, which we soon changed, based on their suggestions, to “bunny jumps”. Basically it’s like a football drill. This teaches them the right motion on how to move in the defensive stance. Then we did all out jumps, two groups of ten, which when done right are quite tiring and the team mostly did them right.
We then went back to the shadowing drill. The defensive stances were, I must say, not quite as good as I had hoped. It’s the first real time that their skills weren’t as good, or better, than I expected.
We did some 1 inch shooting. I really emphasized the importance of shooting straight up, as the point of the drill is to really emphasize shooting form. After this, we ended practice with another game. It was virtually the same game as last time (with a relay) only this time they had to dribble down the full court first. We did best two out of three, but the same team won both times (though I do not recall who was on the team).
It had been a good practice and only a couple of players owed suicides and so I declared that no one had to run (didn’t say that some really had owed it) as it had been a great practice. The players had really displayed hustle, for instance always running to the places I had assigned, and so I felt the reward was deserved. I had been good about giving out permissions, but not quite as good about letting players know when they had earned one, so that’s something I want to improve on for the next practice.
We gathered around and I did the end practice with saying something positive about another team member routine that Steve and I sometimes did at the end of baseball practice. For their doggie bag, they were asked to practice to practice both of the jumps, including doing the bunny hop on one each foot. I also gave them a contact note card as I realized I had handed something to their parents but not them. I wanted to make sure to keep the door open to them, though I have no clue if they’ll take advantage of it.
This week remains a focus on individual skills. The following week we will start to focus on team skills more. I got a voice mail today from Noah’s mother asking for me to send along, or call with, a copy of the doggie bag. I promptly emailed it along. I’m thinking that I will have Noah run a half suicide to emphasize that the doggie bag is his responsibility not his mothers, especially since I had given him the contact card, before practice starts. Also of note is that I sent along our first email update of what we had done this past week and what our focus would be this upcoming week. It was a nice two paragraphs, which I think is the right amount.
Overall, the first week of practice went well. I think the team has improved and just as importantly I think I am growing nicely into the position of coach. However, I worry greatly about our first game. I worry about it. I’ve made it a point, though, not to talk about it with the players. I want them focused, for the time being, on themselves. I’m sure they’re doing a fine enough job of putting pressure on themselves without my saying anything.
So I arrive at the school, which is a different one than we practiced at on Monday, and I find the door locked. After being told on Monday that I was unexpected at the school, I had sent Emily an email. She assured me that all was taken care of and this was a mistake on their part. Anyhow, I finally get the attention of the janitor. I explain who we are. He starts telling me that he is the only there, we weren’t expected, and he is leaving at 7 (our practice was from 6-7:30). I walk with him to the school reservation schedule and not only does the Park District have the gym from 6-7:30 it has it until 9 o’clock. Janitor is still saying how he can’t stay. I thank him for letting us in and ask him to call somebody to see what can be done. He mutters and demurs, and I say there must be somebody he can call and thank him for his help, while expressing understanding how he doesn’t want to stay late. We part ways without formal resolution.
I get my first look at our Friday gym. Where as we practice at a middle school on Mondays, and so we have a gym that is plenty large, we practice at a 3rd and 4th grade school on Friday. This means that the court is perhaps ¾ of a high school size. It’s not ideal and so it means that drills and concepts that require a full length court will have to be run on Monday, while Fridays will likely be activities that only require a half court, at most.
When 6 rolls around we have the expected seven players. Dante, Jack P, and Lucas brought back their “doggie bag” while Tom wrote it out on a separate piece of paper saying he had done it. Each of them earned a permission (Jack M’s mom brought it when she picked him up). I reminded the rest of the team, when the H’s arrived, that they must bring the card. Failure, in the future, to do so would mean a suicide.
I get ready to start practice and I discover that I have left my practice plan in the car. Whoops. I actually had enough time I could have gone out to my car to get it, but decide that I know what I wanted to do well enough to go without the written form. We start off reviewing pivoting and do the ball holding drill. Something I noticed during the ball holding drill is that my ability to notice quickly what they were doing right and wrong had definitely picked up since Monday. Good to know practice is making me a better coach as well (as when I had run practice with my semi-competitive high school team we simply didn’t have enough practices to worry about much more than doing some basic team drills). The H’s arrived at 6:10 rather than 6:15 so that was good. The H’s arrived at 6:10 rather than 6:15 so that was good. After the H’s joined us we went into our continuous motion drill. As we have 9 players it meant that I got to run the drill with somebody. Obviously this makes it harder to simultaneously coach. I am thinking of doing a non-partner continuous motion drill tomorrow, but these kind of drills tend to be more complex and I worry that they’re not ready for such drills, so I think it’s likely that for the time being I will be getting some extra exercise. During the drill it was clear that Jack M was struggling. Dante and David continued at a fast steady pace the entire time. The stars, however, were Gordie and Tom who did the best job of doing no look passes. That is one of the major goals of what I have been trying to do, besides conditioning, with the continuous motion drills.
After a water break we had further practice with looking up when moving. Actually, first we did dribbling in place. Worked hard on the correct dribbling position with both hands. David and Jack P did the best job. Jack M and Dante struggled more, with Noah not far behind. Let me say at this point that I was wrong about Noah. Like completely wrong. I had a real hard time at the first practice with telling apart Jack and Noah and so it’s entirely possible that I had imputed on Noah problems that were not really his alone, but instead an amalgamation.
After practicing dribbling in place, something I did as a low activity cool down after the continuous motion as well, we went into half court diagonals. I would stand at the opposite side free throw line and they were expected to shout out how many fingers I was holding up. Tom and the Jacks had the hardest time remembering to keep their heads up.
After doing this several times we played a game of “Dribble Knock away”. Basically, while dribbling they had to try and knock away the balls of fellow players. If a player lost control of his ball then he was out. The court got increasingly smaller as more players were out. Obviously the idea was to promote dribbling with your head up since you had to be aware of your surrounding. At that it was mostly successful. We played two rounds. Dante was the first player out (or perhaps the second player out the second game) which combined with his form means he wasn’t quite as good of a ball handler as I had expected. He is also SLOW. So he has endurance, but it is slow. It will be vitally important for Dante to hustle always to take advantage of his strength of endurance. Lucas won the first game with Jack M winning the second game. David H got second in both rounds, and was also the best at knocking players out. Good to see I had him accurately pegged as our best ball handler.
Honestly? Not quite sure what we did next. I feel like we did some sort of moving activity as I seem to recall another water break here before we went into our defensive stance activity. Dunno. After practicing our defensive stance we then did an activity where a defender had to stay a fixed distance away from a dribbler. I realized after we did this one time that I hadn’t really taught them how to move in the defensive stance.
So we went back and did some jumping. Taught two kinds of jumps. The first was quick jumps, which we soon changed, based on their suggestions, to “bunny jumps”. Basically it’s like a football drill. This teaches them the right motion on how to move in the defensive stance. Then we did all out jumps, two groups of ten, which when done right are quite tiring and the team mostly did them right.
We then went back to the shadowing drill. The defensive stances were, I must say, not quite as good as I had hoped. It’s the first real time that their skills weren’t as good, or better, than I expected.
We did some 1 inch shooting. I really emphasized the importance of shooting straight up, as the point of the drill is to really emphasize shooting form. After this, we ended practice with another game. It was virtually the same game as last time (with a relay) only this time they had to dribble down the full court first. We did best two out of three, but the same team won both times (though I do not recall who was on the team).
It had been a good practice and only a couple of players owed suicides and so I declared that no one had to run (didn’t say that some really had owed it) as it had been a great practice. The players had really displayed hustle, for instance always running to the places I had assigned, and so I felt the reward was deserved. I had been good about giving out permissions, but not quite as good about letting players know when they had earned one, so that’s something I want to improve on for the next practice.
We gathered around and I did the end practice with saying something positive about another team member routine that Steve and I sometimes did at the end of baseball practice. For their doggie bag, they were asked to practice to practice both of the jumps, including doing the bunny hop on one each foot. I also gave them a contact note card as I realized I had handed something to their parents but not them. I wanted to make sure to keep the door open to them, though I have no clue if they’ll take advantage of it.
This week remains a focus on individual skills. The following week we will start to focus on team skills more. I got a voice mail today from Noah’s mother asking for me to send along, or call with, a copy of the doggie bag. I promptly emailed it along. I’m thinking that I will have Noah run a half suicide to emphasize that the doggie bag is his responsibility not his mothers, especially since I had given him the contact card, before practice starts. Also of note is that I sent along our first email update of what we had done this past week and what our focus would be this upcoming week. It was a nice two paragraphs, which I think is the right amount.
Overall, the first week of practice went well. I think the team has improved and just as importantly I think I am growing nicely into the position of coach. However, I worry greatly about our first game. I worry about it. I’ve made it a point, though, not to talk about it with the players. I want them focused, for the time being, on themselves. I’m sure they’re doing a fine enough job of putting pressure on themselves without my saying anything.
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