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.