10-27 Practice Report

Time snuck up on me. I had been working on various projects and all of a sudden it was 5:35. Egad! I hurriedly put together some doggie bag cards, printed them out, threw my shoes on and ran out the door. Then to compound the problem I went to the wrong gym, so instead of arriving at practice 8 minutes early (still not the 10 I want) I got there 4 minutes early. And what do I find? I find we’re locked out completely with no one in sight.

I go on a search of the building perimeter for a janitor. I come up empty. I head back to the front of the school to see if we have any progress there. The answer is not really. SO I go in search again. Meantime, the PD guy who had showed up last Friday and got the gym situation straightened out is there and he’s trying to call inside. I go in search again and spot a Janitor however he is too far away to hear my banging and I don’t think he sees me.

I go back to the front and basically am about ready to send people home when the janitor moves close to the part of the building we’re in. Finally, after a couple of minutes of banging, we get inside.

It is now 6:20 and we’re just getting into the school. A couple of minutes later and the gym lights are turned on. So it’s not until close to 6:30 that we’re getting underway. How frustrating. I mentally lop large chunks of our practice out of existence. We start with talking about crossovers. I use Jack P, as part of my giving him positives campaign, to demonstrate. We all practice for a minute. Then we go into our continuous motion drill.

I start them off with dribbling and when they reach a corner of the gym they do a crossover before continuing. We practice this with both hands. Most of them are pretty good at the crossovers with their dominant hand, but struggle quite a bit more when forced to do it with their off hand. Already I am seeing a lot more dribbling with heads up than I had before. It has also become apparent who is in shape and who is not. In the not category we have Lucas, who struggles through it, Jack M, who has the lowest endurance of any of our players, and Noah, who basically wimped out by needing to “tie his shoe” not once but twice.

On the other end of the spectrum, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, I think Dante could run all day long, though he is S L O W. Tom knows how to pace himself well so he rarely runs out of energy. Jack P is able to maintain a high level of performance as well. For the partner parts of this drill I put the H’s together and Scott clearly had trouble keeping up with David’s pace, which was not surprising. Gordie is somewhere between our top group and our lower group though he’d be on the lower group side if forced to put in a place.

Following our water break, we came back and worked on bounce passes as it was a nice standing drill. Simultaneous to introducing bounce passes, I also introduced the idea of the “taxi cab” wave to signal that a player was ready to catch a pass. As we will be running a motion offense, and players will (get a load of this) be in motion I want to have as few passes go to players who aren’t expecting one as possible.

We did some bounce pass work, which was a little sloppier than I’d have liked. Several of the players also have the tendency to pass from their shoulder rather than the chest. While I don’t mind, at this age, if they’re shooting from their shoulder rather than chest (assuming they’re doing the other things correctly) there’s no reason, on a bounce pass, they can’t do it correctly. We are going to be spending a fair amount of time on the overhead pass because that will be one that gives them a lot of power, something they might not be able to get as much from a traditional pass.

Following our dribbling practice we worked on doing cuts. The focus here wasn’t so great. And unlike on Monday’s practice I was all over the coaching on this one. I was particularly proud of the coaching I did, but the focus was not what I wanted it to be.

And things only got worse when we went into shooting form. I divided them up into two groups and saw all sorts of things I would not liked to have seen. Things like Jack P knocking the ball out of people’s hands. Things like Jack M shooting when it wasn’t his turn. So here I didn’t reassert control like I should have. They’re starting to get sloppy. I want them to have a good time, don’t get me wrong, but the sort of things that were going on were just not acceptable.

So on Monday (being tomorrow) I hope to reassert control. We’re going to shift suicides/permissions to purely effort and find other things to do for the not paying attention bit. David, for instance, has been getting by way more than he should in not paying attention.

Sure he was one of the 5 people who ran two suicides (in fairness Noah only had to run one but he didn’t make the time cutoff) but that isn’t reflective of how many times he was shooting the ball in the air when I was talking or doing other things along those lines. So there was definitely running (of note: Tom got his first forced suicide as he ended with 2 permissions and 2 suicides, one of which was earned by virtue of his forgetting to bring his doggie bag) at the end there.

Even as I gathered us around at the end of practice there was a lot of silliness. I wish I could attribute that to the poor start we had, as that definitely had an impact, but I like to nip things in the bud and I think now is the nipping time. Part of the problem is that we haven’t had a game yet. I wish I could have had some sort of game, a scrimmage if you will, against another team. It would provide some focus. I am generally opposed to scrimmaging, but think I might use it as a motivation stating that if we practice well we can scrimmage at the end of practice on Friday. The old carrot and stick approach.

Time is our enemy at this point, as I need to, at minimum, introduce press break. And considering we haven’t introduced an offense introducing a press break before our first game is going to be interesting.