11-17 Practice Report

Welcome back to the further travails of my efforts to coach a successful youth basketball team.

As you recall, we had no practice last Friday because of a school event. And practice on Monday was rescheduled for Wednesday. The problem arises with the rescheduling when I get an email Tuesday. Lucas’s mother is asking about our practice on Wednesday since her six year old is scheduled to practice at the same time. I email Emily at the Park District. Turns out I asked to reschedule on Wednesday and she had no gym on Wednesday so gave me Tuesday’s date. I didn’t pay close attention to this and so I blew it. By the time I’ve figured out what has happened it’s 5:00 Tuesday. So there goes that practice.

So that brings us to Friday’s practice. We have too much to do and not enough time to do it. But that’s going to have to be OK. We do a short stretching session and then go into our offense. I show them a few things that they can do with the offense. And well, it goes OK. I think with a another practice worth of trying it, it would go more than OK. However, I think that in many ways they’re going to play an ugly game of basketball come Sunday.

After our offensive practice, which we do for about a half hour, we practice our inbounds play. There is a lot of teaching involved, but people seem to pick it up well enough. It’s a simple stack. We line up and then on the signal from the in bounder the players all do something different. All in all the play seems to work well enough, especially considering that the defenders knew what the offensive players were going to do. So that is good. Now the problem is that this play won’t likely work as well against a zone.

In fact that’s my big fear is that they will be playing a zone. If so it’s going to be an early time out. I know they’ll be able to adjust to playing against a zone, but we haven’t really practiced it. Hopefully the HP coach feels the way I do about man-to-man, and I think he will, and so we will see that kind of defense.

Lastly we practiced our tip-offs. Overall that worked fine too. We concluded practice with my reminding them about some of the nuts and bolts of the games. Things like checking in at the scorer’s table and telling who you were guarding when subbing in.

The thing is that overall we’re still not playing well as a team. I feel good about where their individual skills are at. However, we’re not really playing as a basketball team and that concerns me. I am hoping that our opponents will be just as lost as we are.

One other note from practice. Gordie and Jack M were seriously not getting along. There was pushing, grabbing, etc. I took them aside after practice. It seems that there has been ill feelings before, then things had gotten better, and now things are not going as well again. We talked about how we’re on the same team and that this sort of behavior wouldn’t be accepted. They both got the message, in theory, but we’ll see how this translates to reality.

My original plan for Sunday had been to start Noah, Gordie, Dante, Jack P, and Tom. However, in my talk with Gordie and Jack I talked about how on Sunday there would be times when they’d have to play together and if we were going to do well as a team they’d have to play well together. I am thinking, to reinforce this point, have Jack start in the place of Noah. It would certainly get the message across, I think. Dante, Jack P, and Tom are regular starters for the time being, though I will be mixing things up from time to time to get everybody their promised start, with Scott and David, who are off on a jaunt to LA being our other two starters.

I don’t see that I’ve done a complete run down of the team in a while so it seems like before our first game would be a good time to do that.

Brian –
Good: Remember him? Well word through the grapevine is that he could be rejoining our team as early as December 4th from his ankle injury. I had originally heard more like January, or even February so this is good.

Bad: Who knows how quickly he’ll be able to catch up. The one good point of our being behind where I want to be team wise is that it should be easier for him to catch up. However, he’ll have missed out on some of the conditioning. So he likely won’t return at the same caliber as when he left us. I think we’ve had better chemistry without him. Hopefully we’ll be solid here when he comes back.

Dante –
Good: Good endurance. He gets how to rebound. He has a nice shot so some of the kids have taken to calling him Yao since he is our tallest player and can shoot from the outside.

Bad: He is S L O W. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I honestly don’t know how well his slow will play out. There’s not too much I can do it about it, all things considered, but hope for the best.

David –
Good: Good basketball intelligence and ability. For instance when we were running our in bounds play and his defender was guarding the play more than him, he did something slightly different and broke free for an easy inbounds pass and basket. I’ve talked about his ability before. He’s the only player I really feel good about taking long distance shots.

Bad: As one of the taller members of the team he’s going to have play against bigger guys and in the post more than he’s used to.

Gordie:
Good – A fun kid and helps keep things light. A fairly good defender.

Bad – Takes shots he shouldn’t take. Can get trapped fairly easily on defense.

Jack M –
Good: Has good court vision, he rarely makes a bad pass. Also has a quick first step on his dribble. He will likely bring the ball up for us often.

Bad: He doesn’t seem to like the fact that I don’t want him shooting long distance shots. He’s not the most likable kid which has already had an effect with one player and meant that during our inbounds drill complained about what the 1 and 2 players do, despite the fact that the 1 player is one of the most important as he does two different things to get open.

Jack P –
Good: This kid is a tenacious defender and one of the better shots on the team. He is so quiet it is easy to forget how good he is, but he could easily be the second best player on the team. He was our best in bounder of the five I tried (Lucas, Tom, David, Jack P, and Scott).

Bad: Not a whole lot to say except that since he’s a new kid some of the players on the team haven’t figured out how good he is yet and so he doesn’t get the passes he deserves on offense, despite my prodding, that he deserves.

Lucas –
Good: He’s a nice kid who never complains about anything and will always attempt to do what is asked of him.

Bad: He’s not the sharpest kid on the team. I had to walk through the inbounds play with him several times at each of the positions he did before he got it. He clearly doesn’t like the fact that he has to play post/center positions, but, well, tough. He could likely see a pickup in his minutes once he masters some of the things, like always screening away from the ball, but until then his action will likely be more limited as he kind of plays confused.

Noah –
Good: He picks up things quickly. He is solid all around on offense.

Bad: His defense could stand some improvement. He gets beat off the dribble too much.

Scott –
Good: Solid player who works hard. In particular I like how he seems to have a good sense of where to be on the court.

Bad: His skills are better suited to a forward position, but he’s not really big enough to be a forward. Not as big of a deal on offense, where we play a motion, but does matter on defense.

Tom –
Good: He is the heart of our team. He does most things well and is one of our better shots.

Bad: He hasn’t seemed happy at the last couple of practices, so I don’t know what’s going on there. He has a slow first step on defense.


So there you have it. I am just petrified that we are going to get blown out. I haven’t done as good of a job as I should have in getting them ready for this date. The first game is important and so despite the fact that I stress it’s a long season having a blowout first game is NOT what I want.

Hopefully when I write you tomorrow, my fears will have been misplaced and I will be writing to you about the 1 and 0 Spartans.