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.