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.