December 11 Practice Report

It took me FOREVER to get out school yesterday. I do most of my work in the morning, before school starts and so my administrators have no problems that 5 minutes after the bell rings I’m normally out of there. Today however for various reasons it takes me an extra half hour to get out of there. That’s normally a half hour I spend to use getting ready for practice. I grab some McDonalds as I drive home which saves me some time I normally spend eating. And fortunately I had a good idea of what I wanted to do and everything sort of clicks together.

I haven’t spent a lot of time discussing how I get ready for practice, so this seems like a good opportunity to do so. When I got this job I went and purchased about a half dozen of the best books I could find on coaching basketball, and in particular youth basketball. A couple of them are more drills/game guides while the rest take a more general overview of the game. There are also a couple of websites I will consult from time to time on specific matters. So I generally think of what I want to do in a practice and then look in the various books or books to see if they have any suggestions on either a drill/activity or a methodology. So, for instance, I wished to do a “feed the ball into the post” activity since we had times where a post player was open and we didn’t feed it in there. I look through all of the materials, and come up empty. On the other hand, I also wanted to work on layups. For any sort of fundamentals work, I always turn to The Basketball Coach’s Bible by Sidney Goldstein as he’s better than anyone else I’ve read at really breaking down everything, from shooting, to dribbling, to holding the ball even, into its basics. I jotted down a few reminders to myself on what Goldstein suggests are the steps to make sure I teach it the same way he does.

I also knew that as part of the practice we’d talk about the last game, with a couple of points I wanted to make sure were made, so those want on my practice notes, and that I wanted to practice our Zone Buster. If we needed something to fill time I had our screening drill in reserve. I also try to include one or two games a practice and this time I went with the 3 on 3 (or was considering doing 4 on 4) “no excuses” drill where if your guy scores on you then you come out and a new player goes in, so you have complete mismatches on the court.

The last part was getting the doggie bag ready. At some point I need to give them the zone break we’re going to use, but I haven’t diagrammed that yet so I decided that they could practice their lay-ups, as what we were going to be doing involved no shooting, and be expected to know their positions in our zone breaker.

And we were ready to go, and with time to spare. This was one of the easier practices to put together, and so that was good. As I’m driving over, I realize that I always start the last game’s MVP, that’d be David. Lucas really played well as a starter and deserves another chance, so that’s another. I don’t want to bench Dante as a starter two games in a row and to give him a chance to revert to form, I had decided to start Gordie as a makeup for giving him only six minutes last game. Brian also played well in his minutes. So that’s our stating five, assuming none of them does anything to really mess that up.

Get to practice and get to see a teacher who I used to work with who I really liked, that was good. Right as we’re about to begin practice Gordie comes up to me and asks how he could get more playing time. I tell him it’s an excellent question and we should talk about it after practice.

I had planned on doing our continuous motion drill first, to tire them up just a bit before we did our post-game analysis, but there was a junior high game in the gym before us and they were still unsetting up the gym from that when practice began, so we sat down and did our post game talk. The kids, as usual, did a good job of pointing out the things we did well. They weren’t quite as astute, however, as normal on the areas where we needed to improve. The main thing we talked about there was looking into the post. A demonstration was given on how to do this and how to swing the ball quickly to find open people on the perimeter.

We then did our continuous motion. Following continuous motion we did a simple pass into the post drill. It was done more to reinforce the importance of looking into the post than anything. It went fairly well. A great moment was when Gordie was defending Dante and completely stuffed him.

We then went into our Zone Breaker offense. This went terribly. First of all whowever was on defense cheated since they knew where the passes were going to be going. Second of all, our team doesn’t really understand how to play zone defense so they kind of fall into man to man. This made it hard to practice our zone breaker. Even when I told the defense to do nothing it only went so-so. I think it’s a good play and we’re going to keep at it, but I’m at a bit of a loss how to make the defense part better. I don’t really want to teach them how to play zone and I have no idea how to stop them from cheating.

The zone breaker took MUCH longer than anticipated because of all the problems we had. Also we ran a suicide in the middle because when I blew the whistle people were not stopping play. So rather than running the 3 on 3 drill as planned we played a game of golf. Which went on FOREVER. Our team was shooting the lights out. It was pretty cool. Anyhow we finally finished. We ran our suicides and practice was over.

So Gordie comes up to me and we start discussing what he could do to get more playing time. I talk to him about shot selection and not letting men by him on defense. But I didn’t really talk to him about the biggest problem: he’s small and panics when he gets double teamed. I’m going to follow up with him on Friday. As Gordie and I were talking the coach of the team coming into practice tells me how Gordie must have scored “40 or 50” against him on Sunday. This is hardly surprising to me. Lucas’s father told me how Lucas, who I hadn’t realized was also on a house league team, accomplished something similar.

And so that was our practice. It was a pretty good practice, though the frustration with the zone breaker is puzzling me.