January 19th Practice Report

I don’t expect this to be a very long practice report.

I strained my vocal cords this week. After not talking for all of Wednesday and Thursday I was at around 85%. However, I knew that this practice would have a different flavor since I was going to be quieter than normal.

As I’m raising the baskets a strange kid appears. Turns out Noah brought a friend with him to practice. This does not make me a happy camper. I’m a stickler about having closed practices, but since it wasn’t poor Charlie’s (Noah’s friend’s name) fault, Charlie was allowed to stay.

We did our continuous motion drill. Noah has taken to the habit of going to the bathroom. He did it right at the start of the drill. I was annoyed after our little agreement, which I expected him to live up to.

Following the continuous motion we ran our Zone Buster. I introduced a couple of slight changes, really more variations than anything. The players clearly don’t believe in the play, so we likely won’t run it against JCC but perhaps we can run it against HP. It’s very frustrating because I know the play works if run right and I think there’s no reason our team can’t run it correctly. Perhaps I’m just not a good enough coach to teach it. Perhaps I’m wrong about them not being capable of running the play. As I think there’s a good chance I’ll be coaching this team next year I am willing to consider the time this year an investment.

Following that work we did some work on screens. This included some double screens, which worked pretty well. We might have to try and use that in a game or two against man defense as an occasional play. It was easy and effective, though I suppose I already knew that after how MP had played against us. It was nice to see that we could execute it offensively though.

Next we worked on our fast break drill. I added a new twist in where sometimes I yelled two players names on defense to give a 4-2 advantage. We’re loads better at the fast break on both offense and defense, which is good.

Finally, I decided that we would do a scrimmage of sorts. It was a normal game of basketball, but each player on a team was allowed only one dribble (once the ball got past the half court line). The idea was to work on screens and post play. While there were some good teaching moments, the players really struggled on offense. I think we’ll do it again since we do rely a fair amount on the dribble and this really forces them to start looking at other ways besides dribble penetration, which is effective, but can be shut down and thus leads us into trouble.

We ran our suicides, I previewed the tourney a little, and we went home.

The practice went fine. We’d had a few pretty good practices and this was sort of lackluster. But some of that was by design. There was a lot more slow paced activities at this practice, since I figure we’ll have enough basketball over the weekend to tire us out.

In a couple of hours we have our first game. I hope we win it. I know the team is going to feel a little intimidated when we fact the JCC again and I haven’t quite decided on my approach. I hope to get one of the game’s recapped tonight and another tomorrow before our game, but we’ll see. I haven’t been this unsure of our team since the first game. In many ways it’s very similar since I have no clue how we stack up against the talent we’re going against. Hopefully, I’ll be as pleasantly surprised today as I was on that day.