January 8th Practice Report

I get to practice 10 minutes early and I am pleased to see 6 or so players already there. I’m just as excited as any of the kids to be back to practice. I haven’t seen them since December 18th and that’s just too long. But little could be done about that. Our upcoming basketball schedule is quite intense. Starting on Friday we have a 2 practices and 6 games in a 10 day stretch so as much as we have been away we’ll be spending plenty of time together in the near future.

As I wrote in my last report, I was quite concerned about whether or not they would stay in shape. Actually I was less concerned about whether or not they would stay in-shape and more resigned to the fact that they wouldn’t. I was hardly surprised when Tom proudly hands me his sheet. Tom is just awesome that way. However, in the end I actually got back 5 of 9 (with Noah never having gotten one, and the triplets and Dante failing to return theirs). While some of the activities were better than others (Tom’s playing his PS3 doesn’t really count, with Gordie having my favorite activity: “schlepped luggage”) the kids who turned in a form did not struggle nearly as much at practice as those who didn’t.

After a brief run down of our amazingly heavy schedule, which took longer than it ought to have due to interruptions, which I was kinder about than normal since we’re getting back into the groove of things, we began our continuous motion. Lucas was all over things and Jack P did a pretty good job of things as well. David cramped up, Jack M gave a mediocre effort, and Noah and Brian did their usual try and walk for part of it routine. Overall though I was relieved right away that they were in much better shape than I’d expected. After continuous motion it was 2 free throws and a water break.

Going into this practice I had two goals:
1. Run our zone breaker offense without a defense for a good amount of time and forcing them to play several different positions
2. Run them ragged. I came up with about 6 drills I could use that would all require a good amount of effort.

After continuous motion we went into our zone breaker. The emphasis here was on how to feed the ball into the post and how to run the second, third, fourth, and so on progression of the offense. I made a couple of teaching adjustments to help with this. Lucas, bless his heart, really has gotten the timing down well for his position, which is good since he struggled so much with it at first. I was actually amazed at how poorly the offense ran, without even any defense there, so we’ll likely be spending a similar amount of time, if not more, on this on Friday.

After going through 3 different groupings of players there so players could play three different positions (except for Dante and Lucas who just played 4 and 5) I taught them the Mikan drill. This is a classic drill that basically works on rebounding, lay-ups, and conditioning. A player shoots a lay-up on one side of the basket, gets the rebound and shoots from the other side taking two steps. This repeats. It’s a more important drill for our post players, but it’s a good drill for everybody since it also works on conditioning, so we ran it at all 6 baskets. After 3 or 4 rounds of this (might have even been 5) we did two more free throws.

Next came a new drill: Animal Rebounding. Basically this is an aggressiveness drill. With 5 players on the court it’s basically a free-for-all. I made it clear that they could not seriously whack a player, but I would not be calling small fouls and they could do no more than double team a player. The goal is to get 5 points. You get points by getting a rebound, making a basket, blocking a shot, or stealing the ball. After a player gets 5 points, play continues until all players (even the last person playing by himself) get 5 points. I had, this time, divided them up into a “big group”: David, Lucas, Dante, Scott, and Jack P, and a smaller group: Tom, Gordie, Jack M, Noah, and Brian. While one group was doing the Animal Rebounding the other group was playing a game of continuous knockout at the other end (continuous knockout is a game of knockout/lightening where if the person who got a player out gets out that person is back in. It forces a player to beat all the other players in order to win). One other catch. The first player to get 5 has to do 5 push-ups and gets a permission. Second player does 10, third 15, 4th 20, and the last player does 20 push-ups and gets a suicide. In the first group it was David coming in first, Dante coming in second, which was nice to see considering how he’d been playing of late, Lucas in third, Scott in 4th and Jack P in 5th. After doing this drill it was 2 more free throws. Remarkably when this group went to play knockout Dante won, a remarkable feat considering he’s by far not the best shooter in that group. In the second group it was Brian first, Jack M second, Tom 3rd, Noah 4th, and Gordie 5th. Overall I was pleased with how the drill went. Next time we do this, likely on Friday, I will be making a rule stating you can not dribble more than 3 times. The idea is to encourage inside shots, and there were too many outside shots this time. Jack M kept moaning about the physical nature of things, but I had no sympathy for him, since he is one of the players who most needs to get used to physical play.

After that we did best two out of three with Golf and it was time to run our suicides and go home.

Overall, it was a good practice. My disappointment with our zone buster is what keeps me from calling it a great practice. But the team is in much better shape than I expected and so hopefully we’ll have a good game on Saturday against MP1. MP1, if you recall, is the team tied with us for first place. The game isn’t until 5:45 on Saturday because MP’s players have to play on house league teams and they have house league games on Saturday, meaning hopefully some of their players should be tired coming to our game. We will be at a slight disadvantage since, slump or not, Dante will not be there this weekend, but I like our chances. It’s great to be back.