HP Clinic 3

Well we had the last HP clinic yesterday. For the kids who came to a couple of them, Adam, Ben, Jon (and let me just note that I think I can already tell them apart which is good), Danny, Zack, Henry and Gavin, I have a fairly decent idea of what to expect. That just leaves the Jacks, Jacob, and Josh. Overall it was similar to the other ones in that a lot of time was spent on defensive footwork at the start. There was then a lot of time spent on doing a 3 man weave and 3 on 2, 2 on 1. The most important thing that I learned here is that Joey, from the HP 5A, is a really good kid in addition to being a really good basketball player. I also learned that a couple of the kids on the 4B team are, well, not the brightest bulbs in the box. For station work I was stuck doing passing and did some work on bounce, chest, and overhead passes. I did emphasize the idea of jump stopping towards the ball for chest and overhead passes, something I failed to really do in the long run last year and which was exposed as a weakness when we had our drubbing against the WK 4A team. I hope to not repeat that mistake with either of my teams this year. Overall nothing too exciting.

A few thoughts on the players: Henry was much more impressive this week. In fact, I had to talk to him about taking something off his passes so that they could be caught. Seems like he was just having an off day last week. Ben and Jon are perhaps the most fundamentally sound players on the team. They’re also going to be leaders and are going to be kids who I can use in the post, despite not having the typical post player size. At the end of the clinics they ran sprints. I could tell Danny was holding back and asked if he was. He confirmed that he was and I commented that there was nothing wrong with finishing first. So next time he sprinted, he finished first, even beating out some fast 5th graders. He had a big smile when I congratulated him on his feat. Brian (my PD boss and 5A opponent) told me that Adam wouldn’t say two words the whole season. That seems about right. He’s still the early favorite to be our starting point guard. Gavin wasn’t present at this clinic. But I did get an email from his dad telling me that he won’t be able to attend Thursday practices when they start. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

I’m still excited to get started with an actual practice next week. We’re going to follow, for at least the first four practices, roughly what I did last year at GL. I think those were good introductions to the fundamentals I stress (things like pivots) which weren’t necessarily stressed at the preseason clinics. Only bad thing is that I already know that we’re only going to have 8 players, since the twins and Danny both can’t make it. Should be fun.