HP Practice 2 and Assorted Notes

HP Practice 2
Practice 2 is now in the books for HP. The practice was OK and it wasn’t because of the players, it was because of me. The players were attentive, listened well, were eager to learn and have fun. And I came to practice prepared with a full practice plan and a clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish. The fun part was mostly accomplished as we played two dribbling games that most of the players seemed to enjoy. No problem with anything I did there.

The problem is that my instruction seemed OK. The ball handling instruction was hardly spectacular but was fine, and since this was the focus of the practice that’s a good thing. However, my defensive instruction, something I value far more in the long run, was not something I was proud of. Basically I feel like this practice was held back from being a good one because I wasn’t on top of my game mentally (I think the 9 AM practices are rough on me even though I get full nights of sleep beforehand). I also feel like my strength as a coach comes in teaching team skills rather than individual fundamentals, so it figures that the practices when I focus on the fundamentals (as it should be at the start of the season) are going to be weaker.

The nice thing is that these players have given me far less problems when it comes to listening than I had last year with the team. Tiring them out at the start of practice with continuous motion no doubt helps (this team isn’t in as good of shape as last year’s team). In fact we’ve been overwhelmingly on the positive in suicides rather than negatives, with only Gavin finishing in the negatives today. So that’s all good.

While I know that I can help kids accomplish the fun of basketball, it’s a reminder that I’ve seen good basketball coaching and while I like my style and methods I don’t always have the skills to be as effective as I’d like.

GL Update
GL’s practices start this Wednesday. I’m really excited. Due to the coaches’ meeting I will only be practicing for an hour rather than an hour and a half. We’re going to have a parents meeting afterwards.
Bad news is that Dante is out. He sliced open his foot walking on glass. All concerned seem to agree that this was a lesson Dante won’t have to learn twice. His stitches are due to come out this week and his doctor said it would then be a week or two before he could do physical activity. Speaking of stitches, Brian also has them but assures me they’ll be out by Wednesday and he’ll be fine to run.

I’m real excited to get started with this team again. I had sent out an information packet and as I was making reminder phone calls when possible I talked to the players and asked if they had any questions. All assured me they didn’t. Good. So when I throw a quiz at them, they’ll be ready. My message is going to be that we’re all going to have to move our games up this year and this will, I hope, set the right tone from the start.

Coaches’ Meeting
Wednesday, besides the first practice for GL, is also the coaches’ meeting. This is our chance to schedule games and boy will I be doing some scheduling. As it stands basically every weekend there is some kind of conflict that will need to be resolved, whether it’s lack of gym space in GL, or my having to be in two different places at the same time for the two teams. It is going to be a long frustrating night. Making things worse is that a lot of GL’s home dates are on dates that the gym is not available. There was this same problem last year, but we had home and home dates so normally it was just a matter of switching these. This year, there are 15 teams in the conference. We play a slate of 16 games which means that we only play 2 teams twice. This means that if we want to keep our home court advantage we might have to schedule on Saturdays, something I’m not sure is possible or have two games on one day, or give up our home court advantage. I figure, realistically, instead of 8 home games we’ll likely end up with 5 or 6 home games. Just another challenge for us to overcome.