Despite Wednesday not being a particularly busy day for me at school, I was surprisingly focused on work and not waiting with anticipating for the practice. I had become seriously distracted by basketball around GL’s tryouts and I was a little worried that with the start of practices that this distraction would return. Fortunately it didn’t.
As I get to practice I hear Scott and Cameron talking. Scott says how there were a lot of good kids who didn’t make the team so maybe we’ll do alright against other teams. I’m glad to hear him say this. I thought about eavesdropping longer, but decided against it.
We go into the gym and they start shooting around. David and Scott decide to shoot 3 pointers. David then goes on to make a ridiculous 15 of 20 that he shot. As others come in there is quite a bit of 3 point shooting and the team, as I expected after tryouts, definitely have a better shot of making them than they did last year.
Finally it is time for practice to start. Andrew, as expected, is late, while Tom is surprisingly not present at all. Due to the coach’s meeting that night we only have an hour for practice.
And I then proceed to spend a fair amount of time talking. Granted it’s an interactive conversation, but still a lot of my talking. One of the first things I talked about was how last year I hated the 3 point shot. It isn’t because I hate 3 points, it’s because it wasn’t normally a smart shot. I said this year I hate the shot less because some of the time it will be a smart shot. I have a feeling we’re still going to see a few too many threes, now that the restriction isn’t absolute, but I will deal with that in time. I begin to set up the them that I want to focus on this season: We can’t let up for a moment because every game we go into we’re at a disadvantage. I talked about how we’re a town of 8,000 and we’ll be playing towns of 60,000. Talked about the three goals. Laid out the expectations and rules. Lots of good stuff.
And then it was time for the ball busting move. I had sent out the letter with vocabulary and the introduction to the offense and defense. I even asked, when I talked to a few of them on the phone last week, if they had any questions. I got a lot of “nos”. So it was time for the quiz. First part was matching vocab to its definition, second part was asking what our defensive goal is, third part was identifying different spaces on the floor and then ranking those areas from strongest to weakest for us. Finally, there was a Yes/No section about our offensive rules. I’d have never done this with a team I didn’t know, but I think it set the right tone of higher expectations. There was some moaning and groaning, but less than I expected.
Now what was less than ideal? My grading of the quizzes. My answer key was wrong. I had planned on grading them while they did continuous motion but even mucked that up. It was a mess. In the end rather than giving them the feedback that night I simply said I’d return them to them tonight. They will be running half a suicide for each question they got wrong. Their scores were
Justin -1.5
Cameron -12
Scott -8.5
Brian -4.5
Lucas -13
Dante -11
Andrew -5
David -6.5
Jack M -9
Jack P -9.5
I had told them that while we’ll be running individually this time, a week from Thursday there would be a similar but not identical quiz and that time we’ll be running as a team, with a 1 question wrong lee-way. I really expect the scores to go up now that we all know that I’m serious.
After everyone had taken the quiz as I started to grade I had them play a game of Golf. Golf is a shooting drill. Teams line up on the elbows. They take a shot. If the miss the shot they must rebound before it hits the ground. If the ball hits the ground the team gets a point. If a team makes three shots in a row they lose a point. First team to 7 points loses. Our golf winners, Jack M, Jack P, Justin, Lucas, and Scott, will each get to run one less for the permission they’d earned, except for Scott that simply cancels out the suicide he owed me for his conduct at tryouts (something I talked to him about before practice began).
We did a little continuous motion. Brian’s endurance has really improved, even though he was slightly hobbled by his knee (he’d just had his stitches taken out). Justin continues to impress with his solid ball handling skills and good endurance. Not to mention he’ll be the only person not owing a suicide due to his great score on the quiz combined with his Golf victory. There was quite a fair amount of groaning when I said we’d be building up to 15 minutes of continuous motion this year, versus last year’s 10. They only managed to complete 8 last night. We’re doing a much more physically demanding continuous motion tonight so I hope to see them stay at 8 despite the more demanding expectation.
After practice I had a short parent’s meeting. The emphasis was on staying positive and setting up the expectations that the schedule wasn’t going to be as nice as last year owing to GL having limited times for home games. After some quick goodbyes it was off to the coach’s meeting. But not before Brian asked me as we were walking out side, “Do you know who the starters are going to be for our first game?”
Coach’s Meeting
Well there were a lot of games for me to reschedule. And mostly they got done. My organizational system was good for making sure I didn’t double schedule myself (though I’ve already realized I made one mistake) but not as good for allowing to notify the league of the changes I had to make. And boy were their changes. Fortunately, it looks as though we’ll be able to keep all of our home games. This is a big relief as I honestly worried about scheduling some of them. It does mean that we have quite a few Saturdays and a few double header games. There’s going to be a lot of basketball for me in the days to come, that’s for sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment