Meeting with HP Varsity Coach and Current Thoughts

Last night there was a meeting with the coach of the HP varsity basketball team. It was a good meeting. I got a nice zone offense to try with my 4th graders who don’t have as much ability to make skip passes, the big problem with the zone offense I tried to use last year with GL. From tryouts I think that offense, which I like better, will work this year with GL 5A, but I have a backup now for that as well. I also picked up a few useful drills, that I’m excited about and will be using. It was also nice that some of the biggest points that impacted on others, were things I already did. Things like having shooting drills be competitive or not ignoring how to catch the ball (though I did pick up a nice new drill on how to do this). But I will say that one thing that really hit home was how “Basketball is a game of mental transitions”. This was so true and will be a new teaching point I want to use on occasion, as a reminder.

It’s also nice since I get to take all of this positive energy and excitement and translate it into a practice. Saturday is our first HP 4A practice. I will be following pretty closely my plan from last year. We’ll start off with some talk about expectations, follow it up with some conditioning work, some wrist work, how to pivot, how to jump, do some very basic shooting stuff, and call it a day. It’ll be a real day for fundamentals.

My plan had been to kind of just copy what I had done last year with this 4th grade team. However, reading things over from last year I discovered that I was quite unhappy with how practices went before games started. So while I’m keeping the first practice the same I am going to have to do some serious work on the practices that follow.

One other final note. I am not somebody to regret things. I have made some bad decisions in the past, some decisions I shouldn’t have made, but I don’t tend to regret those. After I make a decision I move on, since there’s nothing I can do to change the past. However, the decision not to take Noah continues to linger at me. I think I was wrong to not take him. I’m not sure I was wrong to take Jack over him, but I was wrong not to find a way to take Noah. I talked a good game about what was important to me, and Noah took me seriously, did what was asked of him, and was close enough that he deserved better from me.