HP Update (With a little GL thrown in)

We had a practice on Wednesday with GL. It was uneventful; hence I have not posted about it. As I will be trying to keep up on both teams as the season moves forward, I will likely just not posting about certain practices in order to keep things reasonable. Especially come January I would guess I would only post about each team’s practice once a week. Information from practice will also find its way into game reports as appropriate. This has been a long way of saying, that this will be an HP focused entry.

HP House League Games
Thursday GL had no practice because the gym wasn’t available so I went to see the house league teams I hadn’t seen play yet. Where I was impressed with the level of play the previous week, this week’s play was thoroughly unimpressive. There was a lot of drive and shoot without much passing by my players. Not too much different from our game, frankly, and not the type of basketball that will win it for us in the long run. Worse is the fact that there are, in reality, two kids on our team who I think will be able to consistently drive past their men in travel, but in house all of our players have that ability. I’m guessing my players have fun, but it does not help them become the kind of players I’d want them to be. Part of the difference, a large part, is that last week it was Kevin officiating the game. This week it was some random high schooler. Kevin knew how to strike the balance between making the appropriate foul and travel calls, and ignoring calls. The kids who officiated Thursday made no travel calls in the 3 games I saw and were far too inconsistent with foul calls. Basically it was organized street ball, which is fine, but could be so much more.

Josh, was still battling whatever sickness he’d had on Sunday. His team played a double header, losing the first. His team then won the second game, against a team that had far superior talent, by 1. But they did it with-out Josh in the second half, as he initially sat himself owing to renewed coughing and general not feeling well. When he then appeared like he was going to go back in for the final 5 minutes, his mom and I conferred and I told Josh that he wasn’t going in. Josh told his coach.

There wasn’t nearly as much for me to cheer about as there had been before. I cheered every good pass that was made, as there were so few of them. The positive to come out of the game was my continued belief that Jack B knows basketball. It’s a shame that he’s by far the shortest kid out there. I’m going to start him anyway tomorrow.

HP Practice

Had a fairly good practice, with all 11 players practicing. Ben tells me the doctor has cleared him to play with-out his boot and Josh is mostly recovered from his illness though I do sit him during continuous motion and our scrimmage when I hear the cough. I had two goals (well maybe closer to three) for the practice: work on breaking the press, and work on dribbling with our heads up and making passes, besides doing our normal continuous motion conditioning.

For the first part we do a 2 on 4 get the ball across half court. Overall it was fairly successful. Hopefully that success will carry over to tomorrow if/when NF comes out pressing.

We also did a drill where they had a partner and attempted to pass a tennis ball back and forth while not dropping the tennis ball or losing control of the ball they were dribbling. This seemed to work well as when they started dribbling during our scrimmage later they mostly did it with their heads up.

We did in fact spend the last half hour with one of my rare scrimmages. Now granted the first fifteen minutes was spent with no dribble. They actually adjusted fairly well to this conditioning, and, on the whole, spread out far more than my GL team has while running the same drill. Of course matters were helped slightly by the fact that Gavin and Jack A, playing on the same team, were defending other people’s men as much as their own. Gavin’s man, in particular, was often open due to Gavin not playing defense. After a period of complete no dribble, I allowed them to dribble in the back court, and press, and then allowed them to have one dribble in the area of the lane, which was never really used. For the last 7-8 minutes I let them dribble as much as they wanted, but they needed to have at least 5 passes to 3 different people. They also couldn’t dribble with their heads down. They didn’t struggle too much with this requirement, but it still cut way down on the number of shots created simply though penetration, which was my goal. They also couldn’t dribble with their heads down, something that happened surprisingly infrequently considering how they’d played in house league and at our first game. I hope that the tennis ball drill’s effectiveness carries over to tomorrow.

Next week we must do some man to man defense work. But overall, I was happy with the practice today.

Tomorrow’s Games

GL plays LN. LN who did very well in their first game, winning 44-27. I expect a tough game, but again a winnable game for us. LN has never seen David play before, so I think that’s a plus for us. And rumor has it that they’ve added a good new player, but so have we in Justin, so that should cancel each other out. I was going to give Andrew a start, in recognition of his being the only player to ask to sub out last game, but he’s out of town this weekend so that rules that plan out. So I think we’ll go with a starting lineup of Jack M (in recognition of his hard work during practice), David, Jack P, Lucas, and Justin. This is an aggressive group who will penetrate well. If we can set the pace as up tempo, I’m confident we’ll be able to out run them in the long run. At least that’s what we did last year.

HP plays NF. This is the same NF team that gave us a tough go in the play-offs though I didn’t remember until I read my game write-up for it that we’d gone with equal playing time for the game, which hindered us. More troubling from that write-up? The fact that our lack of point guard really killed us in the game. Uh oh. We could be in trouble. I will be going with a starting 5 of Zach, Jack B, Ben, Jon, and Gavin. I think they match-up well and give us a fairly versatile group to start.

I think both games are winnable for us and am cautiously optimistic I will be the coach of two 2-0 teams at this time tomorrow.