Coach quatroch,

I have always taught the 3-point line for spacing reasons, as you mentioned. I also teach my two corner rebounders to sprint to the block or first hash marker depending on where the shot came from. This puts them in a primary spot to rebound the ball.

Coach MT,

That's the next progression that I do with teams that I coach.

We go from 5 out pass and cut... to 5 out pass and screen away.

At first, I teach it as two separate offenses.

Then, eventually I teach motion and let them decide between the two.

As for the pass and screen away, start with teaching only the curl cut. You want that to become automatic. All of the other options you teach are set up off of the curl cut. I've even found that even if the player technically makes the wrong read off the screen, by aggressively curling off the cut, you still get scoring opportunities.

As Don Kelbick says, you should think ... "Curl. Curl. Curl." around the screen.

After a few weeks or even longer depending on how your players progress, I teach the backdoor cut as the 2nd option.

Then a few weeks later, I will teach the straight cut.

I don't like teaching the flare cut at the younger ages.. I feel that it is a waste of time. I do teach it to high school teams, though.

Thanks!

When you teach the 5 out pass and screen away, do you have them screen one spot away and then pop back to the ball, since you're also teaching the curl cut off the screen? Or do you have them screen both the wing and then for the corner player?

I teach them to pop back towards the ball after the screen.

However, that's where the Cutting rules are so helpful. If the screener is overplayed on the cut back, they simply go backdoor and you can run a version of cutters/hybrid with the pass and screen away.

When you teaching the offense in practice, the screener can get in a cycle of pass, screen away, pass, screen away, pass screen away... make sure to tell them go backdoor so he can also practice the curl in the offense.

What, if any, kind of drills do you use to teach setting screens?

We worked on pass and screen away the other night and I am seeing an issue of how to set the screen because once the ball is passed to a wing, the opposite wing defender begins moving into help position. That makes it hard for us to set a screen and curl cut into the lane.

I was having the opposite wing (the one getting the screen) take a couple steps toward the baseline to walk their defender down and set up the screen better, but we still ran into some issues.

I know the alternative is to read that defender and if they overplay towards the basket then just use the screen to free yourself up top for a jumpshot, but I'm thinking it might take some time for us to get to that point. I plan to spend more time on it tonight.

Well, that's good.... that means your players are practicing good defensive habits!

I think either walking towards the defense or having the opposite wing try to make contact with their defender first will help.

As you progress to the other options, a lot of the issues you see will disappear.

However, I prefer to do that later. Others will teach them right away.

Here's the drill I used to work on the screen away and reading the screen:

Offensive players at the point, and each wing, with just a single defender on one wing. So it's essentially 3v1. We pass to the undefended wing and screen away. Defense is allowed to play it anyway they want, with the goals of defeating the screen and not allowing a basket. This gave our screener and screenee the opportunity to see if they should be curl cutting the screen, popping to the free throw line for a jumper, or just straight backcutting a severe overplay. It worked out pretty well. We played some live 3on3 afterwards to fully incorporate it.

We called the play yesterday in our game for the first time ever and we get a beautiful curl cut and a layup. Next time down the floor, different girl getting the screen and she backcuts an overplay, we get her the ball wide open, but she missed the layup. But it was absolutely beautiful both times. I was amazed.

On a side note, we were playing a rival opponent that we played a month ago and had to score 4 points in the final minute for a 1 point win back then. Yesterday we beat them by 27. It was never in doubt. Our ball movement, player movement, unselfishness and hard nosed, disciplined defense were all on display. I couldn't be prouder. During a break in action, one of the refs commented to me that he refs a lot of games: travel, aau, and all the upper level stuff and he wanted to compliment our team on how fundamentally sound they were. I was humbled and proud.

Fast forward to tonight and we have to face this same team in our first pool game of a holiday tournament. Hopefully we show up strong again.

Our girls are playing at an incredibly high level right now. We just finished a holiday tournament against 7 of the top teams in our area and we came out on top. FIRST PLACE. Our pool seemed stacked against us, we finished 2-1 in pool play and through the point differential tiebreaker, we earned the #1 seed in our pool.

The pressure of the tournament play seemed to get us a little too out of control at times, but we were able to find a groove and outplay our competition. There were 3 teams in this tournament that we played once each last season and lost each time back then. We were able to get our payback this year by beating all 3 of them!

Although our offense played solid and we had some clutch free throw shooting in the semifinals and finals, it was our defense that impressed me the most. In the semifinals we forced at least one 5-second call with the "closely guarded" rule against their best player. Then we forced one 10 second call in the backcourt with pesky defense, again on their best player and we almost had another. In the finals we forced another 10 second call and also a 5 second call on an out of bounds play. Our girls definitely brought it yesterday. Our fans were really loud all week and watching the game film, I noticed a boys team that had the game after us stand up and cheer on one of our 10 second calls. Great support.

I was thinking last week that we don't focus on defensive drills too much in practice, but we run a lot of scrimmage type stuff, whether it's 1v1, 5v5 or anywhere in between, so I guess we must be doing something right!

We won't play in another tournament for about a month, which I'm kind of happy about because our girls have been playing so intense that I think a little break and back to playing one regular season game each weekend will be good, so we can just get back to practice and really work on fundamentals and not feel the pressure of having to win games.

Nice work, coach!