Coaching 5th grade girls travel. I had them last year in 4th grade. We also played a 3on3 tourney this summer and most of them played together this fall in a preseason league against really good competition. We practiced once a week for almost 3 months for that fall league.

After all that, and after 12 practices this season I think the vast majority of them have finally had it burned into their brains......PASS AND CUT! It's a sight to behold. We have been scrimmaging our 6th grade girls team once a week for the past couple weeks and we're actually starting to score off the pass and cut.

The past couple practices we've started to really drill using backcuts when we are overplayed. Last night we ran shell drill and progressed to no dribble scrimmage and a couple girls were starting to score off the backcut.

I even started to show them pass and screen away last night. That will continue to be a huge work in progress, but most of them are starting to see how basketball can be played. There are some that are further along, mentally, than others and when they are on the court together it's a thing of beauty. The ball movement, unselfishness and crispness of the offense are great.

I've been using the pass and cut drills that are in the read and react and attack and react manuals. The 3 player, continuous pass and cut where a player throws out the point, follows their pass and becomes defense, the point then passes to the wing, cuts and gets the pass back for a layup. next player passes to wing, follows as dummy defense and the pass and cut rinses and repeats. We go both sides at the same time for about 5 minutes early in every practice and it's just about automatic now for all of the girls when we go live.

Nice job! The pass and cut motion offense at that age is an excellent base and allows the players to learn key fundamentals. It pretty much forces every player to pass, move and figure out spacing, all keys to a successful offense. Heck, I watched a high school varsity team run that and just crush their opponent. They really understood sprinting their cuts, going all the way to the basket and keeping the flow going.

Good on you! Look forward to hearing how the season progresses.

I agree with Rob.... pass & cut to the hole... keep the spacing and all should be well...... just tell your players that if the get too close..... look and find te open space on the floor and gett to it....... happens at all levels.

I am coaching 5th grade boys this year and have 7 players back from last year where we first started introducing this offense. I am hoping we see similar strides.

Coach Rob, I saw a team win a state championship with that offense. I also so St. John's upset Duke a few years back by using the offense.

We had our first game this weekend, and it was a fun battle of two teams running pretty similar offenses.

We run what is generally the 5-out, and our opponent ran something similar, but slightly different. They would pass the ball to a wing and then their cuts would come not from the passer, but from the week-side wing.

I called timeout to specifically emphasize that we needed our weak-side defenders to be sagging into the lane to cut off that cut fro the weak side, but we continued to struggle with that. We'll definitely be running some shell drill at practices this week. I still have guys playing tight denial defense on the weak side.

Our 5 out was decent, not great. It started well, with nice cuts leading to layup attempts on maybe 3 of our first 5 possessions, but then it deteriorated as the game progressed. I'm not sure if they get nervous and stop thinking or what, but we definitely loose the structure as the game progresses.

The other thing I need to work on is running this O to kill the clock. We were up 3 with a couple minutes to go and then up 1 with a minute to go. During a timeout, I told them the only acceptable shot was an uncontested layup. We ended up turning it over the first time on a lazy pass and they cut it to one. Then up one, we did get an uncontested layup but missed it.

We are 5-2 on the season. Our two losses have been to a 6th grade team of giants. We played them in pool play in a preseason tournament and lost 29-28, missing a jumpshot at the buzzer. Played them the next day in the semifinals and lost by 7. A couple weeks ago we played a local rec "all-star" team and beat them 34-5. We play them again this coming weekend. Not looking forward to it.

Yesterday we finally pulled off the "improbable" and defeated an older team. We beat our rival town's 6th grade team by 10. It's the best we've played in these two years. Really good offense, spacing, patience. It was a good balance of patience and attacking. Six of our eight players scored, nobody scoring more than 6 points. We are super balanced. We have three girls that can all score in double figures in any given game, but it's rarely needed because we get balanced scoring across the board.

There are still little things to be worked out, but for the first time in my life, I think I can say that our passing and cutting has become automatic, for sure. Not just the action of pass and cut, but we are now starting to look to get the ball to the cutter to score.

I love this game!

Closing out games is just a matter of experience. In past games I've called timeouts when we're up with a minute or two to go and talked about how we can run the clock and not rush things. We've also done a lot of time and score scrimmages in practice so the girls get an understanding of both sides of the coin: how to protect a lead and how to make a comeback.

Our last two games: we had to use our press to score 4 points in the final 43 seconds to win by 1 point. Then this weekend we led by 10 with a minute to go and all I had to do was tell them "slow it down, pass and cut, let's use some clock" and the light must have gone off for them because we were almost able to run out the clock completely until my daughter got too casual, thinking they weren't going to defend hard anymore and she turned it over with a few seconds left.

So in the 5 out that I installed with my kids (5th grade boys), I instructed that the baseline spots are about halfway between the block and the 3 point line. I wanted these spots to be a little bit closer to the basket for rebounding opportunities.

In our games, the boys end up squeezing in right on the block instead of spaced out a bit further. This leads to their defenders being in a much better position to help on our cutters. But we do also get a decent number of very good looks on kick outs when baseline defender helps on the cutter/driver.

Should I re-think this and change to having those baseline positions be out at the 3 point line? It would certainly be helpful for opening the lane, but I do worry about having no offensive rebounding.

Anyone experimented with how you play those baseline spots?

Now that pass and cut is pretty much automatic, we've been stressing how to recognize the opportunity for a backcut. It will be a work in progress, but it's coming along.

I'm wondering if we should also move on to working on pass and screen away? I think using some screen away action and utilizing curl cuts into the lane might really work well for us.