I'am coaching middle school girls for the first time this year. We will be running Don's Motion Offense and your M2M Wolf pack defense. My question is that every other team in the district runs some type of zone defense. When I practice offense do I have to switch to a zone or can I stay M2M. Its seems like I will have to spend time in practice in a zone so they can attack it properly. I know that a motion offense work against a zone with minor adjustments but do I have to run it against a zone.

Coach - That is such at good question on a number of levels.

It all comes down to your priorities for the season and what you feel is important. Ideally, yes you're team is good at zone defense and you can play against a good zone during practice. However, in many cases it's not worth the time and effort to teach your players zone. It really all depends. I'll give you a few scenarios to ponder and you can decide what's best for you.

1) I currently coach a strong team of 6th grade girls (my daughters team). We will face a fair amount of zone however I will not teach these kids how to play zone defense this season because there are SO many other things I feel is more important for their development... man to man defense principles, weak hand ballhandling, lay ups, shooting technique, basic screening concepts, posting up, etc, etc, etc.

Also, most of the concepts we teach with motion apply to zone offense. So we just coaches a few of the zone adjustments and concepts on the fly and make the best of it. Works fine for us since our players are so fundamentally sound and good at general offensive concepts like spacing, getting open, and so on.

Once they hit 7th or 8th grade, I might feel they are ready to learn zone defense. However the jury is still out. Time is always precious so we'll just see how they progress and then I"ll decide if it's in their best interest for their development at that time or not.

2) I know high school varsity coaches that face a lot of zone but they spend no time teaching their kids how to run it. They want to be incredibly good at their own defense. They have a philosophy that they stick to and they are successful.

3) I know plenty of coaches that feel time is more than worth the investment to teach their kids zone defense to not only use as a secondary change up defense and also to teach their kids how to attack zone defense that they see all the time. It does help players get more comfortable facing zone if you practice against a good one a lot.

I think you just need to decide what is most important. Prioritize those things. Make a list of things you must be great at, what you want to be great at, and what you can live without. Then that should guide you as to whether you should teach zone or not. I attached a good example of what I mean.

Thank you. I like options 1 & 2 the best. This is the first time coaching for myself and the head coach, kind of wanted you to make the decision for us. Hey thank you for your time. You are my go to resource for youth basketball, I have bought a lot of your products this past year

For the last three teams that I coached at the 7th & 8th grade level, I taught them zone defense. This also was an advanced group of players relative to their age.

I spent about 30 to 45 minutes at the beginning of the season teaching zone defense. I'd spend about 15 minutes each practice for 2 or 3 practices.

To be efficient, each player only learned one role on the defensive side. Guard spot, bottom wing spot, or center.

I thought our zone offense improved significantly because of it. In fact, many teams transitioned out of zone defense and back to man to man defense.

I spent about 25% of our offense practice time against zone defenses.

Every 2 to 3 weeks, I would refresh the zone defense for 10 minutes to teach it.

If you're lucky and you have a high-quality assistant, they can coach the zone defense while you coach the offense. This is ideal.


It's been 6 or 7 years since I coached 6th graders, so it's hard to say what I would do now. It probably depends on the skill level too.

I don't see myself ever spending any practice time on zone defense below 6th grade.

Thank you both. Your responses will help us make our decision,

Can someone give me the acronym for ELOB? It's #4 on the list. Thanks!

Never heard of that used any where else but I assume it means End-line Out of Bounds. We usually call those BLOBs (baseline out of bounds).