Coach,

I was with you until your second paragraph.... having to break bad habits and teaching them some solid fundamentals along with team work. Trust me, if you ask the majority of high school and college coaches they will tell you that they want to see the kids coming into their school having a solid background in how to play m2m defense. We have talked about this ad nauseam here..... now I know you had to correct things.... but please rethink your philosophy for next year. We got some kids that came in with just a zone back ground, it takes a couple of years to reteach them how to play defense... IF you cant cover anyone, you cant be successful.

Good luck and I hope that you become a m2m advocate with they youth players.

Check this out, its something I wrote for Jeff and Joe some time back.
http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/blog/index.php/important-lesson-for-youth-basketball-coaches/

Have you read this article regarding zone defenses at the youth level? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/coaching/Van-Gundy-Outlaw-Youth-Zone-Defenses.html

By the way, our zone defense at the high school varsity level was crucial for us in making the state championship game this year, so I don't bad-mouth zone defenses. I just believe that you need to build a man to man foundation first, especially at the youth level. By building solid man to man fundamentals first, I believe a zone defense becomes infinitely better. I think you may doing a service to your score by playing zone defense, but it will hurt the kids in the long run. At the youth level, zone defenses also give you the luxury to hide bad defensive habits.

I'm teaching a 7th grade group tough man to man and we spend 20 minutes every day on man to man defense. After the 5th practice, I taught them 2-3 zone slides so we could practice against zone defenses because we face them quite a bit. After about 5 minutes of teaching the slides, the 2-3 zone defense was one of the best I've seen at the youth level. And it was because they understood man to man principles. Talking, closing out hard, moving their feet on defense. It was actually fun to watch. Now, I still have them play man to man defense in games, but it made me even more of a believer that you need to teach man to man first in order to have a good zone defense.