Balance in practice plans

I love the attack and counter system, and I use many of the drills shown in my practices to develop my players footwork and shooting ability.

Here is my next question/ curiosity: how much do you balance the individual attack and counter drills with 2 and 3 player progression drills in your motion offense?

Here is the situation I am facing: Due to cutbacks, we are only going to be practicing on weekdays (can't hold our normal 2 hour Saturday practices anymore), and we will only have half a gym to work in on any given day (cutting down our available work space).

I need to, in 6 days, get the motion, defense (I've been running Don's match-up with very positive results) press break, and inbounds plays to be installed.

What balance do you feel would be appropriate for the teaching of the attack and counter skills and incorporation of this into motion offense? Is it possible to incorporate the drills with 2 and 3 person drills to build motion?

This is a new situation dealing with less. We have about 1 hour and 45 minutes of practice time available each practice, so I'm trying to develop a breakdown of how I want to get it all installed.

While I recognize the stuff is important, I refuse to sacrifice fundamental skills. So how would you proceed with teaching the attack and counter while balancing it with installing the rest?

Brian Sass

Jr high girls team.

We do basic agility ladder drills, some two-ball ball handling drills or form shooting at the beginning of each practice. I plan to replace/supplement some of the ball handling and shooting with the foot work drills from the video. If the results are positive then we may expand on it.

We have done similar things in the past. Our two-ball drills are actually a part of a dynamic warmup. We make the girls do carioca, lunges, slides, etc. using two basketballs. We always do agility drills and have found that the agility drills seem to greatly reduce injuries.

I like the idea that the footwork in the post can be re-used on the perimeter. I also like the "...shot, shot, shot..." mentality. One problem we may encounter is that the varsity coach wants the perimeter players to have a set pivot foot for all shots. Don does not teach his pivots that way.

Just a thought.

I thought Don has a set pivot foot for all his attack footwork. Everything he has is off a pivot foot.

Oh, hold on. I understand now. (I think?)

You mean the varsity coach only wants them to have one pivot foot that they use, regardless of position on the court?

That seems fairly limiting.

What is the advantage in doing that?

briansass wrote:Here is my next question/ curiosity: how much do you balance the individual attack and counter drills with 2 and 3 player progression drills in your motion offense?

Here is the situation I am facing: Due to cutbacks, we are only going to be practicing on weekdays (can't hold our normal 2 hour Saturday practices anymore), and we will only have half a gym to work in on any given day (cutting down our available work space).

I need to, in 6 days, get the motion, defense (I've been running Don's match-up with very positive results) press break, and inbounds plays to be installed.

Brian -

You will need to make a well thought out practice plan...... start with everything you want for the year ... then break it down i n the ordr of importance..... weekly & daily If you are losing 3 hours a week of practice time.... take each drill and make it a little shorter.... ie; shooting was 10 minutes, make it 7 or 8 - just make sure that you spend enough time on the more important things.

You might have to make some adjustments as you go along.... After every game Rick and I would talk about what we didn't do well..... that went into the next days practice plans.... we were able to scout ..... so the things that we needed to really do well also went into the next few days practice plans.

At least this worked for us.

briansass wrote:Oh, hold on. I understand now. (I think?)

You mean the varsity coach only wants them to have one pivot foot that they use, regardless of position on the court?

That seems fairly limiting.

What is the advantage in doing that?

It is supposed to make the girls more consistent in their shooting form. If you are right handed no matter where you are on the court you always use your left foot as a pivot foot. If you are left handed then you would pivot on your right foot.

It does make the foot work between the perimeter players and post players different.

Brian

If I understand your question correctly, you are trying to figure out two things. First, how much time to put into development vs. team play and second; how to incorporate the skill issues into your team offense. If that's not true, correct me.

I put [layer development at a premium and, over time, my coaching has changed to reflect that. I used to spend a bit of time on development, a chunk of time on breakdown drills for offense and defense and then some time in scrimmage (half and full court). I have changed that dramatically.

After years and years of executing offensively with players who could not execute the skills necessary to make the offense successful. I now put much less emphasis on practicing offenses and much more on skills and defense. Keep this in mind, when practicing your defense, your offense gets work as well.

I now spend a minimum of 40-50% of my practice time on skill development. Because of the way that I work, all the development on individual skills. I believe in high repetitions in a short period of time is optimal for skill development. Trying to develop 2 or 3 players in the same situation doesn't provide the same basis for significant improvement. Nor does putting players in lines and having them do it one at a time. This was a big change for me and is based on my experiences. I now work on fewer things to allow more reps per player.

I also use to be a big breakdown coach. I spent countless hours in 2 and 3 man drills and never got the results I was looking for. I then made another significant change. I use a minimum of 3 man drills (I no longer do any 2 man drills) then add to 4 man and eventually to 5 man as an installation for my offense. I go for a very short period of time with no defense and quickly advance to live play. Once I get the concepts in, I may use a 3 or 4 man drill as a warm up, but then everything is whole, live.

The results of making these changes has been dramatically positive. I also spend a lot less time worrying about perfection and more time concerning myself with effectiveness.

In addition, the result of integrating "Attack and Counter" skill mentality into the mentality of the offense has created more decisive decision making and less ball sticking, which is the bane of all motion offenses.

kelbickd wrote:Brian
...I put player development at a premium and, over time,...

I usually think of practice in four parts:

* technique drills - i.e. form shooting but not game like
* inividual fundementals - i.e. game like shooting or ball handling
* team fundementals - i.e. 1v1 or 3v3 (paricualrly if is based off of a specific formation)
* team offense - i.e. 5v5 full or half court focusing on plays

I think the middle two areas are most important. I think the first area is good for introducing a new skill or simple warmup. I dislike the last area because I think kids can get lost in 5v5 situations.

It sounds like you feel the second and forth areas are most important. If you could elaborate on this a little?

I believe you teach team concepts inside your individual skill work. Repeating that robs time.

When do you concentrate on defense?

kelbickd wrote:I
When do you concentrate on defense?

We usually spend 5-10 minutes on shell drills or close outs. When we go 5v5 that's when we really emphasize it.

This s Jr High girls.

Thanks Don,

Yeah, that is about what I was asking about.

I'm curious, what did you streamline your teaching down to? You mentioned that you worked on fewer things. What did you think were the most important things to work on? I mean what was your focus?

Brian Sass

We worked on fundamentals every day without fail. Some days we spent more time on them than other days..... like the day before a game we worked on our game plan.... "How we were going to defend certain things they were going to do offensively. " There were times we would break that down too

What they did with their presses and how we were going to attack them - odd front vs even front.... we tried to keep our press offense the same, just change where we would attack it first. I learned very early that I did not want to get beat by a press, so we worked on that every day

Our biggest problem was our lack of size vs theirs.... we ran a match up zone and a m2m D, switching up just to keep them off balance.

As for the time we allotted for certain things.... that depended on who we were playing. We had a list of 10 things we needed to do to be successful in that game..... they went into our practice plans.

The game becomes a chess match at times..... and there are times you will be outmatched, outplayed and at times, out coached..... but if a coach did something to us one time.... we made sure that wasn't going to happen again . ....we would break that down if we had too... . we ran "situations" at the end of every practice to make sure that we corrected certain things that happened in prior games.

Brian

Some of this is experiential and there really is no other way to sort it out. Also, the levels that I coached, being higher than yours, it made it easier for me to sort out.

I used to worry bout the minutiae, I tried to coach every little thing. I learned to look more at big picture things. In most cases, the little things took care of themselves. If not, they became easier adjustments when the larger objectives were in focus.

The first thing I did was made a critical examination of the things I could actually effect by coaching. Those are the things I concentrated on. Then, I had to decide if I had enough time to work on those things to make an effect. If the answer was "Yes," I would commit practice time to it. If it was, "No," I would expose the team to it and turn it back to them to get better at. This was all done in the context of what we would need to try to become successful during the season.

I was taught very early in my career that you can't coach everything and you can't be good at everything. That didn't stop me from trying. It took me a long time to take that to heart. But when I did, we got better. I chose the things I thought we needed and became more productive. Weaknesses stayed weaknesses but our strengths became so strong that we were able to control games with them.

The time you take has to give you a return. What does working on something for 5 minutes do if 5 minutes is not enough to provide a return, besides waste 5 minutes? I think that coaches do things just because they think they should (like run suicides or 5-man weaves) when there are better and more effective things to do with the time that give a better return.

As Ken says in his post, priorities change situationally, but even at that, the basic philosophy stayed the same, pick what you can affect in the time you have. As he mentions, game prep. I have worked for people who were incredibly complete. We would prepare to defend every cut of every play our opponent ran. As I said, it was very complete, however it was ineffective. Players got confused (most could remember our plays, there was no way they were going to remember our opponent's plays) and it took a lot of time. It prepared us but stopped us from getting better. What I decided to do was tho take the things they ran most often and then try to disrupt the first 2 passes. We had more time to get better and opponent's offenses broke down pretty often. Didi we get beat on some things? Sure. But, you're not going to stop everything. I picked our weaknesses and didn't allow our opponent to do that.

That's just an example. Decide your philosophy, decide the best way to sell it, figure out what is most important and get the other things as you go along.

Thanks Don. I actually e-mailed something to you, not sure if you can do it or not. But thank you so much for the feedback here. It was very helpful. I feel like I'm headed in the right direction.