Inbounds Plays

I've spent quite a bit of time during the off season looking for new drills, plays, and ideas from successful coaches. Trying to sit down now and organize all of the stuff I have found that I think we can use this year. Started looking at inbounds plays today and thought I would share 4 good ones that I have found.


http://www.box.net/shared/u2dm557lpf

Kevin Eastman Teaching Post Players

Give them in game goals
a. 3 free throws per half
b. So many rebounds in a quarter
c. Get one pass ahead layup per half
d. Update them when they come out of games, during time outs
e. The role may not be what you want, but it’s what we need to win a championship

Sell them on finding a niche on your team
Posts that run the floor open up the fast break
Bad first shots might happen but how often do you see bad second shots off rebound
Fist fight to get open and a foot fight to score
See 90% of the floor when you catch the ball
Give up position for possession

Coaching Thoughts 9-29

Sergio Scariolo Guard!Development Nike Europe Clinic

If the ball stops moving off the dribble, pass, or any part of the offense all advantages are lost.

Don't use complicated drills

When working on ball handling high school players should spend 65% of time on weak hand.

Nike Skills Academy
Your eyes make layups
Good offensive players get their shoulders lower than the defenders when attacking

Teach the pound dribble. Have defender push the ball handler while he maintains a solid base and pounds the ball. Teaches offensive player to use his body and protect the ball.

Perfect Feet: Have player practice shooting without a ball

Full Court Team Drills

If you have been following the blog you know how important I think fundamentals are to the success of a team. I think it's very important to work on basic skills everyday in practice if your team is going to improve throughout the season. However I don't want to spend the entire practice doing basic drills that are slow moving and don't get our kids moving at game pace. We want to work on passing, shooting, and pretty much every aspect of the game with these fast moving drills.

All three of these drills get everyone on the team a lot of reps with little time spent in lines. You can also turn these into competitions where you are trying to score as many as possible in a certain time or number of makes before you have a set number of turnovers.

3 on 3 Drill

In a post from this weekend I talked about some great ideas I got from Mike Saylor. One that really got a lot of the coaches attention was a simple drill that I had never seen before. During the preseason he has his players play 3 on 3 shooting only 3 pointers. They play with no out of bounds and look to make as many as they can in a set period of time. There philosophy is to stroke the 3 so they want guys to be thinking move the ball and shoot. They only have one defensive rule which is that you cannot switch on defense. They look to outlet and shoot as quick as possible off makes or misses.

I'm looking forward to trying this out sometime either as a preseason drill or a drill for my guards when we need something fun to break up a practice. Looking to go 3-4 minutes and keeping records of how many makes 1 team can get.

He made several comments throughout his presentation about coaches not liking his style because Bob Knight would never do that. I thought this was a pretty funny way at looking at coaching styles. Coach Saylor has found a style that works for him. His teams beat better teams all the time because they have bought in to this style. What do we do as coaches to create our system?

Live Play Ideas

I am not a big scrimmage person in practice. We just don't seem to get a lot out of it most of the time. As a coach I think this is something that everyone is different with. I have coached with great coaches that went live for 45 minutes every day at practice. I have also coached with people that very rarely go live. I personally want to get as many reps of game situations as possible. We will break up and do a lot of 3 on 3 or 4 on 4 work and work on things we will be seeing in our next game or items we need to clean up a little bit. I have put quite a few entries on here regarding our shell drill work which I think can be turned into a controlled scrimmage.

I found this list that I had started in the spring that has several different ideas for my lower level coaches. I know there are a lot of other great ideas out there as well.

http://www.box.net/shared/se0luscthk

Coaching Thoughts

I loved this quote that I just read on the bison basketball blog.

Look at your team and figure out the two things they can do really well—as well as anybody n the league, conference, district. Then make sure there’s not a team in your district that does those two things better.

Utah Jazz Assistant, Gordon Chiesa

Every year our goal is to win more games than we should or we are expected to. Small focuses on areas like this can be very helpful to maximize your wins. Last year we knew we weren't going to win a lot of games from shooting a high %. We did think we could win from rebounding all of these misses. Tried to focus on getting every offensive rebound instead of beating our heads in about every miss.

Ideas to do these things better
1. Look at your drills and make sure they have a strong focus in this area
2. Find any way you can to put yourself in position to do these things
3. Sit down with your coaching staff and work together to identify these areas
4. Don't try to focus on every thing
5. Ask your players what they are confident in and get them to buy in

Reach One Coach One Basketball Cinic

Today I was lucky enough to go to the Reach one coach one clinic sponsored by NJCAA Basketball Coaches Association.

The clinic was really a great learning experience. Quite a bit different from most of the clinics I have been to because all of today's presenters were JUCO coaches or High School Coaches. You could really tell these guys have had to be creative to be competitive year in and year out. I will share a lot of the information that I picked up at the clinic in the coming weeks.

Mike Saylor from Terre Haute South HS in Indiana did a really good job. I hadn't heard of his system before but it really made me think. They shoot a lot of 3's because he feels it gives his kids the best chance to win against more athletic teams in the state. Pretty sure everyone was in shock when he said they shoot an average of 250 3's a practice before they stretch!

While I am not going to this system it did make me think about the way we practice shooting. How can we get up more shots in short amounts of time? What shooting drills are working or our offense? Are we utilizing our space? How do we get kids to become strokers as he calls them?

Decided to put together several drills that I have that get up a lot of shots quick.

http://www.box.net/shared/1pkbx5zvli

Practice Offenses

I have had several conversations with coaches this past week about getting good looks out of your practice teams. It is very hard to get your second team to give your first team a good look in practice. I have read even from college coaches that complain about this.

One thing that we tried out last year was to have my assistant take our 9-15 guys on the team and work with them on new offenses to run against our defense. I would give him 10-15 minutes to work on this. A lot of time we would do this with them instead of having them sitting on the sidelines doing nothing. We even found a couple of offenses that they could run really well together.

Here are a couple of examples of offenses that we have looked at or used in the past.

http://www.box.net/shared/zs1611kvz5

Dumbell Clean and Press

Another great basketball exercise.

Much easier to with limited time or space than using barbells and racks.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid57002186001?bctid=35262089001

Post Defense Ideas

Guarding the post:
o Duke-everyone digs
o 1 on 1-don’t let the man that entered the ball get the ball back.
o LA-big/big trap (wherever he is on the floor)
o Villanova-guy nearest the ball traps and next closest guy sprints to the open offensive
man for a steal.


I like reading different styles of defense on the post. I'm not a big fan of fronting the post unless we have too. I watched a lot of teams play last year that fronted the post on a guy that was not a scoring threat at all. Then people wondered why the offensive guy kept getting rebounds on a perimeter shot. If you have some size why not push the man off the block and make a bad offensive threat beat you from 8 feet away from the basket.

Kevin Eastman Thoughts

More ideas from one of the greatest coaches in the game. In my mind he is the best at skill development.

Theory of two:
• It takes two minutes to show any skill.
• It takes two weeks doing it every single day to get comfortable with the skill.
• It takes two months working on a skill everyday to get good enough to execute in
a game.

Shooting form:
• Be ready on the catch.
• Ten toes to the rim (if you have ten toes to the rim you will be square to the
basket).
• Only change his form if the shot doesn’t go in. Make him the best worst form
shooter.
• Two second rule: As soon as it’s 1 cm into our players fingers I’m counting one
two. Players don’t have a great understanding of game speed when working out.
• The better the shooter you are, the better your shot fake needs to be. Definition of
a shot fake is a real shot that you don’t shoot.

Shoot free-throws until you miss, and count how many in a row.

My goal right now is to get everything you can teach in the game down to three bullet
points. It makes it easier for players to take in:
• For shooting:
• Perfect feet.
• Ready for catch.
• Perfect follow through.

Three things skill development can do for you:
• It can create a career.
• It can improve a career.
• It can revitalize a career.

Hang Cleans

Great Thought

Great thought from Bison Hoops Blog today.

http://schsbisonbasketball.blogspot.com/


Look at your team and figure out the two things they can do really well—as well as anybody n the league, conference, district. Then make sure there’s not a team in your district that does those two things better.

4 Quick Shooting Drills

Here are 2 quick shooting drills that we use for our drive and kick offense. We really stress having the players spacing out to the NBA 3pt line and stepping into their shots. We also feel that this space opens up the court for driving to the basket.

Also added two simple free throw drills that we do to avoid shooting 2 and rotating.

http://www.box.net/shared/hfaelb2mhc

Dumbell Squat To Press

Explosive basketball related lift.

This version is much easier to teach than the barbell version.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid50992462001?bctid=1522775746



I'm sorry for not having the actual video on the blog. I'm having problems not having all of the videos starting every time you visit the site.

Workout Videos

One area that we are really trying to improve on this year is our in season weight training program. Almost all of our athletes workout out in our athlete performance class at school. We still want to get them into the weight room at least 2 times per week on top of this to work on basketball specific workouts. I'm going to start posting some of the lifts we do as well as some great workout ideas from stack.com This web site is a must for all coaches.


http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid50992462001?bctid=1529520005

Del Harris Ideas

Good practices replicate game conditions. He likes to use four possession games and six possession games. This is very similar to the typical length of action in a game. Try not to teach until the end of the segment, don't disrupt flow.

ODO game – offense/defense/offense. Start the first possession with a situation (ie. Side out with 6 seconds left on shot clock). Scoring is 3 points per sequence. Someone must with either 2-1 or 3-0. Total game score is 1 point for each sequence win. Sequence winner starts the next one with the ball first.

Competitive Shooting Drill

Always looking for shooting drills to do in practice. I like to break up practice so that It doesn't become boring for the coaches or the players. After sitting through a long practice yesterday on the football field I started to think about things to do for kids that aren't my main guys that are getting most of the court and instruction time. A quick shooting drill usually helps everyone stay on track a little better. And I have also found that if you switch shooting drills up frequently kids will avoid going through the motions.



http://www.box.net/shared/r4cz4i5z3b


I'm also looking for ideas regarding how to become a better teacher on the basketball court. I have found some great ideas and lists already but would love to hear some ideas from visitors.

bmoore@plano88.org