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