#6 - The Fun of Xs and Os
Building the playbook
Welcome to another edition of the 1-2-1-1 Press. A small basketball project to help learn more about the game of basketball from my eyes.
1 - Forefront of the Press
Putting together a playbook
This week I was announced as the Tasmanian u18 Men Head Coach for their upcoming 2023 Australian Junior Championship campaign. A privilege to coach again at an AJC but also this exciting group.
My first thoughts wasn’t to look at the athletes and pick a team (we have tryouts for that), but was to sit back on FastDraw and my whiteboard to start writing and creating wrinkles and ATOs.
My experience from coaching the states u20 and u16 groups saw how much more learning I need to do in the area of Xs and Os when it comes to the different types of defences. Teams would mostly hard show and drops in PnR, switch or top block in off-ball situations as well. Seeing these in real time and being able to communicate to my athletes on the fly is the reason why I wanted to get ahead of the game and work on different wrinkles within the main structure to utilise each and every possession.
I’ve gotten my playbook to 20 different wrinkles over the last week, which will continue to grow until I’m comfortable with exploiting different defensive structures.
I look forward to this campaign and stumping opposition coaches with my wrinkles within games and hopefully don’t need to use my end of game ATOs because of those adjustments.
2 - 2 main talking points from:
Slappin’ Glass - Dustin Kerns (Appalachian State)
TIME STAMP: 7:15
“…We’re not coaches guys, so we’re not going to play…”
A great segment on taking over a new program by Coach Kerns. Coming into a new campaign with new head coach and same recurring athletes can be challenging.
First thing that you need to is make all athletes comfortable with their new coach. As Coach Kerns says, it can help athletes having a fresh slate to succeed in a new environment. The ones that want it, will get to work and compete. The ones that complain, will struggle before coaches ultimately have to make the call to remove them.
TIME STAMP: 34:12
“..why did you play? Because it was fun”
Coach Kerns talks about why do we play this game when talking to athletes, with the typical answer being “it’s fun”. We truly just play a kids game in more intricate and detailed way, but at the end of the day, it’s meant to be fun.
Going into a new program with new standards / ideas is all good, but to ensure you can turn a program around quickly, you need to encourage the fun to help with the buy in for the campaign.
Both of these segments on the podcast are extremely valuable when taking over a program, but can be highly effective in the middle of a season when the team is struggling or even need a reenergise.
1 - Development Drill of the Week:
Shooting Decision Training - Basketball Immersion
BDT Shooting - Basketball Decision Training
Coach Chris Oliver has put together some great drills over the years and his philosophy on decision based training has changed the minds of many coaches.
This shooting clinic ads a different dimension to spot shooting including cues. In typical “spot shooting” we will just stand and shoot, and as there is some validity and reasoning to do that, adding in game type decisions helps bring new dynamic and allows an athlete to translate their shooting into game.
The cues that Coach Oliver uses are:
Hands Up = Pass
Hands Down = Shoot
Attack = Finishing on the rim
1 - End of Game Play of the Week:
Olympiacos - Flex -> PnR
Euroleague is back underway, so here is the opening play by Olympiacos Piraeus to kick off their 22/23 campaign.
Olympiacos started of the year with a flex type action that went into a PnR look for newcomer Isaiah Cannan to get his first points for his new team. However, Isaiah couldn’t quite get down hill, but went into a horns dive action to get a mismatch in the post for an open shot.
Great to see that players (and coaches) are able to continue with their possession even with it breaking down and finding the right scoring opportunity within the structure.
Thank you for reading another edition of the 1-2-1-1 press, leave a comment and please subscribe to my learnings from the basketball world
Thanks
Coach James