Preparing Your Season--Leading Up To Your First Game

Years ago, while at a UCLA coaching clinic, Coach Wooden stressed to us young coaches that our priorities should be conditioning, fundamentals, and then team play. The pre- and early-season plan must take that into account. Do this by designing your drills for the dual purpose of perfecting a skill while building conditioning. Wooden told us that, "before working together as a team, we need to break every element of the game down into its basic parts, then begin to put the pieces together. Practice and perfect each part or the whole will not be successful. It requires hard work and repetition, always modifying, always correcting, until it all comes together. 'Practices are where championships are won'."

The identification and perfection of details in the teaching of fundamentals sets the teaching-coach above the average coach. Any coach neglecting details regularly attended to by the teaching-coach is practicing to be unsuccessful. "Failing to plan is planning to fail." Doing the little things well makes the big things work. This is probably the teaching-coach's greatest attribute for success.

The well-disciplined teaching-coach must have both short-term focus and long-term vision. In the short-term are the game just finished and the adjustments to prepare for the next game. On the long-term, we need ask ourselves: Where are we going? What is the plan to get us there? Are we on track? Where are adjustments needed to be made? We must keep a perspective of where we are on the line of progress we set for our long-term goal. We cannot allow one game to sidetrack us or one incident to pull us out of focus and off that line.

For the higher level coaches (middle school & above), I want to make just a few comments here about planning for your team offense, before I show you some of the tools I use for planning.

Teaching offense is time consuming. It requires many more skills of the player than defense does. With defense, minimally, the coach needs athletes willing to work hard and to be able to take some hard knocks. With offense, the coach needs skilled ball handlers, passers, rebounders, cutters, and shooters. There needs to be correct spacing and timing to keep the offense flowing, and it all has to be taught.

If the coach is a good teacher, all the requisite individual offensive skills will already have been mastered well enough to be able to begin implementing the offensive system. This will include not only the individual position skills, but also drills that have taught the players how to complement each other in two and three man setups. These would include flashing, cutting, screening and screen and roll, setting up passing triangles and correct floor spacing, and giving rules for rebounding. With the two and three man setups, you've quietly begun to put the pieces of your offense into play. When you add the fourth and fifth players, you have already had the bulk of the work done.

It's all about breaking each piece of the puzzle into its smallest parts and teaching them well; drilling them separately and repeatedly until the pieces come together. When you finally introduce the full, five man offense, the players should now be able to grasp how the pieces work and fit into the larger set.

Make sure your players are right for your offense, having designed an offense right for your players' talents and skills. This is especially difficult for many inexperienced coaches who may want to try all kinds of gimmick offenses, special plays, or who may be copying an offense they saw somewhere.

Here are some other suggestions I offer about creating offense:

 Any offense needs to involve all five players.  Always create passing triangles.  Use the 3-man game to assess who has the talent to be the spark for your offense. 3-on-3 is basketball at its fundamental best. Everything is there. No one stands, so there's always flow.  Give rules that keep the players moving, but always with a purpose. You might require so many passes, cuts or screens to create the flow you want.  Keep everyone involved in shooting by stressing selfless play that gets the ball to the open player--not just the star.  Use words that give positive reinforcement and inspiration, to create a positive work ethic in your players. Avoid judgmental words, like "should", that can create a feeling of lack.  Critique rather than criticize and be sure your players know where you are coming from in this regard.  Value video taping of individuals, practices and games. Nothing, I've found, speeds skill development faster than a player seeing what you've been telling them, and then understanding what needs to be corrected. Study the videos and allow the players the same opportunity. This is a great teaching tool for the coach to see something that may have been missed "live" and for the players to see what they look like in action. The critique now has a basis in fact that is undeniable because the player can see it.  Keep it simple on offense. Go for quality, not fancy. If you really want to "jazz" up the game, do it with defense.

I always look at how much time I have to prepare before the first game. Then, I look at the list below to see what I have to teach so that all players have the skills to function both individually and within the team concepts of offense and defense. I then start at the first game date and go backwards to see how many practices I have to accomplish all this, and divide all the skills into these practice sessions. It's not perfect, but if the teaching-coach keeps everyone (players, coaching staff and oneself) on focus, it should get you where you need to be for the first game.

The list below is for the more experienced playing levels. At the youth and beginner levels most emphasis should be placed on fundamental playing skills, playing defense and understanding the game and how it is played, rules, etc.

SKILLS TO COVER PRIOR TO FIRST GAME

FUNDAMENTALS 1. PASSING/PROTECT THE BALL 2. DRIBBLING 3. PIVOTING 4. SHOOTING--ALL KINDS (spot shots, free throws, off the drive, finishing, lay-ins from all directions, power-up, position specific shots-hook, jump hook, 3-pt.) 5. TIPPING/REBOUNDING

INDIVIDUAL OFFENSE 1. CUTS 2. SCREENS/SCREEN AND ROLL 3. HOMEWORK--MOVING WITHOUT THE BALL 4. INDIVIDUAL 1-ON-1 MOVES WITH BALL INDIVIDUAL DEFENSE 1. STANCE 2. SLIDING 3. PLAYING ON THE BALL (INFLUENCING/GOING OVER SCREENS/DEFENDING VS. DRIVE, BASELINE) 4. OFF THE BALL--(PLAYING OFF AFTER A PASS/DENIAL/FRONTING THE CUTTER/FIGHTING SCREENS/ MEETING THE FLASH INTO POST)

TEAM SKILLS 1. 2-ON-2, 3-ON-3, 4-ON-4: INCORPORATE ON OFFENSE--(TRIANGLE FLOOR BALANCE, MOVEMENT OFF THE BALL, REBOUNDING RULES, STOPPING BREAK AND TRANSITION TO DEFENSE); INCORPORATE ON DEFENSE--(TRIANGLE POSITION FOR HELP, REBOUNDING RULES, FAST BREAK AND TRANSITION TO OFFENSE). 2. 5-ON-5: MAN AND ZONE OFFENSE/DEFENSE; THE TRANSITION GAME- FAST BREAK OFFENSE/DEFENSE; PRESS OFFENSE/DEFENSE. 3. SPECIAL PLAYS--JUMP BALL/END LINE/SIDE LINE/FREE THROW