Two Points: A Real Life Youth Travel Basketball Team Diary

[Barkeep49]

So I'm going to go with the starting lineup of Gordie, Jack P, Tom, Jack M, and Dante with Lucas and Noah on the bench. I hope to be back in a couple hours to report victory.

[Barkeep49]

Game 1: Spartans versus HP
I get to the gym before 2 o’clock. Already the HP coach (HP being our opponents) and one of the HP players is there. It’s actually one of the HP players I know and I chat with the father a little. By the time 2 rolls around about half the HP team is there. At 2:05 Tom shows up. That’s just fine with me. I purposely only told our players to get there 15 minutes early. These kids are 9 and I figured the longer they were at the gym, the more likely they were to get nervous. 15 minutes, if they were on time, was more than enough time to get loose, have me talk to them and get ready for the game. Sure enough by 2:15 our whole team is there. I’m having them do lay-up lines since I haven’t taught them anything better to do. Finding a pre-game ritual was something I wanted to do, and haven’t done. There certainly hasn’t been enough time to teach one so I don’t feel too awful about that.

A few minutes before the game starts they ask me for “Coaches and Captains”. And I’m like Captain? I don’t have a Captain. I grab Tom. Poor Tom looks like he’s going to pee in his pants he’s so nervous. The kid from HP seems to be equally as nervous. Ref goes over several rules including one about “team control” that frankly seems to go over both my head and that of the opposing coach. After the meeting, I call the team in. I have Tom recap the important points (good sportsmanship, tuck in your shirts) and then go over our three focuses:
On offense we need to pick away
On defense we need to hustle back
On the bench we need to be cheering on our teammates.

We talk about having fun. And it’s time to start our game. I lead us in a cheer of Spartans (our team name) and it’s time to go out. Except I forgot to name our starters. Whoops. I name our starting five of Jack M, who will bring the ball up, Gordie, Tom, who will be our in bounder, Jack P, and Dante.

It takes a while for them to match up, but they eventually match up. HP is bigger than we are but more in terms of weight than height. HP gets the tip-off and we’re underway. The first quarter is ugly. HP comes out in a 2-3 and our team is lost on offense. We haven’t really practiced against the zone so I’m not surprised. On the good side our defense is DOMINATING. There are a lot of travel calls on both sides, though more on HP than on us. HP is also committing a lot of fouls. I’m happy. And do you know who is looking like the best player on the court? Jack M. He’s doing lots of the little things that make a difference. For instance, he’s not afraid to double up when the opportunity presents himself. He’s also doing a good job of keeping the floor balanced.

The quarter ends and I just know, from how they’ve been playing, and more importantly how their coach has been acting, that HP is going to come out with a press. Have we practiced how to break a press? Not so much. I explain how I want Lucas, who is in, to be back setting screens for Gordie and Noah. Jack M is going to try and get open deep. The good news is these kids are 9. So when the press comes, we’re able to break it. As the quarter goes on, we start to be able to break it with more regularity and start to find some open baskets. Our defense continues to play well. My one big coaching decision, which pays huge dividends for us, is to have Tom simply guard the point guard the full length of the court. I tell him not to worry about stealing it, but just pressure him. This leads to NUMEROUS turnovers. In fact I believe they only got 2 or 3 shots off once we started doing this . Their point guard was dribbling right into the corner or throwing the ball away or whatever. We go into half up 14-8, but we’re in control of this game.

At half I stay up beat. I talk about how it’s a close game but we’re in control. Our team doesn’t really appear to be tired at all which is also a good thing. The buzzer goes off and we go back in. As there is no press allowed in the 3rd quarter I take the trailer off, but do have Jack meet the point guard at half court. Again they don’t look so good.

As the game goes on the tempo seems to be increasing. The 3rd is a low scoring quarter, but we manage to extend our lead to 22-10. This means we’re not even allowed to press, being up by more than 10.

And in the 4th quarter, we basically run them ragged. Our defense creates turnovers and we transition these turnovers into points. Despite the fact that we have 7 players and they have 12, they’re tired and we’re not. HP never stops with its full court press, which means that we continue to blow by them and we end up winning, with ease 34-12. I try to slow them down at the end of the game, but basically with HP playing full court press, I can only slow down the game so much.

What a relief. We won and we won easily, though honestly HP missed a lay-ups and we made quite a few jumpers. I think to a certain extent their coach’s commitment to an up tempo game was a mistake. They could have out muscled us but didn’t. We won because of our ability to create transition baskets and because our defense was smothering.

If we had a game ball to give, it’d go to Jack M. He did so much right. One thing we need to work on is that when he’s bringing up the ball he always makes his first pass to his left.

Jack P frustrated me. He was great at creating transition opportunities, both as a defender and as an outlet on offense, but when we were in our “set” offense he took too many shots. In fact he took nearly twice as many shots as our next highest shooter (14 shots to 8). Of course we also led the team in steals with five. So I will take the good with the bad.

Lucas looked basically lost out there. On numerous occasions he had trouble finding and defending our man. On a couple of set plays on in bounds his man got ridiculously open, but fortunately they missed the shots. He did moderately well on the boards, with 4 rebounds, but he lost a couple of others that should have been his.

Dante was a beast underneath getting 9 rebounds. He scored three 4th quarter baskets when he essentially had easy lay-ups thanks to our beating them down the court. In other words he did exactly what we needed him to do. He didn’t play tight enough defense at times, and the HP coach wanted more plays where their Center just backed Dante down. Of course our guards were so smothering it made it hard to get those inside post passes.

Gordie played some good D, but his shot selection is poor. He’s a good shooter, but I am going to rapidly lose patience for shooting shots when guarded by 3 players.

Noah was, perhaps, our worst player out there (actually according to Win Score, a measurement of productivity that I use, it was Gordie, followed by Noah). He looked confused on defense and didn’t really do much of anything on offense. Starting Jack over Noah provided to be the right call, in fact it wasn’t even close.

Tom did about as I anticipated. When the H’s are back and he can play more guard, I think he’ll do better. I don’t feel like I’m taking best advantage of Tom at the moment but I think as we settle more into our motion offense, Tom will see more touches and get shots as he understands what needs to be done.

On the whole, playing time was pretty evenly distributed. Lucas had 15 minutes of playing time, still more than half the game, and he had the fewest minutes of anyone on the team. Dante, Tom, and Jack M all had about 23 minutes to lead the team. Distributing minutes with 7 players is, obviously, easier than with 9 or 10, but I’m glad that everyone got quality play time.

We have no practice this coming week and no game either next weekend so my next update will not be for a little more than a week. I’m glad we won. I don’t know if I can claim too much credit for it, as they did things well that we hadn’t really practiced outright though several of the things we did in practice, such as following shots, did seem to pay-off. However, this victory belongs to them. And let me say what a relief it is not to be looking at a season as rough as baseball was. I just couldn’t take it.

In the post game speech, I talked about how it was a long season. We should be pleased with our effort today, and named our defense (obviously) as something we’d done well. But we have things to work on as well. But a 20 point victory never hurt anyone, especially without our best player

[nfg22]

4 whole points in the second half? Thats unnaceptable...oh wait that was defense..J/k...Great game...honestly that is smothering defense. If you can keep the other team to an average of 4 points a quarter you should go undefeated...

[Izulde]

You have cut-offs for Lucas and Dante's game summaries, just so you know.

Lucas looked basically lost out there. On numerous occasions he had trouble finding and defending our man. On a couple of set plays on in bounds his man got ridiculously open, but fortunately they missed the shots. He did moderately well on the boards, with

Dante was a beast underneath getting 9 rebounds. He scored three 4th quarter baskets when he essentially had easy lay-ups thanks to our beating them down the court. In other words he did exactly what we needed him to do. He didn’t play tight enough defense at times, and the HP coach wanted more plays where their Center just backed Dante down. Of course our guards were so smothering it made it hard to get those inside post passes. The important part was that Dante was

Fantastic first game! That kind of victory has to make you feel good, and I think it really showed off the importance of your conditioning them early on in the season. Now you can focus on the finer points.

Maybe try switching Lucas to a sub role if you get more guys in? Maybe if he's only in as a reserve, he'll gradually get more acclimated to the system and whatnot.

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by nfg22

4 whole points in the second half? Thats unnaceptable...oh wait that was defense..J/k...Great game...honestly that is smothering defense. If you can keep the other team to an average of 4 points a quarter you should go undefeated...

I would agree that 4 points in the second half was terrific, though part of that was luck, as they had several open layups that they missed. I agree that if we can play defense like that it means we should be a contender in any game we play.

Originally Posted by Izulde

You have cut-offs for Lucas and Dante's game summaries, just so you know.

Fantastic first game! That kind of victory has to make you feel good, and I think it really showed off the importance of your conditioning them early on in the season. Now you can focus on the finer points.

Maybe try switching Lucas to a sub role if you get more guys in? Maybe if he's only in as a reserve, he'll gradually get more acclimated to the system and whatnot.

Thanks for the complements and for pointing out the cut-offs, I fixed those.

Lucas, as I believe I noted in Friday's practice report, will see limited playing time for the moment and, as mentioned, saw the least playing time. I have already made one adjustment keeping him at one position. I hope he'll learn that one position, where to start on offense, how to move with it, what kind of tricks to do guarding a man, etc. He's really the best fit to play center when Dante is out, but I had Jack playing there this game to try and simplify things for Lucas. I mean it's hard not to like the kid, since he finds me after every practice, and did so after the game, and said thanks. I'm sure his parents have him do it, but it sort of exemplifies the nice kid that he is, so hopefully he'll pick things up and be able to contribute fully to the team.

[Barkeep49]

The standings for the league have been updated. Not to diminish our acomplishment, but we have an eight team division and the four winning teams all won by 20 points or more. Further, based on the tie breakers we'd be in 4th place because our 12 points allowed was the 4th most allowed on Sunday. In other words, after 1 game it seems like it will be a league of haves and have nots. We play another one of the have nots on December 3rd, and then the following week get our first away game and against one of the two teams from the largest suburb in our division.

[wade moore]

Woohoo, a win!!!

Sounds like if nothing else your emphasis on fitness will pay off.

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by wade moore

Woohoo, a win!!!

Sounds like if nothing else your emphasis on fitness will pay off.

I agree. Fitness actually played a role in our practice yesterday.

Monday November 27th
With the long weekend, and my feeling guilty over not doing work I should have for school, I actually spent a lot of time preparing for Monday’s practice. I always go into practice with a game plan, but I was super prepared.

And of course I step into practice and am dealt my first surprise. Who is sitting there lacing up, but Brian. A pleasant surprise. He tells me that David was not feeling well and so would not be at practice. One of the things I had planned was that at the end of practice instead of doing an open ended complement of somebody, each player would have one person to watch and that way everyone would get a complement at the end of practice. Having Brian there, but not David, meant I simply did a switch on those things, as well as some premade teams I’d made.

We start practice talking about all of the good things that went on during our commanding victory. I let them do most of the talking and they hit on all of the major points behind our victory. It was good. I then talk about how we didn’t do a few things so well and that’s what we’d be spending our time doing at practice this week. That included, most importantly, our offense against the zone.

We then did our continuous motion drill with the dribbling. I explained that we would be running “Princeton” our team continuous motion, on Friday. I think that several of the players on the team might have had a little too much turkey. Brian was winded after about 2 minutes. He explained that he’d never had to run so much in his life, which made me laugh. This second ankle injury seems to have really caused some changes to his style. Where as before he was one of the quickest and fastest players on the team, he is now much slower than many of the other players. I had talked to him before practice started about how I didn’t expect him to be full speed all at once and I understood it would take some time for him to catch up to some of the things we’d done. I really hope that he didn’t rush back too quickly. Noah also seemed to have been particularly slow. He won’t be at Sunday’s game so he’ll have a few practices to get back into shape.

I then dismissed them to a quick water break. Brian asked if I would watch his free throw shooting. And it was then that I remembered how I want everyone to be doing free throw shooting after running. DOH! All my preparation and I still forgot that I’d been wanting to do that.

After our water break, where I reminded them that one of the reasons we won was because they got tired in the second half and we didn’t, we did a screen drill. The only time we’d practiced it before was at our 5 man practice. For the drill we practiced going from a low post to screening high. We talked about the options that can come from a screen based on what the defender does. Overall the drill worked fairly well. Most of the team had trouble defending off the screen, in fact Scott was the only player to do well, so next time we run this drill, either on Friday or next Monday, we will talk about how to defend it some, rather than just focusing on the offensive side of it.

We then went into our fast break drill where they line up on the free throw line extended, I pass the ball to a player, and yell out the name of a defensive player. The defensive player then touches the baseline before going back to defense. I really need to start naming the drills, such as this, that we’re going to be returning to from time to time. Suggestions would be welcome. A big focus here was how to defend short handed. We talked about creating a “high-low”. Overall the offenses got better as we ran this more, which is a good thing. We are such a fast team that it’s hard to get too much of a fast break on us as we get back quickly. There will always be some opportunities but hopefully the player will “hear footsteps” and miss the shot. Brian actually directed the fast break well when it was his turn. Jack M, however, did not do such a good job. He had an open wingman but instead decided to try and drive, which considering he was tightly guarded by Gordie, didn’t work so well. This was but one example of his being slightly clueless. I don’t get how a player can perform so poorly in practice, even in gamesque situations such as this, and then do so well in a game. Perhaps he just played the game of his career? I guess I’ll find out.

Following this we spent some time on our in bounds drill. And it was AWFUL. This was something we did poorly at during the game and we got the ball in bounds more through luck than any sort of coordinated play. This is our one fixed play. I worked hard at making sure players only really focused on one position so they’d remember what to do, and still, it was bad. I’m not sure I can find a much simpler inbounds play, though I will look for one for next week as maybe we need to make a switch. I dunno.

Finally, we worked on our zone offense play. This, not surprisingly, caused some confusion, but that’s what I expected. I don’t think the play will be ready for Sunday, so hopefully Northfield doesn’t run too much of a zone.

We ended practice with a quick game of golf and then we ran our suicides. Since there were a couple of house league teams who were wanting to get on the court, rather than talk inside the gym, I took the team outside and we did our end of practice wrap-up in our half-time huddle area. Jack M, as seems to be typical of him, couldn’t find something nice to say about his player to watch, Brian, so I ended up supplying the positive there. This format didn’t work as well as I expected. I’ll give it another go at some point, but if we’re going to do positives, I think we’ll likely go to the more wide open format, even if that excludes some people some of the time. I reminded them about the game time, and informed them of a possible change in times. Gordie let me know that he’s playing on a house league team and didn’t want the game time to change so he could play in that game as well. Evidently his father is coaching the house league team none-the-less. I then asked how many other players were playing on a house league team and learned that exactly zero other players were. In some ways I think that’s too bad, as having the range of abilities is something I like about house league baseball as I really think it can often help the mediocre players see how to step it up some.

Overall, this was a bit of a “blah” practice. Nothing went too well, nothing too poorly. I was all pumped up coming in to it, and as mentioned had planned it more, so I’m a little surprised about it. Perhaps there wasn’t enough competition in it? Too much learning? I don’t think there was much more standing around time than normal, so I don’t think that was it. I dunno. I do know that I am glad that Brian had been gone for the first six weeks. The kid likes to challenge my authority. I am going to have to put the smack down on that mighty soon, as I will not let the atmosphere which has been built suffer at his hands.

For Friday, I think we’re going to focus on the zone offense again. I will work on finding some sort of competition to play in the middle of practice, and we will work on a full court press. In many ways breaking the press is more important to us now than doing the press, but I know that learning the press will take time and so it’s best to introduce it now and keep working on it for a while until they’re ready to actually run it in a game. I’m trying not to look past our next game, against NF1, but to a certain extent I am doing just that as I think getting them ready for our game in two weeks against MP1.

[Barkeep49]

Friday December 1st Update
Well it’s a snow day here and that means no practice tonight. Love it as a teacher, hate it as a coach. So this means we are once again losing practice time. It really is adding up at this point and I grow very concerned about our longer term prospects.

The big question, then, is who to start, and what kind of rotation I want to do, for Sunday’s game. Jack M, Jack P, Scott, Tom, Dante, and David all can make a legitimate case for starting. Of that group, in some ways I want to bring Jack P off the bench, since he’s the most versatile of that group after David, who I am obviously going to start. But I still think Jack could be our third best overall player. How do you sit your third best overall player?

If, instead, I went based off of skill that would lead to Tom sitting. However, I don’t like how that leaves us for subs. Brian and Lucas are going to each see minimal playing time, most likely 3 or 4 minutes in each half. I basically want Lucas playing the 4 position, for reasons previously mentioned. Brian, is an unknown. Before his injury I’d had him penciled in as a starter. Now, besides not having a real feel for how I want things done (not the biggest minus considering we play just a step above organized chaos) , he’s still getting his feel for running, jumping, shooting, etc back. The kid has spent, essentially, the last 3 months with a broken ankle on one of his feet. It’s got to have an effect on his body if not his psyche.

With Noah not being there, that leaves Gordie and one other player as my main substitutes and Gordie is essentially only good in the guard positions. Despite the fact that the 3 spot is nearly a guard on our team, he doesn’t seem so comfortable with it. The problem is that at some point, Dante is going to need to rest. When he does I will need a center and that leaves me two choices, basically, Jack P and David. Both have their pluses and minuses. Jack P is serviceable there, but since he’s inside more he ends up with higher percentage shots (he took a whole lot of shots at our last game). David can man the position better, but then again he can do most things better and so limiting his touches of the ball seems counter productive. Perhaps I’m over thinking the whole thing, as if they’re doing the offense right, which they won’t, even the center is on or near the perimeter a fair amount.

One could make an argument that having David, as point guard, Tom, as the other guard, some combination of Scott and Jack P as forwards, and Dante as center is our best unit. In fact, I would be willing to make that argument. However, I just can’t bring myself to not start Jack M. First, he earned it by how well he played last week. Second, considering how well he played last week, it would have an especially damaging effect on a player who is somewhat delicate to begin with. So Jack gets the start. Further, having Jack bring the ball up means Jack is less likely to take a silly shot when he gets the ball, so it makes sense for him to play point, rather than David who is our best point guard.

As I would like to use Tom more as a guard and less as a 3, I think Scott will get the start as the three, Jack as the 4, and Dante as the five. As I like to remind the team, it’s a long season so I will have time to play around with that. This is one of those times that writing things down has helped to clarify my thoughts. And while it’s perhaps not my favorite starting five, I do think it will be our best starting five.

[Barkeep49]

Spartans vs. NF2 Game Report

Today we faced NF2. I had problems with my car (the doors don’t want to open) and was already running behind schedule. So I show up only 10 minutes before the start of the game. I’ve never cut it so close to a game, without having some sort of prior commitment. I am relieved to see my team in a nice lay-up line as I get there. I call them over and we talk about screening off the ball, getting back on defense, and being into the game on the bench. We start the Jacks, David, Scott, and Dante. They are a tall team. When I announce that Jack M is going to be our point guard, Brian does not approve. He tells me that I should be letting David bring up the ball. I tell him flat out that I appreciate the suggestion, but that I’m going to make the call about those sorts of things.

They come out in some sort of zone. In fact throughout the game they play zone. I think it was supposed to be a 2-1-2. I know at one point it was supposed to be, however, they never really execute it well. Anyway they’re playing some sort of zone. Having the H’s back for the game makes a huge difference. NF2 is a big team and they win the tip-off (David did the jump for us). However, with-in the first 90 seconds it becomes clear we are a substantially better team. We manage to miss several open and easy layups. However, they’re getting nothing. They had traveling or double dribble called on four of their first five possessions. It’s 8-0 at the end of the first quarter.

For whatever reason, the team had a hard time with the concept of “we’re going to let them in bounds it and then we’ll pressure them” but it doesn’t really matter. Shortly into the 2nd quarter we go up by 10. The game is a slaughter. We end up winning 40-12 but if I hadn’t held them back starting in the 3rd quarter it could have been a lot more than just 40 points we scored. Gordie astutely pointed out that they were tired in the second quarter. Once again their natural talent won the game, so I can take little credit for that. However, the fact that as the game goes on we get better against our opponents is something I will take some credit for.

The good:
We passed the ball well against their zone. There were lots of openings to be found and we found them and took the shots. I started forcing the team not to take those shots but they were there. We played well against a team that was bigger than we were. They had 3 players all taller than Dante (our tallest player) and a couple of others who were about he same size as Dante. Then they also had a couple of kids who were shorter than anyone on our team. It was kind of strange, actually.

We also did a great job of hustling back. They scored ZERO transition points. Which, considering how many points we scored and shots we took, is just strange. The whole hustling ethos did not seem to be widespread on their team, but our team sure did it.

The bad:
We didn’t seem to enjoy this victory. Maybe it was just because many of our best players spent so much time on the bench (yet another way we could have beaten them by more than we did). But while the H’s were overjoyed with our victory at the end, everyone else was kind blah. In some ways, I like that. Win low key, lose low key. And so while I preach it, I’m surprised that these 4th graders are actually doing that. I think part of it must have been how dominating we were all game. It’s hard to stay excited when you know the opponents are so inferior.

Beyond that we got into foul trouble. The non-shooting fouls didn’t bother me. What DID bother me was how many fouls we committed on shots that the other team had no right taking. They would chuck up shots, and let me tell you that’s what the team was doing, chucking up shots, from near the 3 point line and we would foul them. It was awful.

I am not taking advantage of my sitting in the middle of the players. The reason I do this, besides keeping proximity is so I can talk to them. Instead I’ve been way too focused on the game. I need to involve the bench players in the game more, watching what people on the court are doing and asking questions. Brian, in his third bit of challenging, got upset when I wouldn’t let him sit next to Jack M on the bench. Oh well. But the point remains that while it’s good on its own to keep everyone close to me, there is more that can be done.

Finally, our inbounds play is nonexistent. They’re just not doing it in the game.

Player Notes
Brian: He got some extensive playing time and looked much better than he did in practice. I’ll be curious to hear how he feels about it tomorrow.

Dante: Was much more of a non factor this game than last with far fewer boards.

David: My dad was amazed when I told him that he was the best player on the team. He was doing a lot of little things well today, but only had 2 points. I would hazard to suggest his men had 0 points against him. He did play some point later in the game and did a nice job with it, as expected. I do worry that I am not using him as well as I should be. If he has a couple more games like this then it will be time to take a deeper look at how we can be doing more to feature his skills.

Gordie: He got lots of playing time. He actually almost fouled out. He played better than he did last game. He threw up a bad shot in the fourth, when I was all set to leave him in for the rest of the game, so I pulled him. He said “I don’t know why I took that shot.” I replied, matter of factly, “I don’t know why either. If you hadn’t you’d still be in the game.” He got the message and when he went back in was good about distributing the ball.

Jack P: He made things happen. He was able to move well and get good shots, including some nice penetration. He had to guard a lot of different guys, including some who were much taller than he, and did a good job.

Jack M: He started off playing well. I think, however, when he was one of the first people subbed for he felt discouraged and didn’t play particularly well the rest of the game. Also was clearly annoyed at having his time limited in the second half.

Scott: Our game MVP. Just like Jack M made things happen last week, Scott made things happen this week. He missed an INSANE number of lay-ups however, he would come down with the board a high percentage of the time as well so it balanced out. He led our team with 10 points.

Tom: He seemed out of joint. He was quite discouraged and upset with himself after the game on how he’d played. I plan on processing this with him tomorrow at practice.

Lucas: He got a lot of playing time. My dad (who came to the game) thought he did very well. And I was like “huh”? He scored 5 points, all in the second half, and did play better as the game went-on, but his defensive wasn’t so good and he was still often confused on offense. I’m not quite sure what my dad saw in him.

Well there is a lot of stuff to work on. We could easily spend the whole hour and a half practice tomorrow just on our zone offense, man-to-man offense, in bounds, and press. However, we won’t, since that would be boring. I am going to try and find a new game to play.

Two and oh is nice, but three and oh will feel much better.

[Barkeep49]

12-04 Practice Report
Before practice started yesterday, I call Tom over. He had expressed some unhappiness over how he played yesterday. I ask him what he felt frustrated with, so we could “problem solve”. He assures me he was just joking. OK, fine.

We start off practice discussing our last game. I let the team do the talking as much as possible. They hit all of the major points focusing more on offense, which is fine. They talk about what a good job we did spreading the ball around and finding good shots. Also, how we kept the floor well spaced. All true. As we start this post game ritual, Tom is once again playing the “I sucked” card. I was not so happy that when I tried to talk to him privately he claimed nothing was wrong and then with the whole team, it was understood that Tom was going to say this. I talked to him after practice about it and he once again denies that it was anything. My read of his body language and tone state that he really was upset with himself, but clearly he doesn’t want to talk to me about it.

When we get to the “things to improve on” part of our game discussion they come up blank, so I have to fill it in. We do a little demonstration of how not to foul someone when they’re shooting. The one area that they had talked about, and I completely agreed with, was that we didn’t do such a good job of playing help defense. We’ll practice that more on Friday as I think our defensive focus for Sunday’s game will be communication.

Last night, after practice, I even thought of a way to involve our bench more along with this theme. We’ll have a “contest”. Every time a player communicates on defense, they will get a point, when a player on the bench “hears” the communication. Players on the bench who hear the communication will get a “listen point”. Goal is to get as many listen and communication points as possible.

After we finished talking about the game, I go over a couple of administrative issues. First, I let them know that I’ve decided we won’t learn a full court press. I explain that running a good full court press is hard and since we’re having enough problems with our in bounds play, learning a full court press just isn’t worth the time. I point out that we’ll continue to do our trailer “loose press” and our full court man to man as both have been working. Basically we’ll have three set plays, for the time being: an inbounds, our “zone buster”, and a press break. I haven’t introduced the press break yet. I can’t decide if I should introduce it Friday, in case MP2 runs a good press, as that way they’d have some idea of what to do, or just concede that it’s unlikely any 4th grade team is going to run a good press and continue to wing it, while starting to teach it next week.

The last area I wanted to touch on was playing time. I start off by reminding the players that since this is a travel team they are promised zero minutes of playing time. Faces fall. Jack M pipes in, “It even said that in bold on the sheet” (it didn’t, but that’s ok). Jack was one of the prime reasons I was giving this speech. However, I think his attitude had changed quite a bit from yesterday’s game until last night. A big reason for this is that he had a cousin on the other team. When I has asked him, earlier during the game discussion, which one was his cousin he said, “The short one that was benched almost the whole time.” We all laughed, but I actually knew who he meant right away. I think that seeing how the grass isn’t greener on the side was a good reminder for him.

I quickly say that I do my best to get everyone at least seven minutes of game time, which is a full quarter. Dante, bless his upbeat heart, points out that is a lot of time. So, I continue, “If you’re on the bench and you ask me if you’re going back in, I will simply state, I don’t know. Ask me two or three times and the answer will be ‘no.’ “ I conclude the game time speech with a reminder that unless I tell you you’re coming out because of something you did on the court, just assume that it’s because I am keeping up our rotation. I point out how I sent a sub in for Jack P at one point right after he scored a great basket. Jack M, once again, said how he’d scored a basket and was taken out. So at least with Jack M it seems like my mission of reassuring him worked, though even if I hadn’t said anything it sounds like it would have worked.

While this was going on, which took about 5 minutes for the post game discussion, and 5 minutes for the foul discussion/press announcement/playing time comment, I was very strict about paying attention and talking as a team. Several of the players ended up doing push-ups when their attention wandered or they tried having a side conversation. We are facing what I expect to be a higher quality team than we’ve seen so far on Sunday and I had warned them yesterday practices this week would be no nonsense.

We then went into our Princeton continuous motion. We walked through it the first time since I knew they’d have forgotten how to do it. And sure enough they had. However, the whole thing was just a disaster whenever we tried to run it at game speed. The passes were errant people weren’t paying attention and it was bad news. So rather than continue with this, I decided we’d stop. I finally had remembered to write down on my practice plan to have them do free throws after our continuous motion, but no one was tired so I announced a quick game of golf, to tire them out. We then shot our free throws. And basically everyone committed a lane violation. I guess we’re going to have to practice that part on Friday. I had admittedly not practice free throws much, because the shot is outside the range of many of our players and really a free throw is more like a “free miss” at this point. However, whether or not they make the shot, shooter lane violations are stupid and so we can spend a little time on Friday working on that.

After a short water break we were ready to practice our in bounds play. Before we start, I announce that I’ve been very disappointed with how they’ve run the play. I tell them that in the first game we got lucky with the play, and last game the they didn’t even try and contest the in bounds (they just setup in their zone. I thought it was amazingly dumb, frankly and speaks to how that was not a well coached team. I am no coaching genius, but I’d like to think that if I’d had that group of players we’d have played a lot better than they played). I announce that starting with Friday’s game players who fail to properly execute the inbounds play WILL be removed from the game. I sincerely hope we don’t massively fail to run it, since having to sub out 4 or 5 players could lead to some combinations on the court I don’t really want. However, if they don’t run the play I will do it, since I feel we’ve practiced it enough that they should be able to somewhat run it.

Following the inbounds play we then practice our screens. I quickly setup the expectation that even when you weren’t running it you should be paying attention, so I didn’t have to keep correcting the same mistakes again and again. Of course, I did end up having to correct the same mistakes again and again, anyway, but when I would quiz the players who were out about what was going right and wrong they got much better about analyzing the play, which is good. They’re doing a better job of coming off the picks. However, we still have a lot of players leaving before the pick has been set, which is a no-no. Working on getting the timing down will continue to be a focus.

Following the screens, we did a new game, “Basketball Scavenger Hunt”. I gave them a list of 10 items which they needed to complete and divided them into two teams. The ten items on each list were

1. Each member of the team shows coach an animal claw

2. Dribble around the court once with your right hand (must be out of bounds THE WHOLE TIME)

3. Each member of the team makes 2 free throws (each player may only shoot 2 free throws before going to the end of the line)

4. Each player of the team does 10 “high grabs” with 2 different people on the team

5. Have coach time you for 30 seconds of bunny hops

6. The team makes 10 1 foot shots (the team may only form 2 lines). Count out loud each made shot

7. Dribble around the court once with your left hand (must be out of bounds THE WHOLE TIME)

8. Each player must make a right handed and left handed lay-up (may only have one person shooting at a time)

9. Each player of the team shows coach a correct pivot left and pivot right

10. Have coach time you for 15 seconds each of side wrist flick, shooting wrist flick, and dribbling wrist flick

This went well. I will definitely be doing this activity again, though I will likely vary up the order of the lists since, despite my telling them they didn’t have to, both teams did the lists in order.

Our last activity was going over our zone break offense. This went about as well as I would expect for our second time going through it. It’s certainly not really ready for serious use in a game yet, but we’ll get there.

We ended with suicides. I had been quite liberal in handing out both suicides and permissions. Several players were saved from serious running since their teams won either Golf or the Scavenger Hunt, which earned them a permission.

I felt like I had a good practice plan going into practice and that overall it was a productive practice. Hopefully we can keep the good work up.

Look for a post tomorrow or Thursday with an update on how the other teams in the league are doing. Not to spoil the surprise, or anything, but the news is good.

[Barkeep49]

It’s interesting to see how my impressions have stayed the same or changed since the tryouts.

For instance, I successfully nailed Brian (who I had spelled Bryan) as a kid with a bit of an attitude after the first tryouts. So far this seems accurate. I also predicted I would need to use Tom as a guard/forward simultaneously and this too has proven correct, however I proved to be overly pessimistic about how successful this would be . I thought more highly of Noah during tryouts than I do now. I also foresaw some of the problems with Gordie that have cropped up (as I’d completely forgotten how borderline he was in making the team). Fortunately, I made the right call there as Gordie has not really been a problem even if there have been problems (if that makes any sense).

I so foresaw the idea we’d only have 7 players at some game. Of course I thought it would be in February. Does that mean in February we’re going to end up with 5 or 6? Please let that not be true.

I had an opinion of Jack M that more closely resembles how I feel he plays during games than how he practices. Seems like he’s a kid who really needs stress to play as well as he can.

I did not work on zone busting as early as I had originally planned to.

I completely conflated Gordie and Noah in my mind at the time, though reading back on it I was able to put the right name to the right kid.

I haven’t done as good of a job of reinforcing some of the skills we did that first week through-out the season. Working on the proper grip, for instance, or doing the jumps, or wrist flexes, are all activities I should do for 30 seconds here or there. That’s one reason for the scavenger hunt, which was a successful solution to this problem.

I also now know the results of all of the weekend’s games. First, HP won two games on Sunday, including one against a team that had won the previous week. I thought they were a fairly good team, and they showed it, as playing two games on one day is not an easy feat. MP1 defeated MP2. MP2 is our next opponent and has scored more points then our previous two opponents. I really anticipate it should be a good game. If we can win that by a decisive margin of victory I am going to start to believe we have something special. In particular, I’m looking forward to seeing how our defense does. It was “easy” to defend against NF2 and HP, neither of whom have shown that they score points (HP won its game 19-18 and 19-13, while NF2 had only scored 8 points the previous game). If we can limit MP2’s points, as they have scored 40 and 24 in their first two games, I will grow very encouraged about our prospects.

[wade moore]

Still a great read!

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by wade moore

Still a great read!

I appreciate that a lot, wade. This gives me a chance to ask for some feedback.

I noticed I had a lot more comments during baseball than during basketball, though my readership is up (I get about 10 hits a post, versus 8). I've been trying to figure out why that is, as I love comments. I'd narrowed it down to:
1. We're winning here, versus losing in baseball. There were more comments there because people were being supportive, which I certainly needed
2. It's not as interesting (I've ruled this out, since as noted more people seem to be reading this and I appreciate it. I really love coaching and so being able to share it with others is a joy)
3. There's something about basketball, or how I write about basketball, that makes there less to comment on.

So thank you to Wade, but just let me remind everyone that I'm always looking for suggestions either about my coaching or writing. But besides a thank you to a wade, thank you to everyone who takes the time to read this. I really do appreciate it, even if you never post a thing in the thread.

[Izulde]

I think the fact that you're currently winning has a large part to do with it and a lot of the problem areas, you seem to be addressing pretty well.

One question I have. Is Brian challenging you less or is he at least taking your reactions to them any better?

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by Izulde

One question I have. Is Brian challenging you less or is he at least taking your reactions to them any better?

It's a learning curve. I would say Monday's practice was good, though, for instance, when he was assigned 10 push-ups at one point for not listening he only did five and stopped. Since he was only in my peripheral vision I think he was amazed that I noticed and made him do 10, for real. So there's that. On the other hand, when we were coming in he was thoughtful enough to hold the door open for me, which is NOT your typical 4th grade skill. I guess it's a little too soon to tell since I've had so much less contact with him than all the other players. Hopefully, in a month, the issue will have mostly resolved itself.

[path12]

Just found this, great job! I'll be following along.

[wade moore]

Originally Posted by Izulde

I think the fact that you're currently winning has a large part to do with it and a lot of the problem areas, you seem to be addressing pretty well.

One question I have. Is Brian challenging you less or is he at least taking your reactions to them any better?

Yeah.. not just winning, but the general lack of any form of conflict compared to baseball for us to comment/reinforce/suggest on.. in baseball you had the issues with the boss-lady, you had shady other coaches, you had some behavior problems, you had trouble winning, you had some concerns with steve from time to time, etc...

Here you're winning, you're very confidant in what you're doing, and have not had any serious issues with scheduling, etc.

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by wade moore

Yeah.. not just winning, but the general lack of any form of conflict compared to baseball for us to comment/reinforce/suggest on.. in baseball you had the issues with the boss-lady, you had shady other coaches, you had some behavior problems, you had trouble winning, you had some concerns with steve from time to time, etc...

Here you're winning, you're very confidant in what you're doing, and have not had any serious issues with scheduling, etc.

You have an excellent memory Wade. Steve, and I were at a movie on Tuesday and I was reminded of some of the incidents I’d completely forgotten. Like the time they completely forgot to unlock the equipment for us. It was only one of several things that indeed go wrong, as you so astutley pointed out.

This is in complete contrast to the professional way my park district boss, Emily, handles things. She has been wonderful to work for and with. In fact, this week I received a couple of emails from her. The first was a message stating that the local JCC team wished to scrimmage with us. I called up the number and it turns out that they normally practice on Mondays as well, so it was no problem setting up a couple of scrimmages. We are going to be doing one on the 18th and another in February. There’s going to be a ref there, so perhaps rather than scrimmage, exhibition game is a better term. While I don’t really know the quality of their teams, from what I know in general about JCC sports I feel like we should be a better team. Regardless I am excited about two more games, since we play so few games relative to practices in basketball. Not that I don’t love practices, but some things are best taught by experiencing them at a game, or at least through a game the need to practice certain areas is reinforced.

She also gave me the dates for this year’s HP Basketball Tourney, and asked if I wanted our team to participate. This is traditionally a tourney that our travel teams participate in and I am excited about participating in it this year. More importantly, based on how we do against MP2, I’m seriously thinking of entering us in the “A” bracket. I’m worried about the fact that we’ll become complacent. If we keep winning games by 20 points, motivation becomes harder and it would be a shame not to reach our full potential because our competition wasn’t up to snuff. So, if we do well against MP I think I’ll enter us in the A bracket. I think struggling, even losing by a lot against some better teams, could be a far more valuable experience for us come mid to end of January. Of course if MP2 hands us our rears tomorrow, I think it’ll bring us back down in a hurry.

Yesterday’s practice in basketball terms was actually quite good. They understand the rotation of the zone buster offense pretty well. We need to work on improvising when there’s an actual defense (for instance making sure the ball goes into the high post), but they are mostly understanding the rotations necessary. Interestingly, Scott had the biggest problem and as a post player he’s got the easiest job of anyone. The 4 and the 5 in the offense basically just go to either the elbow (high post) or the low post. When the ball switches sides of the court they switch from the high to the low post (or vice versa). Scott simply didn’t know when to switch. Otherwise, they ran it fairly well. In particular Jack M did a nice job with doing what he needed to do. I hadn’t thought we’d be quite ready to run this offense in the game on Sunday, but I think it might be worth a shot, if they play some zone.

Speaking of zone I was asked, again, if we were going to play any zone. I then explained my philosophy of why man to man for 4th graders is the right thing for them in the long run. I used the word philosophy in my explanation and then had to explain what philosophy meant. It was a good moment for their intellectual growth, as human beings, let alone basketball players since I bet almost all of them remember what philosophy will mean.

We also did a substantially better job in setting our screens. A quick tangent, that will relate back to this. Before our practices now on Fridays, Gordie’s house league team is going to be practicing. As I was peeking in, there was one player who was amazing. He was, first of all, bigger than perhaps 2/3 of our team. And he just moved like a basketball player, shot like a basketball player. I saw him for about 3 minutes and it was clear that he could easily contend for a starting position on our team. So I turn to Jack M, who is waiting with me at that point, and ask him what grade this kid is in. Actually, I think I asked something more along the lines of “Is he in 4th grade?” Because if that kid was in 4th grade and not on the team, I was going to be very sad. However, it turns out that he was in 3rd grade. That kid could be real special next year. Anyhow, they were doing some drill and this kid was setting PERFECT screens and his teammates, because they didn’t know what to do with the ball (one kid, for instance would always forget to dribble before he shot), were actually using the screens. So, before we started our screen practice I stated how I saw the Gordie’s house league team do a better job of setting screens, because the person receiving the screen didn’t move too soon, than we had done. This seemed to get them motivated and we did a much better job of setting and taking the screen. What we should do after the screen? A work in progress. But again I was happy with what I saw.

The last basketball thing we did was practice a half-court 3-2 drill. The way it works is offensive and defensive players alternate on the baseline. The player in the center has the ball. They offensive and the defense runs out to half court and then plays 3 on 2. Our offense did well, as usual. If anything they did better than when we normally run this in practice. It seemed like a good chance to start to talk about defending the fast break, which we hadn’t spent much time on. So I thought that went well.

But that’s all we did. At minimum we should have been able to have had time to practice our in bounds drill. I had planned 15 minutes of 3 on 3 at the end of practice. However, they were OFF THE WALL. Our beginning of practice talk, which ought to have taken 2 or 3 minutes tops (all that it was, was a quick reminder that MP2 was a good team, win or lose we keep our heads held high if we gave our all and displayed good sportsmanship, to wear their blue jerseys, and to announce our two exhibition games) took forever. Finally I lost patience and we ran a suicide. After that they were too tired to say much of anything. I finished quickly with what I needed to say and we went into our continuous motion drill. And the suicide before the continuous motion drill? A killer. Noah and Brian continued their inability to jog for 10 minutes, even slowly. However, at times Jack M and Scott needed to be prodded as well, which isn’t typical. Lucas, Jack M, Dante, and David all did well, which wasn’t too surprising as I’d have pegged them as having had the most endurance.

The talking didn’t improve much. I don’t want to go to the suicide well too often, as it could just lose some of its effectiveness. I think the talking was partly because it was Friday. But again, as I alluded to earlier, I think a sense of confidence is prevalent throughout the team. Confidence I like. However, I am concerned that it could turn into over confidence. So if we have another practice were a good chunk of instruction time is wasted, I’m going to have to rethink some things. I let the team know I was disappointed in how we’d practiced, and by the end of practice they mostly had pulled it together, so that was good. However, it was a shame to have so much good basketball be overshadowed by so much other stuff.

As for starters for tomorrow’s game, I’m torn. The thing is that I don’t want to always start Jack M. I would, for instance, like to use David as our starting point guard. I’ve discussed Jack M’s limitations at other positions before so I won’t repeat them again. However, to balance his ego I need to show that starters will not be fixed before I sit him, so he realizes it’s just part of the team and not a criticism of him. So he’s starting. Our best player should start most of our games, so David is going to start. Scott was our MVP last game, and I think the previous game MVP should always start, so he’s starting.

So the question is who else do I want to start? Do I choose one other from the remaining three of our best six of Tom, Dante, and Jack P and one from the remaining four? Or do I rotate in two players?

I’m really unsure what I want to do with the starting lineup for tomorrow, beyond the three already mentioned. I think I want to start Jack P, as he’s kind of gotten the short shift, to a certain extent, in playing time in the first two games.

Looking at our remaining four players we have Brian, Lucas, Noah and Gordie.

Brian is catching up to speed quickly, but I don’t think he has several of the concepts down simply because we haven’t, for instance, run our set offense with him. In fact we haven’t practiced our set offense in a while so it’s likely time to do some review and refinement on that. Anyway, I’m not quite ready to start Brian. Especially after he tells me that he’s one of the slowest members of the team when we were running our suicide and should get the Dante +5 seconds. Perhaps he is one of the slowest members at the moment, but when I selected the team he was not one of the slowest members. In fact he was one of the quickest. No doubt his injury has slowed him down, but I don’t feel particularly inclined to cut him a break here as coddling him won’t, get him back into condition. Of course there is the fear that he rushed back before he was fully healed and is playing hurt. However, he hasn’t shown many signs of tentativeness or whatever so I don’t think that is it. So no coddling for Brian, but also no start at the moment.

Lucas is a great kid. He actually had a really good practice too and so it seems like it might be time to reward him with a start. With him being exclusively the 4 that makes it hard to get everyone into a good slot on offense. For instance, with this five only David (and Jack M) have practiced any time at 2. So David would have to go there. Scott could be a 3, but since he too has spent more time at 4, and struggled in our zone buster at that, I’m weary of making him the 3. Jack P is actually perhaps our best 3, or just slightly worse than David, however he’d need to be center in this grouping since there would be no Dante. Alternatively, I could start Lucas at center. That allows Jack to play 3 and Scott to play 4, both their best positions. But Lucas would be a little lost as center since I’ve been focusing him so heavily on the 4, for both offense and defense. Seems silly to reward a kid for hard work, only to put him in a position where you don’t think you’re giving him particularly good chances of success.

So an argument could be made for Noah. He’d fit perfectly in as a 2, which would allow David to be the 5, Scott the 4, and Jack P the 3, which I feel is a good grouping. He hasn’t started a game yet. The problem is that he was one of the most distracted kids at practice. So I definitely don’t want to even tacitly reward bad behavior.

Finally there is Gordie. Gordie can play the 2, no doubt. His effort was OK, not great not terrible, though his actual skills were good. However, I’d really rather start Lucas, considering his effort was good, he displayed some of the best basketball I’d seen, and Gordie’s already started where as Lucas has not.

As often happens what was a jumble in my mind has become clearer as I write out this blog. It seems as though we have a two way race between Lucas and Gordie.

Last game I was confident. I am now almost as nervous as I was before our game against HP. I really think there are 3 teams, us and the two MPs, who are a cut above everyone else. The question is where do we fall with-in that 3 way race? I hope the answer is at the top, and after tomorrow I will be one step closer to knowing the answer.

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by path12

Just found this, great job! I'll be following along.

Thanks. It's great to have another reader.

[Barkeep49]

Spartans vs. MP2
Well yesterday was going to be where the rubber met the road. We were going to face MP2. Their park district facility was HUGE and was very nice. We were playing on one of their gyms. When I got there some kids soccer team was finishing their practice. They were supposed to be done by 11:30, but didn’t end up finishing until 11:50, which was fine. The first thing we did once we got the court was to run through our inbounds place, with no defense, once with everybody (so in two groups). They ran the play well so that was good.

As we did our lay-up lines I realized just what awful form we have while shooting lay-ups. It’s no surprise we can’t make them in a game when we can’t really shoot them. And thinking back on it, I realized that we never did spend time on them in practice. I think it’s going to be layup boot camp this week at practice. Our poor layups continued in the game with Dante missing three easy layups and Jack M missing many an easy layup. In fact Jack M took 9 shots during the game and made ZERO of them.

MP2 is a big team compared to us. In fact their center is HUGE for a 4th grader. With Dante not starting I worry about his ability to just absolutely dominate us. Fortunately, he turns out to be a bit of an oaf and is pretty much a non-factor while in the game.

The game begins. I decided to give Lucas the start so we had a starting lineup of Lucas at 5, Scott at the 4, Jack P at 3, David at 2, Jack M at 1. As is usual we get off to a slow start. We also have trouble matching up. This would be a problem that would plague us throughout the game. I think that one of the reasons for this is that the numbers on the front of their jerseys were small and on the shoulder. This made it harder when I told some players to switch, which I did more than in other games, and when they subbed as such. It wasn’t a huge problem, but it was certainly an issue.

Anyhow, right off the bat it becomes clear from their first possession that they have a PG, #3, who is UNBELIEVABLY fast. He is also short. In fact he might have been shorter than all of the players on our team, and let’s not forget we’re a short team. After that first possession, which resulted in a lay-up, I quickly assign David to guard him. Our first possession down, we, without running our zone breaker, quickly destroy their 2-3. Unfortunately, we take 3 good, open, shots, and fail to convert any of them before they get a rebound.

At first, it looks like we’re going to be in real trouble. They have guys who can make outside shots. They have this killer point guard. They run a good play, with a couple of variations. However, as the first quarter goes on we slowly pull ahead. And there is one reason for it: David. When I told my dad after our last game that he was our best player, my Dad was somewhat dumb founded. And I don’t blame him. In the NF2 game David didn’t really do much of anything. This game, however, he just took over. Besides shutting down #3, he also created numerous fast break opportunities. He ended the game with 17 points, 7 rebounds, and 5 steals in 22 minutes of play.

When the second quarter starts David is exhausted and so I take him out for a breather. I assign Jack P to guard #3 and he does a nice job. Because of the speed of their team, I decide we will not try and press them at all. They do come out with a press. We struggle at first with it, almost to the point where I was going to call a time-out, but then things start to click for us and we are able to break it. Also, I’m proud that we forced them to switch to man to man during this quarter as we’d been getting so many good shots against their zone.

When the half comes we are comfortably ahead, by about 7, but the intensity of a game would suggest a much closer score (remembering that 7 is a lot of points for 4th graders). At half I diagram the play that they have been running. The play is quite simply a series of picks. Something must have clicked because in the 3rd quarter we held them to only 2 points. It was our best defensive effort of the season. We go up by about 14. Their best shooter, #12, was clearly frustrated by our defense. So frustrated he started crying. Why the coaches kept a player in the game who was crying is beyond me. Sub out the kid, let him compose himself and then send him back out on the court. His frustration almost caused an injury when he stupidly crashed into Brian chasing a ball at the end of the 3rd quarter.

When the 4th quarter comes we are on the verge of being able to dominate the game. I send out a slightly weaker unit to start the 4th quarter. However, their press, which was pretty good in the second, is now very good. It also doesn’t help that we can’t make any of our lay-ups. The momentum seems to be swinging back in their favor. However, we are able to reassert ourselves and though it gets to with-in 9 that is as close as it gets. We end the game with a solid victory. I wish I could tell you the final score, but I forgot that since it was an away game our book wasn’t being used and I needed to write down the final score. We won by about 11.

Overall, it was a good performance. The final score, whatever it may be, does not indicate how close a game it felt. Gordie’s step dad said as much as we left the gym, so I clearly was not the only person who felt that way. However, the fact that we won by as we did, against what is clearly one of the better teams in the conference, does give me concern that our cockiness will only become more of a problem. I also feel a little bad for MP2. They just lost two games in a row, both by good margins, and so they are going to be sitting at 1-2 despite being one of the best teams in the conference.

Taking a look at our players:

Brian – He played very well. Well enough to most likely earn a start in our next game. He found good shots, made a good percentage of them. He also played pretty good defense.

Dante – Dante had an off game. He was a non-presence. He played 19.5 minutes and only had 2 rebounds. Now granted he was playing against some big guys, but against NF2 he was rebounding against a kid bigger than him and he still came up with the boards.

David – As discussed above he was our game MVP. It’s been nice how we’ve had a different player be our MVP for each game, without it even being forced. I’d really like each of the players to be named game MVP at least once during the course of the season, though clearly, as in baseball, some of them are going to be more stretches than others. David will likely sit a lot against NF, our next opponent, as a way of making sure other kids get their chances.

Gordie – Gordie only saw 6 minutes of playing time. I do feel bad as I knew he hadn’t played a whole bunch but I thought he’d played more than that. I think I’m going to start him as well in our next game as a sort of “make-up”.

Jack M – Jack M kept finding good shots, as discussed, he just couldn’t make them. In fact at the end of the game, he kept getting fouled and actually went to the free throw line 10 times. He shot 4 of 10 from the line, which given his size and age, is a pretty good performance. These refs didn’t call lane violations so Jack got lucky there as he had quite a few of them.

Jack P – This was also not Jack’s best game. I believe I’ve mentioned before how I use something called Win Score to measure a player’s efficiency. The goal is to get above .100/minute. Jack, in the two games we’ve kept stats, has had a negative score. I feel like this doesn’t capture the good stuff he does on the court, but does temper some of my enthusiasm for him. He did limit his playing time by getting into repeated foul trouble.

Lucas – Lucas played well. He was actually open quite a bit. However, many times when he was open he wasn’t ready for the ball, even if he was on the strong side. We’re going to work on remembering that feeding the ball into the post is one of our offensive rules. If Lucas continues to play well, and Dante does not, it will lead to an unexpected change of playing times.

Noah – Noah made his first basket of the season, meaning all of our players have now scored, which is nice. He looked particularly lost in breaking the press, which considering we haven’t really practiced breaking the press isn’t his fault.

Scott – Had a solid performance again. It’s great that he can guard guys so much bigger than he. I thought he’d played a lot and was surprised to see he had “only” played about 18 minutes (I’d have thought it was in the 20s).

Tom – In the 3rd and 4th quarter he was WIDE open repeatedly and Jack M and Brian just didn’t get the ball to him. It was frustrating for me, and no doubt frustrating for Tom.

So this game left little doubt that we’re a good team. I am going to be emailing Emily shortly letting her know we wish to play in the A bracket of the HP tourney. It is exciting and nerve wracking to think that the biggest challenge we have right now is over confidence.

[cschex]

Congrats on the win. I've been enjoying this dynasty a lot. I have some experience coaching youth baseball, but have always wanted to try my hand at basketball. You're quite the inspiration, I must say.

[wade moore]

w00t, rack up another W!

[path12]

You mention the giant 4th grader on the other team. It's been a lonnnnng time since I've been around grade school kids, so how tall are we talking?

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by cschex

Congrats on the win. I've been enjoying this dynasty a lot. I have some experience coaching youth baseball, but have always wanted to try my hand at basketball. You're quite the inspiration, I must say.

Thanks for the kind words, though I do think inspiration might be over stating things just a bit. I've coached youth baseball as well and basketball certainly has a different feel.

Originally Posted by path12

You mention the giant 4th grader on the other team. It's been a lonnnnng time since I've been around grade school kids, so how tall are we talking?

Good question and I'm not really sure myself. I would guess somewhere between 5" and 5"3'. Wish I had a better answer for you.

Monday December 11 Practice Report
It took me FOREVER to get out school yesterday. I do most of my work in the morning, before school starts and so my administrators have no problems that 5 minutes after the bell rings I’m normally out of there. Today however for various reasons it takes me an extra half hour to get out of there. That’s normally a half hour I spend to use getting ready for practice. I grab some McDonalds as I drive home which saves me some time I normally spend eating. And fortunately I had a good idea of what I wanted to do and everything sort of clicks together.

I haven’t spent a lot of time discussing how I get ready for practice, so this seems like a good opportunity to do so. When I got this job I went and purchased about a half dozen of the best books I could find on coaching basketball, and in particular youth basketball. A couple of them are more drills/game guides while the rest take a more general overview of the game. There are also a couple of websites I will consult from time to time on specific matters. So I generally think of what I want to do in a practice and then look in the various books or books to see if they have any suggestions on either a drill/activity or a methodology. So, for instance, I wished to do a “feed the ball into the post” activity since we had times where a post player was open and we didn’t feed it in there. I look through all of the materials, and come up empty. On the other hand, I also wanted to work on layups. For any sort of fundamentals work, I always turn to The Basketball Coach’s Bible by Sidney Goldstein as he’s better than anyone else I’ve read at really breaking down everything, from shooting, to dribbling, to holding the ball even, into its basics. I jotted down a few reminders to myself on what Goldstein suggests are the steps to make sure I teach it the same way he does.

I also knew that as part of the practice we’d talk about the last game, with a couple of points I wanted to make sure were made, so those want on my practice notes, and that I wanted to practice our Zone Buster. If we needed something to fill time I had our screening drill in reserve. I also try to include one or two games a practice and this time I went with the 3 on 3 (or was considering doing 4 on 4) “no excuses” drill where if your guy scores on you then you come out and a new player goes in, so you have complete mismatches on the court.

The last part was getting the doggie bag ready. At some point I need to give them the zone break we’re going to use, but I haven’t diagrammed that yet so I decided that they could practice their lay-ups, as what we were going to be doing involved no shooting, and be expected to know their positions in our zone breaker.

And we were ready to go, and with time to spare. This was one of the easier practices to put together, and so that was good. As I’m driving over, I realize that I always start the last game’s MVP, that’d be David. Lucas really played well as a starter and deserves another chance, so that’s another. I don’t want to bench Dante as a starter two games in a row and to give him a chance to revert to form, I had decided to start Gordie as a makeup for giving him only six minutes last game. Brian also played well in his minutes. So that’s our stating five, assuming none of them does anything to really mess that up.

Get to practice and get to see a teacher who I used to work with who I really liked, that was good. Right as we’re about to begin practice Gordie comes up to me and asks how he could get more playing time. I tell him it’s an excellent question and we should talk about it after practice.

I had planned on doing our continuous motion drill first, to tire them up just a bit before we did our post-game analysis, but there was a junior high game in the gym before us and they were still unsetting up the gym from that when practice began, so we sat down and did our post game talk. The kids, as usual, did a good job of pointing out the things we did well. They weren’t quite as astute, however, as normal on the areas where we needed to improve. The main thing we talked about there was looking into the post. A demonstration was given on how to do this and how to swing the ball quickly to find open people on the perimeter.

We then did our continuous motion. Following continuous motion we did a simple pass into the post drill. It was done more to reinforce the importance of looking into the post than anything. It went fairly well. A great moment was when Gordie was defending Dante and completely stuffed him.

We then went into our Zone Breaker offense. This went terribly. First of all whowever was on defense cheated since they knew where the passes were going to be going. Second of all, our team doesn’t really understand how to play zone defense so they kind of fall into man to man. This made it hard to practice our zone breaker. Even when I told the defense to do nothing it only went so-so. I think it’s a good play and we’re going to keep at it, but I’m at a bit of a loss how to make the defense part better. I don’t really want to teach them how to play zone and I have no idea how to stop them from cheating.

The zone breaker took MUCH longer than anticipated because of all the problems we had. Also we ran a suicide in the middle because when I blew the whistle people were not stopping play. So rather than running the 3 on 3 drill as planned we played a game of golf. Which went on FOREVER. Our team was shooting the lights out. It was pretty cool. Anyhow we finally finished. We ran our suicides and practice was over.

So Gordie comes up to me and we start discussing what he could do to get more playing time. I talk to him about shot selection and not letting men by him on defense. But I didn’t really talk to him about the biggest problem: he’s small and panics when he gets double teamed. I’m going to follow up with him on Friday. As Gordie and I were talking the coach of the team coming into practice tells me how Gordie must have scored “40 or 50” against him on Sunday. This is hardly surprising to me. Lucas’s father told me how Lucas, who I hadn’t realized was also on a house league team, accomplished something similar.

And so that was our practice. It was a pretty good practice, though the frustration with the zone breaker is puzzling me.

[Barkeep49]

So going into practice I knew it was going to be a smaller group than usual. Last week Lucas’s father had told me that they had unbelievable seats for the Bulls game and would be unable to make it. I also got an email during the day letting me know that Jack P would not be making it since he had the stomach flu.

When I get to practice first I find that the H’s are already there. And I soon see that Jack M has been drafted by the house league team and is in there doing some drill with the team. I also find out that the kid who so wow’ed me last week is actually in 6th grade and has a younger brother who is actually on Gordie’s team. Kind of disappointing as if I were coaching the 4th grade next year I don’t have this uber-stud to look forward to. But it does explain how he could come and start for my team.

Their practice comes to an end. For maybe 3 possessions in a row the game looked something like this: Gordie gets the ball and blows by all the defenders and scores a basket. Jack then gets the ball and does the same. This was better, however, than the 6th grader who decided to repeatedly steal the ball from 4th graders, and he wasn’t even doing it from Jack and Gordie, who at least deserved that kind of treatment. The range of skills on a house league team is so great. And it’s not quite like in baseball where the damage one start player is limited to the 2 innings of strikes or homerun he hits every 9 or 10 batters. A star player can be a huge difference every single moment on the court. It’s why basketball is so much more a team game than baseball.

Our practice starts a little late since I have to not only raise the baskets from their 8 feet, or even 7.5 feet, to 10 feet, but there’s also a rope wall that is hanging so low as to be an impediment. I manage to jury-rig a solution to that problem. We start practice at 6:05 and Dante is still not there. I give a quick introduction to our practice and right as we are about to start our continuous motion Dante arrives. The return of our doggie bags was ABYSMAL. I’m thinking if that keeps up we’ll do an early practice suicide for those who don’t bring the card to just reinforce the causation.

As we’re doing our continuous motion, Jack M is clearly lagging. I think he played a bit too hard in the scrimmage before. I give him a break as it’s understandable. However, he gets credit this once. Just as we’re about to start the continuous motion drill, Brian tells me that he “pulled his groin” during gym. Let’s just say that this injury will prove to effect him at irregular times during practice. I do tell him he can take the drill “slowly”. Basically he doesn’t like this drill. Noah, who also always struggles with the drill, is at least clever enough to ask, nay plead, for Princeton, since that doesn’t require quite as much running. One change we did was at the end of continuous motion I let them show me “cool” passes. Saw things like no look behind the back, jump and through the legs, and some other neat things. The players enjoyed that variation. It’ll come back as an occasional treat.

I forget to have them do their two free throws after I call a water break. We then go into our screening drill. The second time through I modify it to a game of 2-on-2. Tom continues to be a model of paying attention when out. Dante and Lucas also do good job here. Scott’s, Gordie’s, and Jack P’s performances are mixed. In that not so good category are Noah, Brian, David, and Jack M. The focus of this practice, I stated, was fakes. So I would often ask one of the players who was out how many fakes there were.

Next we did our transition drill, where they line up on the free throw line extended. We started with 3 on 3 and Jack P and Brian were the two I chose to sit out. They decided to take this opportunity to go to sleep. Brian complained for the millionth time how tired he was. He’d been complaining the whole practice and I started to lose my patience. During this drill David was far less on top of things than he normally is. I reminded the team how we’d been doing a good job of spacing the court on a fast break, and discussed a little more how to defend the fast break. The drill went well and at the end of it I had the team shoot two free throws.

We then came back in and played a game of golf and again we shot two free throws. There can be no doubt at this point that they have learned pretty well how to shoot from the elbows as a much higher percentage of shots go in than before and the games are taking longer to play since a high percentage of missed shots are rebounded. I think it might be time to play a new shooting game. After golf we did two more free throws. It seemed like an awful lot of our free throws were made during practice. I didn’t monitor this closely enough to see if there was any cheating going on, whether in the shooting or in the recording of how many made shots they had.

We then did our 3 on 3 “no excuses” drill where you play 3 on 3 and if your man scores on you than you sit out. Of particular note from this: Jack M has a deadly drive. It seemed like his man was constantly being the one who was sitting out after Jack drove right by him. At one point there was a long time without anyone scoring. Scott decided to let his man have a ridiculously open lay-up so someone would sit out. I then had him skip his turn to go back in the first time to emphasize we play defense 100% of the time. We’re also going to have to watch to make sure that our offense doesn’t become the Jack/David show. David made an observation of how Tom is so happy go lucky (he used slightly different words but not by much) in the classroom and he’s so depressing at practice. This after Tom admitted that it was really his fault that someone else’s man scored and so he came out of the game. I think of Tom as a pretty easy going guy so it’s interesting to have heard David’s observations, as the 4th grade view of the world is always interesting.

We then ran our suicides. I ended the 3 on 3 game a little earlier than I probably had to and rather than do the “what did you notice that everyone did well” bit, because I didn’t think about it, I just ended practice 5 minutes early. As practice ends I pull Brian to the side. His nonstop griping continued throughout practice and his effort in everything was not 100%. I explained to him that I had planned on starting him, but after his practice and complaining I would not be. In retrospect I am not sure if the better idea wouldn’t have been to state “you’re pretty close to earning a start, however practices like this don’t help.” Still gets the message across, but isn’t quite as in your face. Brian didn’t take the news well, which was expected. If looks could kill, I’d have been dead thanks to all the daggers his eyes shot at me. His caretaker asked me what happened, but there were lots of kids around and so I just said that she could ask him. A minute or two later I had a chance to get her by herself and explained what had happened. She was not exactly surprised. She was glad to hear it though, which even if it wasn’t a parent it was nice to have had the support.

I think Scott will be getting the nod in Brian’s place so we’ll go out with a lineup of David, Gordie, Scott, Lucas, Dante. Hopefully it’ll be another easy victory and everyone can get some quality playing time.

[Barkeep49]

Spartans vs. NF1
Another day, another victory. There were a few hiccups. Like the fact that Northfield had a 1:45 start time. We ended up starting closer to 1:30 and it all worked out. When I announced that Scott would be playing the 3, he freaked. I guess he didn’t feel capable of playing a wing in our offense. It got to the point where I said “You can play the three, but if you really insist you can’t then I have to start someone else.” And so Jack P got the nod. So we go out with a starting five of David, Dante, Lucas, Jack P, and Gordie.

It’s clear from the start that we’re a substantially better team. The other coach used 3 of his 5 timeouts in the first quarter, and I hardly had my killer’s row out there. The group did well. I sub in Noah and Jack P with about 2 and a half minutes left in the first quarter and it soon becomes clear that Noah is playing injured. Noah had his game time limited accordingly, though I probably still over played him relative to his injury. At the end of the first quarter it’s 8-0. We quickly come out on a tear in the early second quarter and are soon up 12-0. NF didn’t come out with a press until about 3 minutes in the second quarter which unfortunately for them was about the same time that I put David back in. They try and run their press once, except David simply dribbles through it like swiss cheese. It’s certainly not the press break method I recommend but we never did see the press again. We have a commanding lead at half time and a ref, who we hadn’t had before, gives me the “we’re going to put them down softly” speech. OK.

The second half is not noteworthy except NF comes out in a zone towards the middle of the 3rd quarter. And let me tell you they looked hapless in it. So I basically do a line change we go with Indiana, our name for our zone breaker. And we can’t run it. We run the initial progression just fine, but when it comes time to get the ball back to the other side of the court the offense just falls apart, which is roughly the same time it falls apart in practice. At least it’s clear what we need to work on. We continue to run Indiana and some ineffectual practice with it, but I do gain a pretty good understanding of what some players need to work on. At one point Tom was in at the 3 and was completely not running it right and so I pulled him and was diagramming the play when he made some disparaging comments about himself. While I disagreed with David’s overall assessment on Friday I could not disagree with the idea that Tom does say an awful lot of negative things about himself. I told Tom I wanted to talk with him after the game.

The game ends and we’ve achieved another easy 37-12 victory. The second quarter seems to be our bugaboo as we allowed 6 points in it, 4 in the 3rd, and only 2 in the 4th. Though we did get sloppy in the fourth giving them better looks than I would have liked. On a personal note, except for Noah, I did an exceptional job of distributing playing time today. Everyone else had between 12 and 16 minutes of playing time. Considering if things were perfectly equal everyone would have 14 minutes, I think that’s pretty damn good.

Let’s look our individual players:

Brian – Played fairly well in his time. He had a great second quarter, which he played all of, but cooled off in the second half. In particular I think he was cheating too much on defense which allowed his man some easy shots.

Dante – Dante has been in a slump. I’m going to talk to him tomorrow before the game and tell him I want him to go hard on the boards. He had a few open shots he couldn’t quite convert, but more importantly his rebounds are way down.

David – He had an amazing 11 points in only 12 minutes and 9 shots. At this level getting 50% shooting is incredible, but that’s David. I told him at half that he wouldn’t be seeing much second half playing time, which of course he understood, and actually had him in as the 4 in Indiana in the 3rd quarter which he did a nice job with. I did get annoyed with him when after he had an early foul he was playing slack defense against their point guard. This was a kid who was practically dribbling at his shoulder. I actually subbed in Jack M at one point just to get some tighter pressure in the first quarter, but unfortunately they subbed the kid out at the same time. I called my only timeout in the second quarter to give David a mild scolding and tell him that this kid is nowhere nearly as impressive as the kid he was guarding last week, though this kid went with the “head full of steam” method of getting across half-court which proved to be effective. This wasn’t even a case of treating David differently as I think I’d have been equally upset if either of the Jacks, for instance, had played defense like that.

Gordie – He felt proud at how he did. He talked about how he took better shots and I agreed. He only took two shots and made one of them. He did have 5 turnovers so that part of his game still needs work, but this was his best game to date. Of course on the Win Score measure I use for productivity he still had a negative number, but it was less of a negative number. If we can cut down on his turnovers he could find some more playing time, though I’m not quite sure what role I would have for him, since we don’t exactly need a short kid who can’t guard all that well on either offense or defense. Nevertheless, I was happy for Gordie and how he played and the better shot selection was a huge first step.

Jack M – Clearly he was disappointed at not starting, though to his credit he didn’t say a thing. He did get very annoyed, however, that NF kept running their play “Brady Quinn”. I am not quite sure why they had an offensive set named after a QB. It was basically just a motion offense. But Jack did not like it. He was a pretty much non-factor until the 4th quarter when he exploded for six easy points.

Jack P – Jack actually led our team in minutes but didn’t do anything exceptional or poor. His defense wasn’t quite up to its normal stuff, so perhaps he was still feeling the after effects of his sickness. On the good side he only had two fouls so that part was good. Of course I’d rather have another foul or two and get some better defense.

Lucas – I’m going to make Lucas our MVP. He came up with the second highest win score for the game, and is actually third on the team for the season (behind Scott and David). He played some really nice help defense, mostly to make up for Brian’s lackings. And he had a HUGE stuff, where he came out of nowhere to prevent an easy basket on a sidelines play. Good enough for a game MVP and it gives me a chance to remind the team how important role players are. The just scoring baskets doesn’t make you a great player.

Noah – As discussed above was injured. He will not be playing in our exhibition game to give his ankle some time to rest.

Scott – Led our team in rebounds with only 5. We had a lot fewer rebounds this game than previous games and I’m not quite sure if it’s because we just allowed fewer shots or were getting out rebounded. I think it’s the latter and not the former, however.

Tom – Played pretty well in his time in the game. After the game I told him in no uncertain terms that he belonged on the team, was an important member of the team, and I was not going to tolerate him being so negative about himself.

For tomorrow’s game I think we’ll go with a starting lineup of Dante, Lucas, Tom, Jack P, and either David or Jack M. I think we’re in a good place heading into winter break and hope we’re in as equally a good place when we come back January 8, so essentially 3 weeks of no basketball, which is a long time. And then we have a killer schedule: MP1, our only competition for best in the league, some other shlubs, and then the HP tourney. I talked about this some at practice on Friday and will be doing so again tomorrow, but we need to stay in shape over break, otherwise we could be in some real trouble when we come back.

[wade moore]

Originally Posted by Barkeep49

For tomorrow’s game I think we’ll go with a starting lineup of Dante, Lucas, Tom, Jack P, and either David or Jack M. I think we’re in a good place heading into winter break and hope we’re in as equally a good place when we come back January 8, so essentially 3 weeks of no basketball, which is a long time. And then we have a killer schedule: MP1, our only competition for best in the league, some other shlubs, and then the HP tourney. I talked about this some at practice on Friday and will be doing so again tomorrow, but we need to stay in shape over break, otherwise we could be in some real trouble when we come back.

Seems like your biggest obstacle now is complacency. I'm not sure how you work on that with 4th graders though ...

[Barkeep49]

So I started typing this post up on Tuesday December 19th. Then I got sick and never got around to finishing it. Until now. I will make a note where I started writing so far after the fact, just so you know where my memory might be a little hazier.

Last night was our exhibition game against JCC team 1. When I got to the gym I knew we were going to have a much closer game than I had anticipated. Their whole team was already there and they were a big team. Even more worrisome I saw a player on their team who I knew, #3, and I knew him to be an exceptional athlete. For whatever reason we were slower than normal in arriving. Eventually we get all of the players I was expecting. Or rather we get the 8 players we’re going to have for the night. Noah, it had been decided, would miss the game due to injury. Scott, who I’d decided to give the nod to start to over either David or Jack M, was sick. I really hate going to the game and finding out there that a player will be missing. Someone needs to let me know ahead of time.

Anyway we do our warmup. All the while they are blaring music into the gym. It was pretty annoying, honestly, and a couple of my players moaned about it. It did create a funny situation where I was giving our pregame talk and I was having to scream and then all of a sudden the music went off and so in midsentence I switched to a normal volume. It gave us all a good laugh. With Scott not being there my plans to go with a large lineup were somewhat foiled. I had decided it was a good situation to not start David, and so on a spur of the moment I decided to go with Gordie as our fifth starter, along with Dante, Lucas, Jack P (playing point), and Tom. Gordie was actually playing the three here.

Dante did a nice job with the tip, something he hasn’t shown any particular ability to do before this. We did get off to an early 2-0 lead. However, that was when their star basically took control. After the first possession I had Jack P guard him, though Jack P was clearly outmatched in this case. When the first quarter ends it’s 8-6 and it’s a good ball game.

The second quarter was the difference maker. They came out in a 1-3-1 defense and absolutely destroyed us. They had been playing a 2-3 with a little man in the first quarter. We could get nothing going on offense. It didn’t matter rather we ran our zone breaker or our motion, they were shutting us down and not letting us find good shots. Matters hadn’t been helped in the first quarter that David, seeing that the other team was good, decided to try and be the hero and on his first two possessions down launched two ill advised shots. I gave him a quick pull, but I knew if we were going to compete in this game that we’d need his skills so I had him back in there in the second quarter. However, the combination of the good team, plus having their star player beat him a couple times on offense, threw David out of sorts.

However, the whole first half, really even through the second quarter, about the only foul the refs would call would be on our team doing something to their star. Now I’m not saying that they weren’t fouls, because they were, but at the same time we weren’t getting any where near the calls that they were getting. Talking to the refs in a situation like this is something that is currently beyond my comfort zone. I don’t ever complain, whether it’s baseball or basketball about the officiating. And there were things that they weren’t calling, such as Dante’s repeated 3 second violations, that benefited us. However, the home team advantage with the fouls was a bit much to swallow. Anyhow, the second quarter was a disaster for us and we go down by 8 into half. David guarded 3 for most of the second quarter, and was clearly frustrated on both offense and defense. Things just weren’t happening the way David was used to them happening. It didn’t help that since #3 was such a good ball handler even our full court man-to-man proved ineffective as even David simply couldn’t keep up with him the full length of the court. And let’s not forget David is VERY fast.

At half our team is shell shocked. I start to talk about some things we need to do differently, but it’s clear that our team is somewhat tuned out. I ask for someone to tell a joke to try and loosen the mood and get them to relax. The problem is that David comes up with “the refs”. This gets everyone to smile but isn’t quite as productive as I’d have liked. I do manage to get a couple of actual jokes out of them I then tell the team how this is our first real basketball game. We all know we’re still in this game, but the spark that the team normally has just isn’t there.

The third quarter doesn’t go particularly well for us. We are actually shutout, the first time we’ve failed to score at least one basket in a game all season. Even worse is that a couple minutes into the quarter David goes down hard and gets injured. He landed hard on his elbow. Honestly I think it was as much a frustration injury as anything. The good news is that we finally being to contain #3. #3, like oh so many players, has a tendency to go right every time and so we begin to play some better help defense knowing this.

We enter the 4th quarter down by 10. In the 4th quarter David says he’s ready to go back in. The good news is that we start to play our basketball game. We actually get the lead down to 6 at one point. However, we’re never able to get it closer than that. Our fast break offense had clicked, for the first time all game, and we were finding good shots on offense, partly thanks to some coaching on my part. But the baskets just don’t go in. And in the end we go down 26-16. To be honest while the margin of defeat doesn’t surprise me a whole lot, I am surprised we only managed 16 points. Our transition offense is normally just so good that we can score practically 16 points on that alone.

[Note: This is me typing far after the fact.] Funny thing happened in the 4th as well. Somehow after a time out we got 6 players in the game. I realized this, and not right away I’d add, when I only had two player sitting next to me on the bench. My first reaction was to get mad at the missing player for leaving the bench without my permission. That was when I looked at the court and realized we had six players in the game. I got the refs attention who let us score a basket as he tried to count our players. I kept point it out to him and he finally whistled the game to a stop. A player was pulled out and we got to keep our basket. I’m not quite sure how we got 6 players in the game in the first place but it had to have been my fault somehow.

After the game I pull the team together. We do a longer than normal post-game talk since there will be no practice again until after Winter Break. I really attempt to emphasize the importance of staying in shape over Winter Break and even hand out a log for them to record physical activities that they do. I don’t honestly expect more than 2 or 3, if that, to keep the log in any serious fashion, but it was just another way for me to emphasize the importance of staying in shape.

Taking a look at our players from the game:

Brian: Actually had the second most minutes on the team. He’d have had more until he started with the “you hate me” stuff again during the game and so I put him on the bench for a bad attitude. I really have to have a talk with about it since I don’t hate him, though clearly we need to work on some things between us.

Dante: Dante is just playing bad basketball. Now granted he was up against some really big guys but I don’t quite know what to do with him. He’s clearly trying hard out there and just coming up short. It’s times like this that I wish we had video so I could really take the time to analyze what he’s doing.

David: The other team’s assistant coach and I were talking after the game and one of things we talked about was what a talent David is. It’s hard not to recognize what a gifted player he is and I feel very fortunate to have him on the team. I think we’d still be a pretty good team with-out him, as our dismantling of HP, who appears to be above average, shows. However, I’m VERY happy that we do have him on the team.

Gordie: I let him have some crunch time minutes, as I feel players should get to experience all aspects of the game and will always try to have one of our end of the bench players in at crunch time so they get that kind of development. That said the kid needs to work on his shot selection and turnovers. He was 2 for 8 from the field, not actually a terrible shooting percentage at this age, but the real killer is the 7 turnovers he had. I set-up my stats spreadsheet to shoow stats/28 minutes (meaning if they played a full game) and Gordie has 11 turnovers/28 more twice as many as the next highest person.

Jack M: Jack also sat on the bench more than he might have otherwise due to some negative comments he made (about our ability to come back). As I have mentioned before he has a delicate psyche and so the music before the game really bothered him as did the poor reffing. I would go so far as to suggest it had an impact on his game play. Hopefully when he starts our next game some of the confidence will return.

Jack P: Did a good job of attempting to guard #3 despite being out matched. Gained some valuable experience as a PG. Jack had moved from Massachusetts over the summer and I learned before the game that there he played almost exclusively guard, which is obviously different from the forward/center positions I am asking of him. After giving him some time as guard I like him better in those other spots, which is nice considering that there are more minutes available there as well.

Lucas: He turned in another solid performance. He is clearly more comfortable the more chances he gets in our offense and at playing help defense. The stats that have been kept have really helped tune me into the little things he does much faster than if I just had to go off of observation.

Tom: Tom had a pretty good game. And he didn’t make any self-depreciating comments which was good.

Overall I’m glad we lost. It should hold off our getting too cocky which had been a concern of mine. And like I said after the MP2 game, we were never out of the game and it’s possible we could defeat this team were we to play them again.

My big concern is how in shape we come back from winter break. We have a BRUTAL schedule coming up. Our first practice back is January 8th. We have another practice on Friday. We then play MP, our competition for best in the league, on Saturday and WK, a team which is 1-3 thanks to its victory against one of the NF teams, on Sunday. Then we have no practice due to Martin Luther King Day and then we have at least three games in the tourney that Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. And then it looks like we might not be able to reschedule our Sunday game so we’d have a game then too. I still haven’t received word whether or not we got accepted into the A bracket, but I hope we did. So in some ways, with so much basketball, it’s good to be rested. But if we’re out of shape, oh am I dreading the game against MP. However, all this basketball is very exciting and I’m looking forward to what should be a fun couple of weeks.

[wade moore]

Do you think in the long run the loss will be a good thing or a bad thing?

[timmae]

great read barkeep... keep it up. Your thought about each of the kids adds to the depth and I am sure helps you out as you proceed through the season.

As far as the video... aren't any of the parents taking video of the kids? Seems like there may be one or 2 that would be..

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by topdawguga

Congrats on what seems like a great season thus far. It's interesting to see what you're going through as my son plays on a brand new competitive fourth grade team. In our area, there are a number of teams that have already been playing together for two or three years - and that pull from a pretty big tryout area. Suffice it to say, we aren't doing as well as you guys are. But, we're coming along and will hopefully get there. Enjoy the holiday and good luck on the rest of your season.

I can't even imagine a 4th grade team that's been together for two or three years. Seems wrong, frankly. In many ways I think 4th grade is even pushing the envelope for travel teams and why I'm glad Gordie and Lucas play in house league as well.

Originally Posted by wade moore

Do you think in the long run the loss will be a good thing or a bad thing?

This was going to be a major focus of the last entry before I got sick and my perspective changed a bit on it. I really think it's a good thing, in the long run. Normally I'm very depressed after losing, whether we're out classed or it's a game we could have won on a different day. In this case I think it'll do a lot to help tone down the sense of invulnerability. I want my team to play without fear, but I also want them to work hard doing it. The need to work hard was sort of getting lost and this will be a good reminder of why we need to work hard. Jack M has given me a hard time for saying a couple times, when talking about up coming games, "Win or lose, we will leave with our heads held high." And then this game he gave me a hard time for believing that we had a chance even late in the game. I mean that's part of Jack, he'll always be looking for a reason to be upset to a certain extent, but it does show that I was being hopelessly pessimistic when I talk about win or lose. I'd think this was even more of a positive thing if we'd been able to convert the energy into a couple of good practices and a solid win rather than have winter break upon us.

Originally Posted by timmae

great read barkeep... keep it up. Your thought about each of the kids adds to the depth and I am sure helps you out as you proceed through the season.

So true. There have been numerous times both with this and baseball where the blog itself has really helped me clarify thoughts. I really like kids as well which is why I make it a point to give some time to each of the players because it's my love of them and the game that make me enjoy coaching so much.

Originally Posted by timmae

As far as the video... aren't any of the parents taking video of the kids? Seems like there may be one or 2 that would be..

Especially in the area we're in, where everybody likely has a digital camcorder (or two) you'd think this, but I haven't seen anybody do this yet.

[wade moore]

Buehler?

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by wade moore

Buehler?

Without any practices or games it's hard to have updates. But fear not, we finally had a practice last night.

I get to practice 10 minutes early and I am pleased to see 6 or so players already there. I’m just as excited as any of the kids to be back to practice. I haven’t seen them since December 18th and that’s just too long. But little could be done about that. Our upcoming basketball schedule is quite intense. Starting on Friday we have a 2 practices and 6 games in a 10 day stretch so as much as we have been away we’ll be spending plenty of time together in the near future.

As I wrote in my last report, I was quite concerned about whether or not they would stay in shape. Actually I was less concerned about whether or not they would stay in-shape and more resigned to the fact that they wouldn’t. I was hardly surprised when Tom proudly hands me his sheet. Tom is just awesome that way. However, in the end I actually got back 5 of 9 (with Noah never having gotten one, and the triplets and Dante failing to return theirs). While some of the activities were better than others (Tom’s playing his PS3 doesn’t really count, with Gordie having my favorite activity: “schlepped luggage”) the kids who turned in a form did not struggle nearly as much at practice as those who didn’t.

After a brief run down of our amazingly heavy schedule, which took longer than it ought to have due to interruptions, which I was kinder about than normal since we’re getting back into the groove of things, we began our continuous motion. Lucas was all over things and Jack P did a pretty good job of things as well. David cramped up, Jack M gave a mediocre effort, and Noah and Brian did their usual try and walk for part of it routine. Overall though I was relieved right away that they were in much better shape than I’d expected. After continuous motion it was 2 free throws and a water break.

Going into this practice I had two goals:
1. Run our zone breaker offense without a defense for a good amount of time and forcing them to play several different positions
2. Run them ragged. I came up with about 6 drills I could use that would all require a good amount of effort.

After continuous motion we went into our zone breaker. The emphasis here was on how to feed the ball into the post and how to run the second, third, fourth, and so on progression of the offense. I made a couple of teaching adjustments to help with this. Lucas, bless his heart, really has gotten the timing down well for his position, which is good since he struggled so much with it at first. I was actually amazed at how poorly the offense ran, without even any defense there, so we’ll likely be spending a similar amount of time, if not more, on this on Friday.

After going through 3 different groupings of players there so players could play three different positions (except for Dante and Lucas who just played 4 and 5) I taught them the Mikan drill. This is a classic drill that basically works on rebounding, lay-ups, and conditioning. A player shoots a lay-up on one side of the basket, gets the rebound and shoots from the other side taking two steps. This repeats. It’s a more important drill for our post players, but it’s a good drill for everybody since it also works on conditioning, so we ran it at all 6 baskets. After 3 or 4 rounds of this (might have even been 5) we did two more free throws.

Next came a new drill: Animal Rebounding. Basically this is an aggressiveness drill. With 5 players on the court it’s basically a free-for-all. I made it clear that they could not seriously whack a player, but I would not be calling small fouls and they could do no more than double team a player. The goal is to get 5 points. You get points by getting a rebound, making a basket, blocking a shot, or stealing the ball. After a player gets 5 points, play continues until all players (even the last person playing by himself) get 5 points. I had, this time, divided them up into a “big group”: David, Lucas, Dante, Scott, and Jack P, and a smaller group: Tom, Gordie, Jack M, Noah, and Brian. While one group was doing the Animal Rebounding the other group was playing a game of continuous knockout at the other end (continuous knockout is a game of knockout/lightening where if the person who got a player out gets out that person is back in. It forces a player to beat all the other players in order to win). One other catch. The first player to get 5 has to do 5 push-ups and gets a permission. Second player does 10, third 15, 4th 20, and the last player does 20 push-ups and gets a suicide. In the first group it was David coming in first, Dante coming in second, which was nice to see considering how he’d been playing of late, Lucas in third, Scott in 4th and Jack P in 5th. After doing this drill it was 2 more free throws. Remarkably when this group went to play knockout Dante won, a remarkable feat considering he’s by far not the best shooter in that group. In the second group it was Brian first, Jack M second, Tom 3rd, Noah 4th, and Gordie 5th. Overall I was pleased with how the drill went. Next time we do this, likely on Friday, I will be making a rule stating you can not dribble more than 3 times. The idea is to encourage inside shots, and there were too many outside shots this time. Jack M kept moaning about the physical nature of things, but I had no sympathy for him, since he is one of the players who most needs to get used to physical play.

After that we did best two out of three with Golf and it was time to run our suicides and go home.

Overall, it was a good practice. My disappointment with our zone buster is what keeps me from calling it a great practice. But the team is in much better shape than I expected and so hopefully we’ll have a good game on Saturday against MP1. MP1, if you recall, is the team tied with us for first place. The game isn’t until 5:45 on Saturday because MP’s players have to play on house league teams and they have house league games on Saturday, meaning hopefully some of their players should be tired coming to our game. We will be at a slight disadvantage since, slump or not, Dante will not be there this weekend, but I like our chances. It’s great to be back.

[wade moore]

Oops, forgot you had a layoff ...

Good read, look forward to the next game!

[Barkeep49]

For Monday’s practice I seriously over prepared. Making yesterday’s practice the “what we didn’t get to on Monday” practice to a large extent. Of course one of the more important things I wanted to do, practice our in bounds play, I completely forgot to put on the practice plan and so we didn’t end up doing it.

As usual we started practice a few minutes a few minutes late since I had to raise the baskets from 8 to 10 feet. I arrived particularly early as I wanted to make sure I could grab Brian and Jack M to talk to them before we started. As I was watching the house league team practice, I liked a lot of what the coach was doing with the team. Skills that I assume my team has (well cause they do) this team most definitely did not have. Watching the practice it made me sorta want to coach a house league team next year as it would force me to think about the fundamentals more, which would only benefit my travel coaching. I had to bite my tongue at one point. They were working on a movement drill trying to get open. It was a pretty good drill. Only problem was that when one of their players got stuck at the top of the arc by the sideline the coach was encouraging everyone to come to the ball. While I understood what he was saying what he was really encouraging them to do was converge on the ball. That’s bad basketball. Our ability to space the floor is actually one of the things that’s made us so successful. Anyhow it was fun to watch their practice.

The triplets were the first to arrive. I pulled Brian aside. It was clear that he feels I disrespect the team at times. I had a two pronged message: first I think we’re a good team. Second, my stating things such as certain players shouldn’t be shooting three pointers isn’t disrespect, but instead is trying to put us in the best position to win by giving players a shot at winning. I also particularly emphasized what a good player I thought he was. He seemed very receptive to the message.

When it is time to start, after raising the basket, we had 7 players. Dante I wasn’t expecting to be there. However, I had no idea where Jack or Gordie were. I later checked and Gordie’s mom had told me that he was going to be gone at his grandmother’s birthday and I’d forgotten to mark that down. I talk for a few moments about our upcoming games and who should arrive but Dante just as we’re about to start our continuous motion. And evidently he’ll be at the game tomorrow as well. I don’t quite understand what happened with soccer, but I’m not complaining.

We did our continuous motion. I really need a new drill besides the dribbling and Princeton for continuous motion. Anyhow that went on. I then had a decision to make. We really needed to practice our zone buster, but only had 8 players. Despite it not being optimal I decided to just run it with the groups I’d made out and whoever was playing a particular position where there should have been a missing player. If I’d known we were going to have 8 players I’d have planned something for the three who weren’t in at any given time, but I couldn’t think of anything good at this particular moment (things are complicated since there is only one 10 foot basket in our Friday practice gym and so I couldn’t even send each of them to a basket to shoot lay-ups). Good news was that our play was a lot sharper today than it had been on Monday overall. Even better was that Jack arrived just as we were about to start out third rotation. As I had Gordie playing the clueless 4 (simply because I need to give Scott and Jack some reps at 3 and David needs reps at all the positions so I need to put a guard at the 4/5 once in a while to make sure that everyone gets some looks at spots they might play in the game) in the last drill, his not being there made it possible to run it with 9 players. Brian who had run things so well in the 2 on Monday actually didn’t do so hot. Jack M continued to struggle to play the two position as well. Tom actually did the best job of it. This changes my plans slightly for how I am going to handle starters for the game, which I’ll talk about more below. Anyway, we look better overall in our Zone Buster. I talked a fair amount last night about how if it breaks down we just have to reset it. Resetting is easier said than done, but I feel a lot better about them being able to run 3 or 4 iterations of the play in a game.

I then decided it was time for the Animal Rebounding drill. This time I didn’t quite do the shorties and tallies. Instead in group 2 was David, Tom, Lucas, Scott, and Brian and group 1 was Jack M, Jack P, Dante, and Noah. I honestly don’t really remember how the drill went except that Brian finished in 4th and Tom in 5th in Group 2. After they had finished their round I had them shoot two free throws. Except that Brian was having trouble doing his push-up and David felt the need to point this out. This set-off Brian. I reminded David that his job as a player was to be supportive of his teammates. Brian had been having a pretty good practice until this point however after his brother’s taunt he got very frustrated and tried to turn that determination into finishing his pushups. And then when he couldn’t do those he changed into running suicides. He was doing this while everyone else was at a water break. As people filtered back in I tried to release him from his obligation, but he wasn’t having it. I finally got him to shoot his two free throws however his temper was still raised.

I then partnered people up and we did a speed shooting drill where they shot from two feet away, but had to move around the free throw line before shooting from the other side. The team did a really great job of being supportive of their teammates as this was going on which was great to see. Brian, however, was in a world to himself. The team made between 5 and 9 of these shots in 30 seconds. I told them they were competing against themselves and didn’t even record their scores. This was the by product of a discussion Jack M had started. He was stating how he doesn’t like it when we’re competing, even if it’s just for a permission. This was quite interesting to hear. Jack had really toughened up in the Animal Rebounding drill between Monday and today, despite playing with bigger people, but it’s always good to be reminded about that with Jack.

Anyhow after we did the speed shooting drill, which we’ll do again, we did a drill we had done a long time ago, where it was 3 on 3 with the goal of the defense forcing offensive turn-overs. Things went OK, despite Brian moaning and moaning and moaning about his team until it was time for Brian’s team (on defense) to face David’s team on offense. And Brian went into full tilt meltdown. He was playing recklessly and could have easily hurt someone. He was just off the wall. We ran our suicides with Brian not fully participating.

We gathered around for our post-practice talk. I was a little more rah rah than normal. But Jack M wasn’t buying it. I asked to speak to Jack and Brian after practice. Unfortunately Brian had to leave quickly so I only got to speak to Jack. Jack actually did a great job of giving the “you have to be a more positive player” speech and used reasons I don’t normally use so clearly he’s heard this before and not just from me. I told him that I sincerely believe us to be a very good team and part of being a very good team is acting like it and that he should try acting like it, even if he doesn’t fully believe it since it makes a difference in how you play.

At some point I had decided that our starting five would be David, Tom, Brian, Scott, and Lucas (in # order). Despite Brian’s completely unacceptable behavior at practice I’m still going to start him. I will be talking with him before hand and telling him there will be serious consequences if he puts up a performance like he did at our last practice again. We’ll talk about how he can calm down if he starts to get frustrated, but going off and doing his own thing will not be OK. I’m going to use the “complement sandwich” strategy with him and hopefully it’ll go well.

My initial plan had been to announce our starting five, but state that if they come out in a strong zone that I would be using the line up of Jack M, Brian, David, Jack P, and Lucas (again in # order). Except that with Brian not showing as much ability to run the play as the 2, and Tom showing great ability, that would likely be the switch I’d want to make. The idea of announcing this switch was to give Jack and Jack some feeling of recognition. However, I don’t want to take away Brian’s sense, I think. So, Jack M will start tomorrow against WK and we’ll simply have David and Brian switch roles if we run Indiana.

If we’re going to win today, and going forward, we need David to play a great game. However, he seems to have been lacking in much of his normal confidence ever since the JCC game. A lot of it seems to be the fact that he’s been having trouble making free throws. I haven’t had a chance to work with him to see if there’s a flaw in his mechanics but I’m going to tell him that despite what may happen in practice with free throws that he’s a great player and he shouldn’t stress about it, and instead should just play good basketball.

It’s a big game today and I think we’re ready for it. Hopefully I’m right.

[Barkeep49]

Well yesterday was the day. After essentially a month of anticipation we finally got to have our go against MP and the game was every bit as competitive as I’d expected.

I get to the game a little bit earlier than a half hour and get to see a good portion of the 6th grade girls team getting blown out by another team. It was not a pretty sight. The MP coach arrived early and we chatted a little bit before the game. He seemed like a nice guy and we chatted with each other quite amiably. Anyhow we straggle in, with 9 of the 10 players getting there by the designated time of 5:30. I had been informed we were going to start the game 10 minutes early, which I objected to under the grounds that my whole team might not be there. However, when at 5:35 we had all buy Gordie there I said we can go ahead and Goride arrived just as we were going over to the huddle to talk.

In the pregame huddle I reminded them of some of the highlights of last night’s speech and then explained that our offensive focus would be beating them back. I wanted that ball in bounded quickly, sent to the outlet even quicker. On defense I identified our priority as helping out in our man-to-man defense. And then it was time to send our starting five of David, Tom, Brian, Scott, and Lucas out there. The good news is that this team is not particularly tall. It seems like when the two MP teams were divvying up the players MP2 took the taller players, who were slightly less athletic, while MP took the slightly more athletic players.

They come out and right off the bat run basically the same high screen play that MP2 ran. As they were running this play the third time, (they called it 1) though not on consecutive possessions I shouted out “Watch the high pick. Just like the other MP team ran.” My players adjusted accordingly and we only saw this play one other time during the game. They also ran a double pick play that proved quite effective. It led to numerous fouls being called on us and several baskets as well. They were a good shooting free throw team and we quickly fell behind. I was not surprised that we were committing so many fouls. I didn’t do a good job of calling fouls during the 3 on 3 drill we did and the Animal Rebounding drill is predicated on not calling too many fouls, so our team had gotten a little sloppy.

Meanwhile on our side of the ball, they were running a 2-1-2 defense. I basically let our offense try and work the motion and see if they could create something, but to no avail. I called a 30 second time out, switched Brian and David, and instructed them to run Indiana. We ran it on a few possessions and on one of them it actually resulted in a basket. There were a couple of other times where when we had a look, but the player didn’t take it before the play broke down. MP basically shut down the play by preventing us from making the first pass. Part of this was because Tom and David were going down the court on the same side each time, so the pass was going the same direction each time. Even if that first pass was getting there they were then executing a very high trap leading to a turn over. I think I’m going to make a few minor changes to the play, or rather teach them a variant, that should help us out in that situation. But I’m glad we had a success with it. We’re going to need it against the JCC team in the HP tourney so I’m pleased with our improvement.

Between their offense and defense they had opened up a 7 point lead at the end of the first. In many ways we were lucky it wasn’t 11 or so. During the huddle between quarters I diagramed the double screen play that they were running for the team. David, bless his heart, had already figured out the whole play, and a couple of others in the game had figured out parts of it, which is again a testament to their basketball IQs. There was a funny moment. We were kind of slow getting into our huddle. I heard their coach start to diagram their press break. A kid asked how he knew that we were going to press and the coach just replied that he knew. I smiled since I knew I had no intention of pressing, or even pressuring them at the start of the quarter. I wanted to save it until we were either in slightly more dire straights, or for the 4th quarter.

We come out pretty flat in the second quarter. They don’t have their first string in there and the subs I’ve made didn’t really hurt our quality of player out there much, so the game stays pretty much at a standstill for a bit. However, then the phantom calls started happening. In the first quarter ever call that was made was legitimate. But in that second quarter we were getting called for all sorts of things which simply weren’t there. We quickly go into bonus and then double bonus. At one point Lucas gets called for a foul which was not a foul. In fact Lucas was called for 3 fouls none of which were great calls, not surprising as coming into the game Lucas had committed only 2 fouls the whole season. After this call which was not a call, I asked what the foul was. They said Lucas’s number. I said I heard who it was on. What was the call. I say it in an inquiring tone, but it was my way of asking “what the heck?” During baseball I NEVER question the umpire. And really I hadn’t talked to these refs too much, but the officiating was highly suspect this game and it was too close of a game for me not to grow a bit frustrated.

Anyhow, we’re really out of sorts. They are basically running a trapping defense against us in the second quarter and it had some success. However, our offense FINALLY kicked into gear and we started to create some fast break opportunities. This allowed the refs to call some specious travel violations, but it also caught us up from what had been at one point a 9 point deficit to only 5. Credit for this change in offensive pace really belongs with David and Jack P, though Jack M helped as well here.

During half time I kept the talk simple. I asked what our offensive goal for the day was. I’m met with blank stares. I pointed out that it was beating the other team back down the court. That’s what we needed to be doing and weren’t doing. Then I talked about the fouls. I said that they were calling things in this game that they hadn’t in previous games and we needed to recognize that. I reminded them that basically any contact in the lane was going to be called a foul so if you were playing help defense, which we’d been doing a good job of doing, make sure you tried to meet the man outside of the lane. We talked a little bit about how to take a charge and then I sent them back out there.

The big difference in the 3rd quarter was our defense. They kept going back to the well of the play with the double screen, but it got less and less effective, until finally by the end of the quarter they stopped running it. Meanwhile, their zone started to get sloppy. We were running enough transition offense that they weren’t making their traps work. Plus having David and the Jacks being able to dribble through a lot of them helped. By the end of the 3rd quarter we’d pulled to with-in 2. And then we tied it up. We got the ball back with 9 seconds. I told David, who was taking the ball up the court, that we had plenty of time. Someone on the bench scoffed at this and I pointed out that 8 seconds was enough time for two shots. Sure enough we got a good shot off with about 3 seconds left, but it missed. Lucas grabbed the rebound and put it back in half a second before the buzzer went off and we entered the fourth quarter up by two. After Lucas made that shot, our bench exploded. Honestly you’d have thought that was the end of the game. However, seeing the pure joy of his teammates caused Lucas to flash one of the best smiles I’ve seen in a long time. That moment right there is a big reason I coach sports.

I pulled the team together and said “It’s games like this that make me love basketball. This is fun. Each quarter we’ve been doing better. We started off down by 7, narrowed it down to 5 at half and now we’re up by 2. We’ve got 7 more minutes to play and we’re going to win this game.” And sure enough the 4th quarter was ours. We were still getting called for a bunch of fouls, but they weren’t making as many of their shots, and there were less shooting fouls anyway. More importantly we were doing a great job of moving the ball around on offense. Brian hit a couple of clutch outside shots which made them guard our perimeter more giving us more players open inside. On defense we continued to hold them SO tightly. Lucas drew a key offensive foul that was a big moral booster. With about 2 minutes left we’d extended our lead to 6. Tom had started doing a chant of “Defense” from the bench that was great. Our players were pumped and their side was not. With about 90 seconds their PG, who was a pretty good player, fouled out.

Not too long after that they decided to start fouling us. Now they’d had their own share of fouls in the second half and so when they foul Scott and they went to the line, I thought it was a 1 and 1. Scott missed the first shot, and there’s no jostling or anything, which didn’t even register at the time. Jack P ends up with the ball. I tell him to shoot. At that point one of the MP players starts guarding him. Jack goes in strong for a lay-up, which he makes and there’s a whistle. Looks like it’s going to be a possible three point play.

Their coach starts asking if the foul wasn’t an intentional foul. He thought they did the signal for an intentional foul. I had been talking with someone on the bench, so while I saw the foul, I didn’t pay attention to the call. The two refs conferred and agreed it’d been a called an intentional foul. And let me say that I thought that was an awful call. I mean granted they were trying to intentionally foul us, but it wasn’t like they Scott was in any danger of being hurt. After it was agreed that it was a two shot foul, the coach gets very upset and starts going off at the refs on how they don’t even know the rules of the game. He’s really livid about the poor officiating.

Something I’d never mentioned before is that the refs who typically do our games are a pair of brothers, while the scoreboard operator is a third brother. So as the MP coach is going off on the refs, the scoreboard operator tells him to cool it. They go back and forth for a little and finally the MP coach does quiet down. Since it was an intentional foul, we get the ball back. When the ref comes over, the scoreboard guy whispers to him about the MP coach. The ref then tells the coach not to yell at the scorer’s table. This starts a heated discussion between the ref and the MP coach. At one point the ref had to say, “Coach lower your voice there are kids around.” The MP’s coach was two fold: the scoreboard operator started it, he doesn’t really have the authority to tell me to be quiet, and because of this if he talks to me I’ll talk back. While I think the scoreboard operator did have the authority to say what he said, I otherwise agree with the MP coach. This discussion, which took a minute or two, really took a lot of the good feeling out of the game, which was unfortunate. As it was going on, I even said “this is a shame.” Gordie asked me why and I said that it was taking away from our great victory. Finally that whole discussion finishes.

They keep fouling us and in the end we win by 12, 36-24, though it was far more of a 6 or 8 point victory, just because of the way the end of the game went down. Our bench leapt up with great joy. We were very happy at winning this game, no doubt about it. We went through and shook their hands. At the end I shook the hand of the MP coach and we exchanged a few pleasant words about each others team and agreed that the officiating was horrible. I had been quite pleased with the officiating we’d had up until this point, but this game was just not called well.

This game reinforces a few things. One we thrive off a transition offense. In the 3rd and 4th quarters we did a good job of running a half-court offense, but it was because we’d changed the tempo of the game. My dad, who is obviously biased, feels that the other team was out coached. I’m not sure that’s true at all. I think I’m getting a lot of credit, from not only my dad but the other parents for things that the team did naturally. Now a few of my decisions have been good decisions. So, for instance, we don’t have plays. Instead we work on drills and offense more abstractly. When MP was forced to stop using their plays and go into more just playing basketball, we were more than up for the task. So I guess I do deserve credit for that. At the same time, their coach has taught them how to trap pretty well, both full and half court, and we haven’t done that at all. So I’ll add that to our list of goals of things to do between now and the end of the season.

One thing I did, and it was a pretty conscious decision, was weight the playing time in favor of certain players. I don’t think I did as good of job of balancing our need to win with players having the right to play as I did in some other games. I’ll talk about those specific cases as we look at individual performances.

Brian – Talked with him before the game. The conversation went well and he had a great game. Took four shots and made them all. He is definitely our best jump shot player. He will be getting the start again today against WK.

Dante – Only saw 7.5 minutes of play and did much better in that time than he had in the last couple of games, pulling down 4 rebounds, a block, and a steal in that time. He’s going to start as well today. Scott and Lucas were having good games as well, and so I felt bad at the time that Dante wasn’t getting more time, but was reluctant to pull the trigger in getting him more time.

David – Another excellent game. He and Jack P helped get our game going. My dad thought he’d only sat like 3 or 4 minutes, but really he played about 21 minutes, or ¾ of a game. I don’t feel bad about that at all and David could easily be seeing that kind of playing time again in our games. Everyone is a better player with David on the court. He leads our team in points, but is also second in assists. He’s a true team player and doesn’t act like a star, so I don’t feel bad at all about giving him the chance to shine.

Gordie – Gordie got into serious foul trouble which limited his time to only 6 and a half minutes. Once again his turnovers killed us. He also lost time since I yanked him earlier than I would have in the 4th after he put up an atrocious shot while double teamed. He knew it was a bad shot, but claimed he was open when he started to take it. I responded that if he’d said that and had used good form, I would have been ok with the shot. But the shot was with awful form and in a bad spot. What was interesting was that even after this conversation he said after Lucas drew the offensive foul, “I’ve never had a coach who is nice and good before.” That was a really nice thing to hear and shows how if you’re fair and respectful to a kid, you can impose consequences (you shoot bad shots and you come out) and they won’t hold it against you.

Jack M – Here was another player I’d like to have played more in the end of the game but for whom there wasn’t a spot and so he too will get the start today. He did have 12 minutes on the game, and played well in that time. There was something slippery on the basket by our bench and so a couple of times Jack turned the ball over when it wasn’t his fault. I was pleased with how he played and feel good about giving him the start today.

Jack P – He had a great first half, as mentioned. While he missed a lot of shots in the second half, which is typical for him, I felt he was key to our victory and he was the only player I named specifically in our post game talk. He’ll start again today.

Lucas – While he didn’t rebound particularly well in his time (only 3 in 15 minutes of play) he made the basket off our zone breaker, on a nice feed from David, and was clutch when we needed it. Not his best game, but he’s an important piece of our puzzle.

Noah – A continued nothing in his 8.5 minutes of play. He’s a really nice kid and I told him that if he will go a whole continuous motion without walking or stopping that I would start him, he doesn’t really bring much to the game either offensively or defensively. Gordie, has some play making instincts, but Noah is pretty much over matched on the court. I really like him, but he just hasn’t progressed as much as a player as I’d like.

Scott – He continues to play big. He came in second on the team in minutes, with 21. In reality we’d likely have been OK if some of those minutes had gone to Dante/Lucas, but he works well with David (in other words he’s excellent at finding David as an outlet) and you’ll rarely have anything but positive energy from him.

Tom – Tom is a crucial member of the team. I played him the whole first quarter and he only saw 3 minutes of play after that, at the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th. When I took him out in the 4th he said “I stink”. I was not pleased to hear him say this, as Tom is the one who will start us cheering, as he did here. Or provide that comic relief. While he gets frustrated with himself he never is anything but positive and supportive of his teammates. While I think he’s slightly under achieving for his basketball skills, so the frustration is somewhat understandable, I don’t think he’s as bad as he thinks he is. I hope that he can have a break out game one of these games to give himself some confidence.

Today we play WK. They’ve put up a lot of points lately and I think that they’re going to upset someone soon, despite their 1-4 record. I don’t want it to be us. In my pregame talk I’m going to focus on not having a “let down game”. We’re a superior team and if we play like it, we’ll win easily. However, if we don’t play our top game we could be in trouble.

Let me just close with this: the best thing about this victory was that we were behind the whole first half. I talk about the difference between a good and a great team. And I knew they had it in them to come from behind. However, they didn’t know that. Now they do. While over confidence was starting to become a problem, and will likely rear its head again depending on how we do in the HP tourney, we needed to know that not only could we get out to a lead and hold it, but that we could come back. We didn’t believe it when we played the JCC team last time, but this team we should believe it. If we can win well today, in what could be a potential pitfall game, we’ll be in a good place for the HP tourney, which I’ll talk about more in a post tomorrow or Tuesday.

[wade moore]

This continues to be one of the things I look forward to reading most each week.

Great win, keep it up!

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by wade moore

This continues to be one of the things I look forward to reading most each week.

Great win, keep it up!

I really appreciate you saying this. And since it was a double header weekend here's our latest.

I get to the game and the 5th grade boys travel team game is well under way. I find Noah and Jack P already at the game. We go and sit down on some empty bleachers and watch the game. The team filters in and we have some nice hang-out time, a luxury we don’t normally get. Finally with about 90 seconds in the game there’s a free throw at the far basket and I take the team out of the gym and we have our pregame meeting. I figure they’ll be hot to start the next game and so we can save time by doing that first. I should point out that when I get to the game more than a half hour early the entire WK team is there and sitting in a corner. Seems like a huge waste of their time, but hey what do I know?

In our pregame talk I retell the last three games of the season for my beloved 49’ers. How they have a huge game against the Seahawks, win, and then lose to Arizona, which after they beat Denver the next week proved to be the difference between making the playoffs and not. I emphasized it was Arizona. It’s nice that it was the Cardinals since even at 9 boys are going to know that they’re a laughing stock. I pointed out that the 9’ers played a great game against a good team but then had a let down game the next game against a bad team. A few of the swifter boys understood the analogy, but for our slower ones I connected the dots. I emphasized that I wanted to come out running. I named our starting five (Jack M at 1, Brian at 2, David at 3, Jack P at 4, Dante at 5)

We then head back into the gym at almost the same time that the other game had ended (must have been a lot of end of game free throws). One of the refs (we have our normal crew, meaning it is the same set of brothers) asks how long I want to warm-up. I say that 3 minutes should do it. And so three minutes goes on the clock. I have our team start with a quick set of layups and then after I’ve gotten some business squared away, we go into our 3 on 2 half-court warm-up. From where we started to where we are now on this is amazing. We’re making good quick passes that takes advantage of the space and numerical superiority. We had enough time that everyone got to go once before there was about 20 seconds left. I send our starting five out. WK comes in. Just to recap, while the previous game was going on the coach was talking at them. Clearly they then had another pre-game meeting. That’s a lot of talking.

The game starts, David tips it to Brian, standing towards our basket, Brian dribbles two steps, makes a pass to Jack P who goes in for the easy lay-up. And with-in 10 seconds we’re out to a 2-0 lead. The game was absurd. 18-0 at half. At half time we do a “name something good you saw” since there was so much. Whether it was the alley oop to David, Lucas’s rebounding (more about this later), or several other things I’ve forgotten there wasn’t too much trouble for each kid to give a specific positive.

Almost from the start I work hard to get Gordie and Noah in there and getting some playing time, trying as much as possible to put our B time out on the court. By the 4th quarter WK has still failed to score a point. By this point they were not to run a fast break, period, and had to work around for good passes. In particular I was vocally encouraging working the ball into the posts (high and low) and we had some nice looks with that, though not as many conversions as we could since poor Dante couldn’t make a shot (more on this later as well). With about 3 minutes left, WK finally scores a point. Everyone, cheered. I kind of felt bad for WK as it was kind of like if we were playing a 3rd grade travel team in terms of their skills. The WK coach happens to be commissioner of the league and he made a joke at one point about immediately moving us into the A league.

The only negative is that we still couldn’t run Indiana even against their rather hapless 3-2 defense. I really don’t know what we’re going to do when we face the killer 1-3-1 of the JCC team next Saturday.

Final score as 32-7. I was really making an effort to get our lesser players in the game more and sit people like David, but wasn’t nearly as successful as I’d like to have been as the minutes for the game were pretty universal. Let’s take a look at the players:

Brian – Got the wind knocked out of him hard one time. He didn’t play his best game on offense, but his defense was superb while guarding his man on ball. He is too willing on defense to free lance, leaving his player open, but when I told him he needed to stay on his man more he adjusted nicely.

Dante – So I think I’ve discovered the reason why he hasn’t been playing well in several of our games: soccer. Turns out he’s had a soccer game before our basketball game on several of the days he hasn’t done well. Yesterday when he played well? No soccer. I need to get a hold of his soccer schedule so I can know I which Dante is going to show.

David – I was really trying to sit him a lot and he still got 11 minutes of play. I told him that he’d played ¾ of the game yesterday and would be playing a lot in the tourney, so he was going to sit more today. David, being David, found this perfectly reasonable and gave no complaint.

Gordie – He had his best game to date, which isn’t saying much. Excepting the first game (when we only had 7 players) he had the most minutes he’s had. Overall he did some things well, but in a game where 7 of our 10 players had a positive WS (Dante and Jack M were the others with negative ones), and remembering that for the season only 4 have positive WS, one could expect him to have played well against a clearly over matched team and he still managed to turn over the ball 5 times.

Jack M – I’m not really sure why he didn’t play better. This is a team he should have eaten alive. I especially thought with the start he’d do better, but perhaps he put more pressure on himself and that negated the implied confidence boost. He led the team in minutes so perhaps fatigue had something to do with it as well.

Jack P – He actually did very well this game with his shooting percentage, which is the biggest thing which holds him back. I was happy, in other words, with the game he played. He made a couple of fast break layups which is what I have been hoping to see.

Lucas – At half someone gave as their positive all of the rebounds Lucas had. I agreed it was definitely a positive. However, when the game ended and I looked over the stats I had no idea of just how right this was. Lucas had a team-high (for the season) 12 rebounds. He was just eating them alive out there. Amazing.

Noah – He scored two baskets, which was nice for him. Still a huge liability on defense and a smaller one on offense. I was sad to see I had only gotten him 13 minutes of play. I’d rather have seen this in the 15-17 minute range.

Scott – Scott only played 8 minutes, and if it hadn’t been for a late game “shift change” we did he’d have only had 7 minutes. Something was wrong with Scott’s ankle. He denied that he was hurt in any way, but I don’t think that’s true (just as it wasn’t true with Noah). Hopefully he’ll be at 100% by Saturday.

Tom – Tom saw time at 1, 2, 3, and 4 today. I was hoping one of those positions would really ignite him and we could see explode. Sadly, nothing clicked. I had thought he’d turned a corner with how he was playing before break, but perhaps he just had a couple of good games. I maintain there is potential with him that we’re not seeing.

As I mentioned in the previous writeup, we don't have practice tomorrow. Instead in the next couple of days I'll give an update on what the league standings look like (with our obviously being in 1st place) and what we might be looking at with the HP tourney.

[path12]

Two wins off the break! That's big. Looking forward to the next installment.

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by path12

Two wins off the break! That's big. Looking forward to the next installment.

I definitely agree that the two wins were big. I really feel like we're in a position to dominate the conference at this point, with 8 games left and only 3 that present any real concern, HP and MP and MP2.

HP Tourney
So 6 teams are in the A bracket for the tourney. I really like the format they are using. Two pools of three teams apiece. You play the other two teams in your pool. Based on your standing in the pool you then either get a bye (if you finish first) or play a team from the other pool, with the 2nd place teams playing the 3rd place teams.

About a week ago I sent Emily an email asking for a copy of the tourney rules. Today, after numerous emails and phone calls from her, I got a copy. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the HP Park District still does not have their act together. Reminds me of why I chose to coach the Spartans rather than in HP and just how right I was with that choice. Anyhow the tourney rules are:

1. All games are officiated under IHSA rules
2. All games have two, 20 minute running halves. The clock will stop only during the last two minutes of each half. Three timeouts per half.
3. 4th grade level may press only during the last 5minutes of each half with a 10 point limit.
4. Half times and warm-ups are five minutes long. All teams must provide a volunteer to work the table. Duties may include working the scoreboard or keeping the book
5. All teams must have light and dark color uniforms and bring them to each game.
6. No protests allowed. All scores are final.
8. Overtimes are two minutes long, 1 timeout per team no carryover.

I’m not really sure how the running clock will effect us, but I don’t think it’ll be our friend. We’re an aggressive team and we foul a lot. If the clock runs during free throw shots (which is sometimes done on running clocks and sometimes not) it’ll cut way down on possessions. On the other hand a running clock can increase the tempo of the game, and an increased tempo? Good for us.

In our pool we play HP. They’re a middle of the road team in the A bracket, 3-3, which suggests to me that we should have a shot, as I would guess we’d be a middle of the road team. I hope we win this game, because our next game is against the JCC team.

Now, that JCC team? It’s a good team. I know we didn’t play our best basketball against them. But, I’m not sure that even our best is good enough against them. I am glad we get another shot. I think we’ll be able to play #3 much better and our ball movement has looked good the last couple of games which should help us even if we can’t run our zone breaker. Of course that’s really the deal breaker. I expect us to get more transition points this game than we did last game. But even if we get more transition points, if we can’t beat their zone, which gave them numerous transition points, than we can’t beat them.

I haven’t told the team that we’re playing the JCC team again. I am glad that they’re the second game we play. I think it’ll mean they’ll come into the game warmed up and hopefully we can get off to a bit of a quick lead and place some pressure on them. Of course if we get blown out in the first game, or lose a real nail biter, we’re likely dead in the water once they see who we’re playing. On the other hand, if we can beat HP, I think we can build off that momentum and give the JCC team a surprise.

The only other team I can find out anything about is WM, another A bracket team. However, they’re in the cellar of the A bracket, having yet to win a game, so it’s likely if we can get the #2 seeding out of our pool we’ll make it into the final four.

I’m very excited to see how we fair against this tougher competition. There’s little doubt in my mind that we’ll lose more than 2 games in the regular season, and there’s an excellent chance we’ll go undefeated. If we win the post-season tourney, as I expect we will, there would be a lot of pressure to move up to the A bracket next year. This will be a preview of whether we have what it takes to succeed there.

Conference Update
We are, for the time being, the undisputed first place team, though MP is clearly nipping at our heels. We’re in good shape for the tie breaker, however, currently owning the first one (head-to-head record). The second one is points allowed in head-to-head games, so even if we were to lose to MP in the rematch, we’d just need to keep the margin of victory to with-in 12 to keep the tie breaker. After that it’s overall points allowed, and removing our game from the record, MP has been doing better than us here, allowing fewer points against the same teams. However, because of our 36 point game we are ahead here as well for the moment. Of interest is that MP is playing in the B bracket of the HP tourney. I’d have to think they’d stand a chance of doing well.

After us, there’s then the middle tier. In this grouping you have HP, MP2, and LS. MP2 is clearly the top of this heap and LS the worst. I think HP is a scrappy team and if they were to get the #4 seed in the post season tourney could upset us.

At the bottom of the barrel you have NF, NF2, and WK. None of these teams will give us any trouble, but it’ll be interesting to see how they sort themselves out.

Wages of Wins

I’ve mentioned several times that I like to use Win Score (WS) as a measure of player’s productivity. This stat (really more of a formula) came out of the book Wages of Wins, by Dave Berri (and several other authors whose names I don’t remember). This was a great book where three economists use the tools of economics to analyze sports.

They spend a lot of the book arguing that the current measures of performance in basketball do not strongly correlate to wins. In essence, they argue that scoring is over valued, and other statistics, such as turnovers, assists, rebounding, and the like are undervalued. To counter this perceived problem they formulated something called Wins Produced. This is an incredibly complicated formula. So, they made a simplified version of this called Win Score that an average fan could use from the box score to see how players on their teams performed. It is this measure that I use to evaluate my team. The formula is

Points + Rebounds + Steals + ½Assists + ½Blocked Shots – Field Goal Attempts – Turnovers - ½Free Throw Attempts - ½Personal Fouls

I take this total and divide by minutes played to give me WS/M.

There has been some criticism of the methods that were used in this method, but none which I really felt exposed a flaw. That is until today. Over at the Saving Darko blog there is a post which suggests that while scoring might be over valued, this is because scoring is a far riskier proposition than rebounding, assists, and the such. One of the things that I like about WS is that unlike some other stats, such as PER, it recognizes the full opportunity cost of a possession. However, taken to its extreme players would have a disincentive to shoot were WS/WP to become the norm because, again, shooting is more risky.

So one needs to still encourage shooting, while looking at the other parts of the game as well. Now granted my players don’t know that I’m rating them on this, thought they do receive feedback in practice during drills/games based on what their WS is showing, but despite my thinking quite highly of WS, I still think highly of Jack P. This is a kid who shoots a lot, and misses a lot. However, his willingness to try and score, even if he’s not the highest % shooter, is helpful overall to the team. I’m happy that I intuitively made the adjustment that Saving Darko seems to be suggesting.

[Barkeep49]

I don’t expect this to be a very long practice report.

I strained my vocal cords this week. After not talking for all of Wednesday and Thursday I was at around 85%. However, I knew that this practice would have a different flavor since I was going to be quieter than normal.

As I’m raising the baskets a strange kid appears. Turns out Noah brought a friend with him to practice. This does not make me a happy camper. I’m a stickler about having closed practices, but since it wasn’t poor Charlie’s (Noah’s friend’s name) fault, Charlie was allowed to stay.

We did our continuous motion drill. Noah has taken to the habit of going to the bathroom. He did it right at the start of the drill. I was annoyed after our little agreement, which I expected him to live up to.

Following the continuous motion we ran our Zone Buster. I introduced a couple of slight changes, really more variations than anything. The players clearly don’t believe in the play, so we likely won’t run it against JCC but perhaps we can run it against HP. It’s very frustrating because I know the play works if run right and I think there’s no reason our team can’t run it correctly. Perhaps I’m just not a good enough coach to teach it. Perhaps I’m wrong about them not being capable of running the play. As I think there’s a good chance I’ll be coaching this team next year I am willing to consider the time this year an investment.

Following that work we did some work on screens. This included some double screens, which worked pretty well. We might have to try and use that in a game or two against man defense as an occasional play. It was easy and effective, though I suppose I already knew that after how MP had played against us. It was nice to see that we could execute it offensively though.

Next we worked on our fast break drill. I added a new twist in where sometimes I yelled two players names on defense to give a 4-2 advantage. We’re loads better at the fast break on both offense and defense, which is good.

Finally, I decided that we would do a scrimmage of sorts. It was a normal game of basketball, but each player on a team was allowed only one dribble (once the ball got past the half court line). The idea was to work on screens and post play. While there were some good teaching moments, the players really struggled on offense. I think we’ll do it again since we do rely a fair amount on the dribble and this really forces them to start looking at other ways besides dribble penetration, which is effective, but can be shut down and thus leads us into trouble.

We ran our suicides, I previewed the tourney a little, and we went home.

The practice went fine. We’d had a few pretty good practices and this was sort of lackluster. But some of that was by design. There was a lot more slow paced activities at this practice, since I figure we’ll have enough basketball over the weekend to tire us out.

In a couple of hours we have our first game. I hope we win it. I know the team is going to feel a little intimidated when we fact the JCC again and I haven’t quite decided on my approach. I hope to get one of the game’s recapped tonight and another tomorrow before our game, but we’ll see. I haven’t been this unsure of our team since the first game. In many ways it’s very similar since I have no clue how we stack up against the talent we’re going against. Hopefully, I’ll be as pleasantly surprised today as I was on that day.

[Barkeep49]

The day of the tournament was finally here. I get to the facility nice and early. I have two games to chose from watching, with HP playing in one and MP2 in the other (I had originally thought it would be MP1 in this tourney, but evidentially not). I decided to watch the HP game and while I did so I decided to keep stats myself, just to see how hard/easy it is to do. One of the parents there and I started talking. HP was playing this team called Karzen, which turns out to be their coach’s name. The team I was watching, in the B conference, were really mostly 3rd graders, with their connection being attendance at a tennis facility in a nearby suburb. I later learned that this was their first game, which you would never know. However, while I was watching HP has handling them easily.

Right on time, my team started to arrive. The HP team had already arrived much earlier (why do kids need to be 45 minutes early to a game at their own facility?) and we established that I was to be the home team. This caused some consternation from the HP team, as they figured since they were at home they’d be home, but it was agreed we’d wear our home jerseys as it was scheduled.

As I’m sitting there, who should arrive, but Michael. Michael, for those of you who didn’t read my dynasty, and I had a long meeting at the end of the baseball season. The baseball season had not been particularly well run and I had written a long letter with very constructive suggestions for the future. Michael was the boss, at the time, of the person who ran the baseball league. We talked for a moment, with him being surprised o see me, as he knew I wasn’t an HP coach, but I explained I was coaching the Spartans. Then, in a moment which is VERY unlike me, I said “And we’re going to win your tournament.” Did I really believe this? Not so much, but the words came flowing out of my mouth.

We finally get to game time. It is clear from the start that this will be a good game. We get off to a quick 2-0 lead before falling behind. I somehow messed up my sub sheet and so I end up winging it. The game is fairly low scoring in the first 6-8 minutes, remembering that we’re playing two 20 minute halves with a running clock which only stops in the final two minutes of a half or for a time-out. The game opens up a bit after that and HP pulls ahead, by as many as 4 or 5. However, right before half we narrow the gap and on a late shot we actually pull ahead by a point.

At half time, I remind them that we can be a great second half team. I feel confident that this game is one we can win. They’re a good team, but we do tend to do better in the second half. We go out there and it’s neck and neck for a while. Just as we look to be pulling ahead, we hit a brick wall and HP comes roaring back. Highland Park pulls up by 5. Despite our best efforts we end up losing by 3. It was a disappointing loss to be sure, since this was a team we could have beaten.

We were not the happiest team in the world after this loss. And there was a fair amount of anxiety over the fact that our next opponent was the JCC. It was hard to think that we wouldn’t start of the tourney 0-2.

Luckily we had a little over an hour to kill before our game. I took in a game between HP and MP2. HP, despite having a comfortable lead going into the second half of their first game, ended up losing the game in OT. HP never bounces back and gets destroyed by MP2. It was a bit of awful sportsmanship as the final score was something like 51-19 and unlike some of our lopsided victories, MP2 played all out the whole game, though they did have their reserves in the game for most of the second half. It really made me mad to see them so needlessly run up the score.

The game on the court we were to play on finally ended and we started to warm-up against our foes, JCC.

Sorry for the slowness of this update. I hope to have the JCC update tomorrow. I do promise to be caught up before our next game on Sunday (no practice Friday).

[path12]

Your comment reminds me of Hasselbeck against the Packers a couple years back in the wild-card round. Overtime, Seahawks win the toss and Hasselbeck goes "We want the ball and we're gonna win!". Couple plays later he tosses an interception that got run back for a touchdown, but never mind that. It's a great ballsy thing to say anyways.

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by path12

Your comment reminds me of Hasselbeck against the Packers a couple years back in the wild-card round. Overtime, Seahawks win the toss and Hasselbeck goes "We want the ball and we're gonna win!". Couple plays later he tosses an interception that got run back for a touchdown, but never mind that. It's a great ballsy thing to say anyways.

I wish I could call this an unfair comparison.

[Barkeep49]

Jack M could not hide his thoughts that we were going to lose to JCC. During the time in between games I had taken some time to talk to him, again, about the importance of a positive attitude. Now in fairness, I felt a good deal of trepidation myself about the game, but the idea of having a positive team attitude is an incredibly important thing to me. I also talked to David about his frustration. As the HP game slipped away, David’s frustration grew and grew and this was not helpful for us as a team or for him individually. I approached him under the guise of “what is frustrating you out there?” and we had a good conversation. I emphasized the need to use the whole team. It was a good discussion.

After a little bit of warm-up, our team sat down for our pre-game meeting. The pre-game meeting revolved around, #3, Luke. When we played the team last time they were basically a one man show and so we talked about forcing Luke to his left. I talked about how happy I was to have the chance to play this team again since I didn’t think we had done our best the last time we played them. I said that I don’t think anyone, including me, was ready last time for how good this team was. We would be ready this time and it would make the difference. At least, I thought to myself, I hoped it would.

The game began. Luke tried his best to go to the right, but David, being the monster defender that he was, kept forcing him left. Luke was clearly uncomfortable with this. His coaches kept yelling “If he’s giving you the left, go left.” The game was hard fought the whole first half. We started off strong, as I think the HP game had us in game shape. The first half was fought tooth and nail, but by half time we were up to a four point lead.

A big controversy occurred late in the first half. JCC called its second time-out, as we continued to build momentum. It was clear what had happened: the rules as sent to me via e-mail said 3 time outs per half, a lot of time outs. I asked a question about this before our first game and was told 3 per game but obviously the JCC coaches had never been informed. In the end the decision was made to give each team 3 time-outs per half. This meant that my saving of all my time outs was for naught.

It was easy to be positive at half. The focus was on momentum. We also talked about the 1-3-1 zone they would sometime play. In the first half the JCC had done a good job of forcing us to score in transition or to settle for longer shots. We were fighting hard for rebounds and getting some put-back points, but the zone was doing exactly what it had been designed to do. I pointed out a few ways we could do better against the zone.

For subbing purposes I had every 5 minutes inserted 2 or 3 (and once in a while 4) players into the game. So I sort divided the halves into 4 parts. During this first part the game remained virtually unchanged. We did have our most remarkable possession of the season. We got the ball at half and held onto the ball, basically just passing it around, for 54 seconds before we found a good shot. The patience on that possession was just amazing. We didn’t end up with a basket, but it was an just an incredible display of passing and team work.

During the second part of the half I rested David. Jack P did an admirable job, both here and in the first half of guarding Luke. Where as David sat in both halves, Luke sat about 2 minutes, if even that, the whole game.

It was during the 3rd part that things changed dramatically. We were up by 4 points about half way through the part when Luke went on a tear. He started stealing every ball around him and taking them in for baskets. We got a basket here and there, but he got 7 points, including an incredibly lucky 3 point shot, in a space of only about 2 minutes. Luke’s 3 point shooting was actually a big bonus for us. There were several times where he just settled for the three, with his coach’s encouragement, and he missed a lot of the time and since we’re a good rebounding team we got the rebound a lot of the time. I’m guessing that in the long run this might not be a bad strategy, since many teams won’t out rebound them, but I am about as virulently against shooting regular 3 pointers at this age as you can get.

So now we’re entering the last part of the game and we’re down. And then we get down by some more, losing by 3 with about 90 seconds to go. I call our second time out (I had called one after the lucky three to try and calm the momentum, which was largely successful) and tried to get our team back on track. With 30 seconds left to go we narrow the game to 1. We get the ball with 14 seconds left in the game and I call our final time-out. I explain that there’s plenty of time left and we need to get a good shot. I tell them that I want to work the ball around since it’s likely we would get a good shot that way. My thinking was that they would so overload coverage on David, who has been playing his normally fantastic game, that they would leave someone else open.

JCC came out of the time-out and their defense was tough. We made a few passes around the perimeter of their zone and nothing was happening. Finally David gets the ball back. The clock is ticking down. I call on him to shoot. He pulls up just behind the free throw line and NAILS a jumper with 2.5 seconds left. JCC immediately calls their final time-out. In the huddle my speech is simple “We all know where this ball is going to go, to Luke. Make sure they in-bound the ball so the clock starts, and then pick-up your men at half court. Don’t foul.”

The ball is in bounded. Luke sprints up the court. He launches his final shot on the sideline, by our bench, just behind the half court line. The ball goes up and it’s got a real shot. My heart absolutely sinks as the ball looks might good. But it turns out to be long and we win the game at the buzzer. Luke literally crumples to the floor.

We did it. We had beaten, at the last second, the one team who had beaten us. Our team goes wild. We shake hands and I immediately pulled away by the conference organizer, before I can even talk to my team, for an explanation of some time changes for the next day. At the time I didn’t realize this, but our win basically finished us in second in our pool. We did discuss the various possibilities, but I predicted that JCC would blow-out HP. Eric, the HP Park District tournament organizer was skeptical, but I knew that’s what would happen. When he called later, he told me I was right and that we’d gotten the second seed.
I was so happy that we beat the JCC team. As the game went on I grew to dislike the JCC coaches more and more. They were loud. They didn’t promote team basketball. Their players didn’t look like they were having as much fun as we were. After the game as we shook hands they were clearly stunned. While we’d both said before the game how much we were looking forward to this match-up, I honestly don’t believe they thought for a moment we could beat them. What is funny is that after the first game we’d played against them I’d told one of the coaches how Luke was just not comfortable being forced left. So it should have come as no surprise that we forced him left. As we were shaking hands I had said “I think we’ll play each other again” with the only way of that happening is if we met in the championship. If we could beat the JCC, at that moment I knew that we really could win it all.

[wade moore]

I'm grinning from ear to ear.

[Barkeep49]

Originally Posted by wade moore

I'm grinning from ear to ear.

You should have seen me Saturday night. I was just overwhelmingly happy. However, with a game to play the next day I had only a little time to bask in the joy I felt.

Following our dramatic last second victory over the JCC we looked at the following as our “road to the championship”:

12 game versus WM – The team is in the A division and was winless when we played them.

If we won that we’d have a 4 o’clock game against the winner of the other pool, which was a team called Karzen. Basically they were a group of players recruited by this guy named Karzen from a tennis academy in a nearby suburb (this was the A team of the same group that had played and defeated HP in overtime).

If we won both of those games we would be in a 5 o’clock championship. JCC had a similar path to the finals.

Now our 12 game against WM was not going to start on time since WM had a game at 11 (owing to the fact that on the original schedule the earliest Sunday game was to be 2 and so they’d rescheduled a league game). The Park District thought we’d start at 12:15, but I always found that to be an optimistic outlook. Still I had the team get there a little before noon in anticipation of an “on-time” start.

Of course this was not to be. We ended up playing a couple of games of lightening with a ref (I even knocked him out of one game, which we joked wasn’t likely my best move). There was a lot of random waiting. The best thing to come out of the waiting was that the team agreed we’d go to lunch following the game.

Finally just after 12:30 they got their fifth player there. We started the game moments later, when they had six or seven of their players there. I had been warned by several players on my team that they had a kid who was HUGE. They weren’t exaggerating. This kid was likely 5”5’ and 190 pounds and, as someone on our team (I think it was Noah) later said, “I didn’t realize a kid so big could also be so fast”. For whatever reason, my guess being he’d played a lot earlier, he didn’t start.

With the exception of this player at center we were pretty much stronger than them top to bottom. By the third part of the first half we had the game solidly in hand, though certainly not out of reach of WM. After half, with a lineup that did not include David nor Scott (who had the thankless job of guarding the huge guy most of the time and consequently had worked himself into foul trouble) we came out and went on a role. We increased, in 5 minutes, or lead from 5 to 15. This would not have been a lineup I’d have expected to go on such a run, but several people seemed to get hot at once including Jack M, who did a nice job of playing point and on defense after having had a couple of lackluster games at point, and Lucas, who finally seemed willing to take shots in the game and not just on put backs. After that it was never really a game. We won the game by 18.

Of note was that the ref who played lightening with us was a real jerk towards the opposing coach. At one point in the first half the coach was unhappy with a travel call (based on the kid carrying the ball). The ref said something to the effect of “Coach if you taught your players how to play I wouldn’t have had to call that travel”. Which was like WHOA. Then at the start of the second half, WM was EXCEEDINGLY slow at coming out of their huddle. In order to make-up for lost time, half time had been shortened to 1 minute, so basically just a time-out. Finally WM comes out of the huddle. There is then some confusion over which way they were going and the ref called over and back on the kid. His argument was that he’d stated several times which way they were going, he had. But c’mon they’re 9 years old. He didn’t favor us, in the sense that calls were called the same going both ways, but I was still glad to know that we wouldn’t be seeing him again (he’d mentioned that this was his only game of the day officiating).

It was really interesting because this was the first game where we were clearly out rebounded. When he was in there their center grabbed a HUGE amount of the boards, offensively and defensively. He also displayed a pretty soft touch on farther out shots. This kid needs a little help on his inside offensive game, and assuming puberty doesn’t completely wreck his coordination, could be a dominating force, but it was not to be on Sunday. In a gam

I had entered the tournament figuring us to be a middle of the road A team in terms of quality of play. The game against HP did nothing to change that estimate. When I crunched the stats of the JCC game I discovered we’d played nearly perfectly. Turnovers were WAY down compared to our normal games, even ones against inferior teams like NF. This took some of the wind out of my sails. I was VERY confident that we would see JCC again entering the day, as I thought we matched up well against the teams we’d have to play today. Knowing that we had managed to just squeak out a 1 point victory when we played our best game, statistically, of the season? Not encouraging. The only redeeming factor was that while most players were at their best, David’s shooting percentage was terrible. It was actually bad in both of the games Saturday, so that was a ray of hope. Of course that could also mean we had fallen into the trap of “David feels like he has to do everything to help us win”, which wasn’t so far from the truth in the JCC game.

On the other hand, where we might have won the JCC game because of one player, this was our best team game yet. Every player on the team, except Tom, had 2 or more shots. The most anyone shot was 10 shots and most players had multiple good looks. Several parents remarked how well we spread around the ball. It was certainly a good TEAM game. This gave me some hope about our future chances should we meet the JCC in the finals.

I had expected to win this game easily, and it was nice that we did so and it was then off to lunch we went.

[Barkeep49]

For Lunch we went to a well known hot dog/hamburger place in HP. Scott had suggested we go to Hooters (which considering there isn’t a Hooters anywhere near by was a particularly amusing suggestion), while Brian was pushing hard core for Wendy’s. However, my suggestion won out when I said that if we went there they’d be able to see what I looked like when I was 10 (I played on a basketball team that they sponsored). Not to mention I knew that they had TVs that we could watch the Bears game on, before heading back to the rec center for what I hoped would be two more games.

We caravaned over there. Gordie’s, Noah’s, and Jack P’s mothers insisted on paying for my lunch, which was very nice of them. Lunch was a very nice affair. The kids all sat together and talked and then watched the Bears game together. I sat with the parents, doing stuff on my laptop, while they all talked and gossiped. Dante’s father and I talked a little bit and he asked me the very legitimate question of why I didn’t go for the three point shot late in the HP game when it would have tied the game. I answered that I felt that we had a better chance of making the basket and stealing the ball than making the shot. In reality? I blew it. Lunch was a real nice way to kill a couple of hours. Towards the end the kids got a little antsy, but it wasn’t too bad, and it was a great team experience.

During lunch a conversation which began towards the end of the WM game continued. Basically the question was would I be coaching the fifth grade team. I gave a non-committal answer along the lines of “I would love to move up with the team, but it’s a long time between then and now so who knows.” Dante’s father had said, even before that “Who do we need to write to about keeping you?” I smiled and he went, “No seriously, who?” It was a very gratifying experience. Part of this conversation, with the players, was also would everyone on the team make it again next year. I obviously had to tread very carefully here. My answer was “I love the team we have this year. Next year at try-outs I’ve got to choose the best 10 or 12 players for the team. I would be thrilled if we had the same team, but I’ll have to put together the best team.”

I was thrilled about something I had heard from the triplet's (and their step-mom). During the interim on Saturday between games Brian and I were talking. He told me that next year they planned on trying out for an And1 team. My heart sank. I asked if he was planning on doing two teams, and he responded, weakly, that he was. I think we'd be a really competitive B league team with-out the triplets but we wouldn't be as good as we are. The idea that we might lose them compounded my misery after the HP loss, and tempered some of my excitement from the JCC win. Well, during the game as we were talking about whether I'd pick the same team next year, David said, "I hope that it would be the same 10 people. We are such a good team." Step-mom also indicated how much all of them loved basketball this year. Losing David would be bad, but I think we'd still be a great team. Losing all the triplets would be catastrophic as they are 3 of our 4 or 5 best players, easily.

Just before half time in the Bears game we headed back to the gym. We caught some of the 4B and 5B championship games. More importantly we waited a long time. Games were still far behind schedule on our court. This meant that JCC was already comfortably ahead by the time our game began. I knew from watching the other team that this team would be scrappy. It was also clear that their coach spent a lot of time on fundamentals. Even in warm-ups they were doing defensive slides and such.

During the first part of the first half the game was a virtual tie, even a little bit in their favor. They played us real well. We seemed a little off balance. They weren’t any bigger than us, but they were really out rebounding us. They wanted the ball more than we did, which was just an amazing thing to happen to our team. In a tough game like this it can be a game of Russian Roulette to see who’ll blink first on calling a time out. While they had an early edge, we had fought back some, again thanks to very good ball movement and use of the post, and with about 6 minutes left in the half, the other coach blinked first and called a time-out. I had decided to call one at 5 minutes to get my last group of subs in and make the rebounding comment.
We have a small lead at half, but again it is the first part of the second half where we make our mark. What had been a close game, with us up by about four at half, suddenly became a game where we were very much in control. Our control only increased as the half went on. Finally with about 5 minutes left we were up by 13. I just couldn’t see them closing the gap, so I went with a weaker line-up with the intent of starting the players on the bench at the start of the JCC game.

At the same time I was backing off, Karzen made a push. The started a very effective press that we just didn’t have the skill on the court to beat. And slowly, bit by bit, they worked their way back. Finally it got to the point where I needed to insert Jack M with about 2 and a half minutes left just to make sure the game didn’t get out of hand. The combo of Jack P and Jack M were able to break through their press. Press break is something I had anticipated we’d really need, but never gotten around to teaching. David is practically a one man press breaking machine. And even if he’s stopped Scott, Brian, Jack M, and to a lesser extent Tom, Lucas and Jack P, all understand the basics of how to beat a press so it seemed like a poor use of time. Fortunately as it got late in the game they were forced to foul us and we did well on our free throws. We ended up winning by a far too close six points. A situation like this is difficult. If it weren’t for the pressure of the JCC game, I’d likely have inserted more of our a unit back into the game. You don’t want momentum to swing so far that your team is helpless to counter act it. However, JCC had finished their game well before the end of our game, and I wanted to give our players as much of a rest as possible. This game never got out of control, but it was might close there for a while.

So we had done it. After an inauspicious beginning we’d reached the tournament final. However, I was not confident. Perhaps the late swing in Karzen had contributed, but knowing that we’d have to play another near perfect game against JCC to beat them just did not inspire confidence. I was left in the trick position of trying to get us ready for another game against the JCC, while also not setting up a situation where we’d feel like failures if we came up short. It was in this mental state that we headed next door to play our now clear foes.

[path12]

This is so cool. I feel like I know these kids.