My friend coaches a 7th/8th grade rec basketball team, and his assistant coach was his girlfriend. They broke up, she doesn't help him out anymore, so he asked me to help him out at practice this coming Tuesday. I've always wanted to get into coaching, and I this is a pretty nice little opportunity for me to get my feet wet. Next year we plan on coaching a team together for the full season. I'm pretty pumped up, and I'm definitely taking it too seriously (all I'm thinking about right now is drills to run them through and whatnot), but this should be great.
2-3 ZONE IS WEAK! You need to teach those kids the match-up zone, with a trapping aspect. No one will know what to do. Only acceptable zones are trapping zones. 1-3-1 all day.
match-up zone will take too much time. Just make sure they're active in rotating around the perimeter and you'll destroy them. No middle school team is going to beat you by shooting perimeter jumpers all game long
One of the problems he told me was that a lot of the kids on the team are hard-headed and have some negative attitudes. One kid lets his talent get to his head. Hell, his dad tapes his practices from the bleachers. My friend said that he's talented and quick but a turnover machine and can't accept constructive criticism. I doubt I'm going to have any effect on this kid from the sounds of it, especially with one hour of assistant coaching, but it sounds like all this kid needs is discipline. I'm gonna take some drills that my old AAU coach used to run with us, and see how some of these kids respond to them. Again, I'm probably taking this way too seriously, but hey that's a good thing.
I can't even get my intramural team to understand a match-up zone, so I doubt the 7th and 8th graders would execute it, anyway. 1-3-1! DO IT!
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Kid Chocolate)</div><div class='quotemain'>1-3-1 all day.</div> I was gonna say. That's the only defense I was ever coached and its pretty damn good if you got a solid, athletic big man.
Screw playing zone, have the guys play Man-to-Man, or in this case Boys-To Boys. Good luck, have fun but more importantly have the kids have fun.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (CelticBalla32 @ Jan 17 2008, 03:44 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>One of the problems he told me was that a lot of the kids on the team are hard-headed and have some negative attitudes. One kid lets his talent get to his head. Hell, his dad tapes his practices from the bleachers. My friend said that he's talented and quick but a turnover machine and can't accept constructive criticism. I doubt I'm going to have any effect on this kid from the sounds of it, especially with one hour of assistant coaching, but it sounds like all this kid needs is discipline. I'm gonna take some drills that my old AAU coach used to run with us, and see how some of these kids respond to them. Again, I'm probably taking this way too seriously, but hey that's a good thing.</div> Make them run drills all practice long and the ones with the bad attitudes, make them go up against one in another in box out drills. Always remember, suicides/gassers are a coaches best friend.
Dude, I'm literally staring at a bunch of coaching resources right now. I work at a provincal basketball federation so we have all the books, dvd's etc. I'm going for my level one in a month, hopefully get level two by next fall and ideally level three sometime next year. How about you.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (shookem @ Jan 17 2008, 11:14 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Dude, I'm literally staring at a bunch of coaching resources right now. I work at a provincal basketball federation so we have all the books, dvd's etc. I'm going for my level one in a month, hopefully get level two by next fall and ideally level three sometime next year. How about you.</div> I'm not into any of that right now. I do, however, have some resources to pick at. When I played AAU ball, my coach gave us a thick packet consisting of the Syracuse basketball offseason workout program. I also have another small packet full of ball handling drills, and a 50-minute workout packet that my old coach put together himself. I'll be looking through these things over the weekend and pick out a few for Tuesday night. That's awesome that you're into coaching too, though. Good luck with it!
i wish i could do zone, i coach as well, and i coach grade 7s and 8s. Its hard to get some of them to learn basic plays. I try to run back door cuts but meh. I have a couple plays i just aded that might work . But coaching is awesome
I just got back from my first practice as a coach. Unfortunately, it apparently was the last practice of the year. I can't make it to their next game, due to work, but I may be able to make it to a playoff game or two of theirs, depending on how far they go and what days the games land on. But I had a lot of fun. We didn't do as much hands-on stuff as I thought we were, but I did manage to help a kid immensely with his shooting form. Whether he carries that over to his own practice time/games is up to him, but he was one of the kids my friend said didn't listen well. He was great with me. He listened well, seemed to take it pretty seriously, and it was nice to see him smile after he hit a few jumpers in a row. At the end of the practice, his dad (who was watching through the whole thing) came up to me and told me I did a great job with him, so that made me feel pretty good. I am definitely coaching through the full season next year. I can't wait.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (BasX @ Jan 19 2008, 11:56 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>i wish i could do zone, i coach as well, and i coach grade 7s and 8s. Its hard to get some of them to learn basic plays. I try to run back door cuts but meh. I have a couple plays i just aded that might work . But coaching is awesome</div> I was just at that level last year, and my team could run a pretty effective zone. I have absolutely no natural basketball skills, but I found learning cuts, picks, and the such to be easy. Our only problem was our offense, where the coach's son thought it'd be fun to just pop 3s and bitch at the ref.
after my teams game Saturday, they suck, they don't care, players i coached last year are annoyed at the ones we got this year cause they won't listen to my friendsand i cause we know basketball and they are just thinking they know everything AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Well, I just got back from coaching my first game. It was a playoff game. In the first half, we were brutally beaten. We were down by 20+ at one point, and they started off on a 21-4 run. My kids were just letting them waltz into the lane at will - one kid literally had his hands on his hips (yes, I pulled him out). My longest, most athletic, and most active player also picked up 3 fouls in the 1st half (you only get 5 in this league). To top it off, 2 kids didn't show up, so we only had 7 players to work with all game long. So as you could imagine, a lot of guys were tired. At the half, we were down 31-10. The second half, however, was a completely different story. We made an amazing comeback with our press, effort, and domination on the glass (thanks to my athletic big man, who probably grabbed 7-8 boards in the 2nd half). We ended up winning the 2nd half 31-15 Final Score: 46-41 (we lost). I'm not happy with the way we played in the first half, but I'm very proud of them for the way they came out and played in the second half. Luckily, this league's playoff setting is double-elimination. We have a game tomorrow night at 8 pm. If we win, we advance and get at least one more game. If we lose, our season is over. I'll keep you posted.
Our season is unfortunately over. We had our second playoff game tonight, and lost by 13 or 14. It was the same exact story as yesterday's game - we were down by 21 at halftime and made somewhat of a comeback - unfortunately, this one wasn't quite as epic and fell short. No matter what we said to them during timeouts (which, we only get 3 full timeouts for the entire game in this league - no 20's - ridiculous, and something I'll talk to them about next season), they didn't really improve. No matter how many times I screamed it - by name, someone wouldn't get back on the press. In result, as you would imagine, we got murdered with fast break buckets. So then we tried to tone it down on the press and have 3 guys get back with two pressuring full-court... nope, didn't work. Why? Three to four kids still pressed full court. So I took 2 of them out - the next 2 did the same thing on most possessions. In addition, the shot selection was horrible and they didn't move the ball or off the ball very well. This one official was really getting on my nerves too. There was about 7 or 8 jump-balls in the game - the possession is supposed to change each time. We only got 2 of those 8 jump-balls, rather than the 4 we should have gotten. Oh well, there's really nothing I could have done tonight. Just one of those games. I'm really looking forward to next season, especially since we will get our top 2 scorers back. Next year, I will make sure these kids are ready to go on game days.
Yeah, all rec refs suck. We had amazing transition D. Most of us were unathletic, but we still would run our asses off. Too bad we couldn't do shit on the offensive end.
