I've been teaching a pre-season strength and conditioning class every morning at 7am. All of the basketball players freshman to seniors are in the class and I've been progressively making the workouts harder and harder each week. I use motivational quotes every day and I'm always looking for ways to push them. There are some great quotes to use from the clips below. The one I'm using on Monday:

"All men are created equal, some just work harder in the preseason." -- Emmitt Smith

If you haven't seen the original Eric Thomas, the hip hop preacher, secret to success motivational speech then take a look here,

Most recently, some people have put together a video montage of NBA players working out with Eric Thomas' words in the background,

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I know that it has been forever since my last post. It's been crazy since I was officially hired several weeks ago. Our football season has been in full swing and so far we are undefeated, picked to finish dead last in the entire province/state and we just went toe to toe with the number 4 ranked team and we came from behind to win the game.

Our basketball teams have been running open gyms the past several weeks and the topic of open gyms came up on the X's and O's forum the other day. Like many of you, open gyms are necessary to get players into the gym playing basketball. The first hour or so is generally pretty good, but then the second hour typically goes downhill and guys are mostly goofing off taking NBA 3-pointers and trying ridiculous circus shots.

Here is a summary of some of the ideas to add some more competitiveness to your open gyms and to make them more effective and relevant:

- play doubles, double the points for offensive board putbacks to emphasize rebounding (off and def).
- add points for taking charges, minus points for turnovers, etc...
- play to 3, but must win by 2 to emphasize defensive stops
- have a round-robin tournament, or king of the hill
- "validate" wins by having the player who scored the winning shot make a FT. Made FT winning team stays, missed FT and its live to next threshold. FTs again to validate, a made FT then winning team stays, a missed FT then both teams off.

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Coaches, just a quick update for you all. I haven't had a chance to put anything together this past week as I've been gearing up for my new teaching job at the school that I am coaching at. I just got the job earlier in the week and it has been quite the whirlwind of preparing our football team for our first game, helping organize open gyms with the basketball teams, and planing and preparing for 7 classes I have never taught before.

I had no idea after I left my previous teaching job in June when or if I would find myself a teaching job aligned to a coaching position at the same school, and 3 months later I am there. Coaches, I am here to tell you that if you are patient, and that if you put your head down and just take care of the things that are in your control, good things will happen.

So, the good news is, I can't imagine being anywhere else in the world, doing exactly what I love to do. The not so good news is, I'll be working harder than I could ever imagine over the next 8 months with football, school, then basketball, school. But I wouldn't have it any other way...

School is about to begin in a few days, cherish the last few days of summer, and I'll be sure to post something basketball related as I breakaway from the madness. I've watched a ton of videos over the summer that I've backlogged and been waiting to see, and I have a ton of fresh ideas in my head I'd like to hash out. Also, I will be going to the Basketball BC Superconference, where Alan Stein, the guru of basketball S+C will be one of the keynote speakers. I will be looking forward to meeting Coach Stein in person after following his stuff online for many years now.

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Watched a few more videos the last day or so with coaches Bob Knight, Bo Ryan, and Sherri Coale. One of the things they said was the most important thing they look for in a scouting report was to identify the player on the opposing team that was the worst percentage outside shooter. That is the player that they want to cheat on for help defense.

Seems pretty obvious, but it's a crucial point. You don't want to spend a whole game trying to figure out which players are the ones that can hurt you from beyond the arc. Not to mention the fact that in High School, most teams will have 2, maybe 3, really good shooters. Find the worst shooter out of the starting lineup, and you will know where your help defense should be coming from.

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It's the calm before the storm, football training camp begins on Monday for us, and my girlfriend is going away to Europe for 2 weeks. So I decided with my last day of nothing really to do, I went downtown and caught some live 3-on-3 action at the annual NBA Jam Session 3-on-3 tourney. It is a cross country tournament held every year for players of all ages and skill. I was watching this one team in particular and there was a post player who being guarded by a guy with long arms. Every time he tried to call for the ball inside, it was getting poked away or even stolen. He looked pretty frustrated both with himself and with his teammates whom he thought were late in seeing him open.

Being the coach that I am, when he subbed out, I decided to approach him and I asked him if I could give him a quick coaching point. He said sure why not. I told him one of the reasons why he was having problems with Mr. long arms defender was that his teammates were either bouncing passing the ball towards him where it was getting poked away, or they were passing it to his body where his hands were.

I advised him instead to use an arm bar with his inside arm, and extend his outside arm out in an L with fingers pointed towards the sky (also known as a Pro Stance). In other words, give your teammates an outside hand as a target. They will most likely throw it a little outside, so you'll have to hop to receive the pass with the outside hand, chin it, then get into your on-ball post moves. He said alright, he would try it when he got back on the flor.

In the next series he subbed in, he tried it against Mr. long arms. He caught the ball successfully with the outside arm, chinned it, reverse pivoted, swept the ball low, blew by Mr. long arms underneath and finished with a reverse layup on the other side of the hoop, away from Mr. long arms attempted block. Needless to say, that just about made my day.

It's a great tip not just for post players though. It's also something you can use for perimeter players. As they come off a downscreen, exploding up past the 3-point line, make sure they are calling for the ball with their outside hand. Cutting towards the basket, the opposite is true, they need to call for the ball with their inside hand.

I got this tip from watching Mark Few's Flex for Success DVD. In it, he keeps telling his guards to call for the ball with the outside hand coming off the downscreen. Off the flex screen, he keeps telling his guards to call for the ball with the inside hand cutting to the basket. Seems so simple a concept, but players don't know these things instinctively, it has to be taught, and reinforced. Anyways, the season is approaching fast, the question you have to ask yourself coaches is, what are you doing this offseason to best prepare yourself for the upcoming season?

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I think every coach has had the situation happen before where we use a lot of coachspeak and the players look at you with that puzzled look. And then you use a different word and then it instantly clicks.

For years, in teaching M2M defense, I've always used the term "hedge and recover". To me, it seems natural, I've been around coaching long enough and I always thought it was a universal term. But I can remember the many times that I've tried to teach it to players and some of them got it, but from others I would get the puzzled look. They problem is that they really don't understand what that means, what does it really mean to "hedge"??

Old School Coach K

I was watching an old school Mike Krzyzewski DVD on M2M defense (I converted it from VHS and isn't available anymore, but this Coach K DVD on Defense is basically an updated one) and in it he talks all the time about the "fake trap". After hearing that, I instantly thought to myself, that is what I need to use to better communicate it to my players. I'm watching the players move, and Coach K is there saying "fake trap" and they're really getting into it. The motion is exactly like going to set a trap, but backing out -- a fake trap.

There's all kinds of coaching jargon that gets in the way of getting your message across to players. Although we take for granted, the many terms we use, we have to assume the players don't know what the heck we're talking about the majority of the time, and we also have to assume that not all terminology is the same from team to team, school to school -- ie. there is no universal terminology. I'd be interested to hear if you all have others out there that might help all of us out.

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After this past season where we started 2 point guards, the more I think about it, it is something that I would definitely go to again given the personnel. The game of basketball has evolved to more of a dribble drive attack and having 2 point guards allows you to take advantage of the extra speed off the dribble. There are also several added benefits:

- never get pressed. Teams didn't even try to press us this past year with our team speed
- early offense initiated quickly. We didn't have to get the ball into our primary PGs hands to start our break. It was just outlet and go.
- shared PG duties. Our 2 guards could share the primary responsibility of bringing the ball up the floor against heavy ball pressure, making it easier for both in the long run.
- our best FT shooters were also our PGs, so we were more efficient from the line as well.

When one of our point guards got injured late in the season, we suffered our first loss of the year against our crosstown arch-rivals (whom we had beaten twice previously). I was (still am) convinced that the main reason why we lost was that we didn't have our 2 point guards on the floor at the same time. With our 2 point guard lineup back intact a few weeks later, we were able to beat the same team in the championship final.

I've seen most recently the Denver Nuggets using Ty Lawson and Raymond Felton on the floor at the same time. You sacrifice size on the boards, and maybe a little scoring, but what you gain in the efficiency of possessions and ball movement is worth it in my opinion. I think it is especially effective under FIBA rules where you basically have 15-20 secs each possession after you factor in bringing the ball across half-court. Let me know what you all think.

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