Today’s basketball coaching notes are on Ettore Messina Defensive Principles

These basketball notes talk about Ettore Messina’s offensive and defensive systems and the importance of developing your own system.  It’s a very inspirational set of lectures on man to man defense and offense from Coach Messina.

Coach talked a lot about the importance of having your own system. The key to great coaching is taking your system and breaking it down in to progressional steps that you can teach your players. The trick is to move them along quickly enough so that they stay interested but slowly enough so they understand and are not overwhelmed with detail. Similarly it must be difficult enough to challenge them but not so difficult that they get frustrated and quit. This is the art of coaching. Working out how your system progresses and what the steps are along the way is as important as how the system works overall and is often overlooked. Another important aspect of coaching is selecting from a vast amount of knowledge at your disposal exactly what it is you want to teach. This is especially relevant in the non-professional environment where practice time is limited.

Partly for this reason, coach warned against simply copying a system that you find at a clinic but rather take elements that can be built into your system. Beware that the more you know makes it more difficult to coach in a sense as you face the problem of selecting what it is you are going to teach The most important thing is that players must feel that they are being led at an appropriate pace along a system to a clear end goal. Clear ideas are far more important than discipline. Coach talked about his principles on offence and defence rather than specific offensive plays or exactly how to defend certain screens. On defence:

The goals of Coach’s defensive system are:

1. Don’t give up a transition/easy basket. Too much time is spent on half court defence without enough attention being given to transition defence. Most defensive mistakes happen in the first 8 or last 5 seconds of possession.

2. Challenge the set shot (especially a 3 pointer). Coach believes the two weakest fundamentals are passing, and shooting off the dribble. Therefore his system tries to force the offence to pass and shoot jump shots rather than set shots

3. Limit offensive rebounding

Click on the pdf link to download the basketball coaching notes:

Basketball Coaching | Ettore Messina Belgrade Basketball Clinic