Pre Season Practice and Preparation
It’s that time of year when coaches and players are starting to get really excited about the start of their season. We all probably have a ton of ideas floating around about how we are going to make our team as successful as possible and have spent a lot of time thinking about the make-up of our team and what we do well versus things that need to improve. In the information age with online coaching clinics, websites that provide tons of information, etc. it’s very easy to get overloaded with things that we feel are necessary to our success and try and put in too much of our “system.” I know this is something I have struggled with and have wanted to try and simplify things more this season to make sure we do the “common things, uncommonly well.”
I’m not a system coach but someone that believes in adjusting your team strategy each season based on the talent that you have. I’ve never wanted to fit a square peg in to a round hole and make our players adapt to “my” style when their strengths might not necessarily be geared for that. This may be different at the collegiate level when you are able to recruit players that have the physical traits you are looking for, but at the high school level it’s very hard to maintain that consistency year in and year out.
I enjoy this challenge because I feel it makes me a better coach and forces me to learn more about different offensive and defensive strategies that will be best suited for the team we have the following year. Another benefit is that our players are challenged to learn new ways to play basketball and better prepare them for the challenges of the next level if they are lucky enough to have that option. Coaching at a high school with 225 kids in the entire school we have managed to send four players in the last three years to the college level and will send two more after this season. Our players are well-rounded and understand how to play different styles as we try and maximize their different skill sets year in and year out.
The past few seasons we’ve approached the off-season with the mindset that we are going to collect as much information as possible from anywhere we can get it until we decide what we feel will work best for us. We tinker with some ideas during our Summer League and then come back in late August/September and start breaking it down. Then, when we find out how many practices we are going to have before our first game I put together a calendar that serves as a checklist for what I want to accomplish before the first game. Similar to a football coach scripting out the first 10 plays of a game this helps me stay organized and make sure I have allotted practice time to implement the system we discussed above.
Attached is what I have put together for this year. Some of these things will be new to our kids while others will be reviewing and practicing the things we already do well and we believe will help us this year. We hope that the things listed here take up a little more than half of our practice knowing we need to implement drills that feed in to these concepts prior to rolling it all out to them.
Coach Justin Duke
Played at Linn Benton CC for two years and in the IBL for one season
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Scio High School Girls Head Coach – HAVOC AAU Boys Head Coach
Back to Back State Title Game Appearances 2010-11, and 2011-12
League Champions 2012, Coach of the Year 2012
Click on the pdf link to download the basketball coaching practice plan for your basketball playbooks:
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