Baseball Opinion

Posts Tagged ‘coach’

The ability to play good basketball defense is more important than most players think. Good defensive skills not only will get you on the team, they’ll get you into the starting line-up.

Everybody wants to shoot, and everyone wants ankle-breaking dribbling moves, and why not? It’s the scorers and the moves that get the “oohs” and “ahhs” from the crowds, that get most of the glory and make up most of the highlight reels on the evening newscast.

And of course, scoring is important – you can’t win a game without points on the board. So don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing bad about working to become good shooters and good ball handlers.

My point is, don’t neglect defense. Teams need good defenders. If you look at every team that’s won big championships and national titles, you would be hard pressed to find one that didn’t have good defense – either a good overall defensive team, or at least one or two defensive specialists.

A good coach looks for good defensive players during tryouts, and spends a great amount of time at the start of preseason practices focusing on improving the team’s defensive skills. So even if your offensive skills are only so-so, good defensive skills will get you noticed. And if you already have good offensive skills, having weak defensive skills can make you a liability to the team.

So, how do you improve your defensive skills?

1. Understand your Role on Defense. Man to man defense is a must. Even if you are playing a zone, the principles of man to man will be applied. So know how to play man to man defense, but also realize that you have to see what else is happening on the floor in case one your teammates gets beaten and you need to help out (something else a coach looks for when choosing a team)

We are volunteer youth football coaches and we don’t have unlimited hours to spend on coaching. However, youth football is pretty much the most coaching oriented sport there is, in other words the coach can be the difference in winning and losing more than any other sport. So you must do the following to win games and give your team the competitive advantage it needs. The following game process takes about 3-4 hours on a Sun. night.

Step 1. You need the game film from your opponent’s previous game. There are usually no high bleachers at youth football games so get an endzone view of the teams offense. Always film behind the team you are scouting so you can see exactly what they are doing. Make sure you can see all the players and their numbers on every play.

Step 2. Watch the film and diagram every single play the team runs including repeats. I usually use cardstock. Write down the play number and the down and distance to the best of your knowledge and a caption for each play i.e. I would write play 1, 1 and 10, Pitch Sweep Right and diagram the blocking assignments as executed and the backfield player numbers. For a playoff game I would take the extra time to write down every player’s number.

As you diagram the plays you will learn their playbook and start to get an idea of the coach’s play calling philosophy. This is the most time consuming part of the process as you have to keep pausing and rewinding to get all the blocking assignments and the plays drawn up correctly.