🏀Maximize Your Early Season Practices
Basketball Tryouts, First Practices, 3v2 SSG, Special Situations
In this week’s AQTO edition (Total read time - 2 minutes and 31 seconds):
🏀 Practice design for early season practices with Mark Cascio
🏀 Xs & Os: West Virginia’s Iverson Curl
🏀 Small-sided game: Jay Wright’s Hunting Dagger 3s (3v2)
Practice Design for Early Season Practices
This week on A Quick Timeout podcast, Mark Cascio of Courtside Consulting shared practical ideas for conducting tryouts and organizing early season practices.
Q: What are your primary objectives for early season practices?
Coach Cascio: We establish our non-negotiables for practice. Before we did something for the first time, I wanted to have player-determined standards. We’d meet together and talk about things like, “What does a great practice look like?” And we’d consolidate those standards on a white board.
As far as practice goes, if you weren’t able to install some things in the summer, it’s going to be more instruction. We leaned a little heavier on drills. An example is a player with the ball; instruction from the coach about “This is how we guard the ball, this is how we influence it, etc.” You’re also installing terminology.
Offensively, we ran a Drive and Space offense, so we put our big rocks in the jar early. Obviously, there was the spacing. You can’t run Drive and Space without space. We liked to play fast. Some people call it Pace and Space. So, we’re going to install our pace, our space, and then ball movement. Pace would be our transition. I love starting with transition because it allows you to flow into your spacing template.
I think spacing goes into, first, your transition (i.e., Can we get spaced in the full court and then arrive spaced in the half?). And then second, can we maintain our spacing? Most offenses struggle with maintaining their flow because they’re not maintaining their spacing. We might arrive spaced, but as we pass, cut, drive, it becomes a free-for-all. So, we’ll use games, our small-sided games - advantage games, disadvantage games to teach players have to properly play with dribble penetration and play .5 basketball.
Listen to the full interview…
Additional Resouces:
Improving Players’ Basketball IQ through Practice Planning with Mark Cascio
Games-Based Coaching with Small-Sided Games with Mark Cascio
Xs & Os of the Week: West Virginia Iverson Curl
College basketball is back! And who doesn’t love a 4-High Iverson action? A simple ATO for almost any level. Top player curls the second big to receive a pass for an easy look inside.
SSG of the Week: Hunting Dagger 3’s 🗡️
Hunting the “Dagger 3” is a concept I heard from Villanova’s former head coach, Jay Wright. Off the offensive rebound is a great to time hunting 3s as the defense reorganizes.
Instructions: The offensive rebounder reads the perimeter defender to make the right pass. The receiver of the pass reads the defender’s distance to decide whether to shoot it or make that “one more” pass to an open teammate for the 3PA.
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