🏀 The Scramble Defense
No Dribble SSG, Brad Stevens' Winner Play, and Full Team SSGs
In this week’s AQTO edition (Total read time: 3 minutes)
🏀 The Scramble Defense with Matt Ridge
🏀 Variation on Brad Stevens’ Winner Play
🏀 Small-sided game No Dribble Tag
🏀 Utah Utes Xs & Os
🏀 Full-team small-sided games
The Scramble Defense with Matthew Ridge
This week A Quick Timeout podcast, Coach Matthew Ridge dives into his half court Scramble Defense. Coach Ridge's 84.17% winning percentage is the highest winning percentage in the country at the NJCAA level. His teams have 5 top-5 finishes at the national tournament in the past 14 years. His team currently sits at #2 in the national polls.
Q: Can you give a quick overview of the Scramble Defense?
Ridge: It’s a defense that we don’t run every single possession. it’s something we’ll run randomly throughout a game, depending on our opponent, who their point guard is. We may trap him a little more often if we think he’s someone who may not handle that type of pressure. But sometimes we’ll run it to get the ball out of the point guard’s hands as well. So, there’s multiple reasons as to why and when we run it.
Q: Is it something that looks the same every possession?
Ridge: There are several ways to run it. You can trap the first pass across half court and rotate. Then you get two interceptors and a goaltender. A lot of times it’ll lead either to a deflection, steal, turnover, fast break. Or sometimes it’ll lead to a quick jump shot, which is something also beneficial to us.
Listen to Coach Ridge explain more about the Scramble Defense on this episode of A Quick Timeout podcast...
Also available on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
Check out these additional resources on the Scramble Defense from Championship Productions:
Play of the Week: Variation of Brad Stevens’ “Winner”
Former Celtics head coach, Brad Stevens, made this SLOB famous a few years back. Recently, Montana State used a variation on it to win an early season game out West.
You can download this play and all of my FastModel Chalk Talk plays here.
SSG of the Week: No Dribble, Half-Court Tag
We added in some tag this past week during our Holiday Break practices. It’s probably not a true small-sided game but still was fun way to warm up for the afternoon’s practice!
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