Many in the Tribe have asked about the Full Court Trips Drill listed in the Master Practice Plan from my last post, ‘Do You Have a Master Plan?‘ Since this is the first drill we do just about every practice, it is appropriate for it to be the first drill detailed in this series.
We work on this drill every day of practice, and it has been invaluable to our program in making it a habit for our players to flow from our fast break directly into the Read & React. Our players love the opportunity to push the ball and score quickly, but if the defense gets back, we do not feel the need to pull the ball out and ‘reset’ in order to run offense.
Here is a video excerpt from Planning the R&R Practice of our team running it, followed by the breakdown of the drill. To set up the video, I must mention that this was filmed at a Spring Clinic, and our team had been off for 2 months. It is not perfect, and we were using players from 3 different levels of our program. What I love about that is that they were all able to operate on the same page because of the Read & React curriculum we have installed.
(If you don’t have Planning the R&R Practice, it is an invaluable resource that we use all season long for ideas and information)
Teaching Full Court Trips
The way we install Full Court Trips, is to first teach our early offense. We use an Inbounder, an Outlet, 2 Lane Fillers (who cross if we don’t pass the ball ahead) and a Rim Runner. The first 3 trips can be taught to all players at all levels regardless of Read and React experience.
Trip 1 – Ball ahead to our Rim Runner
Trip 2 – Ball ahead to Lane Filler, who looks to feed the Post.
Trip 3 – No early shot, go straight to Reverse Dribble.
(This is an opportunity to introduce Circle Movement, but we don’t call much attention to it yet)
We then expand that to our ‘Simple 7’:
Trip 4 – Pass and Cut Layup
Trip 5 – Post Pass and Laker Cut
Trip 6 – Dribble At
Trip 7 – Live 5-on-5
We run the Simple 7 as a 5-on-0 drill until we feel they have the hang of it, then we introduce defenders.
Adding Defenders
Trips 1 and 2 have no defenders, just early offense.
Trip 3 we add 1 defender on the ball handler to be screened. (Not shown well in the video)
Trip 4 vs 2 defenders.
Trip 5 vs 3 defenders.
Trip 6 vs 4 defenders.
Trip 7 vs 5 defenders.
For the last 3 trips, we tell the defenders to pick a player and guard them, not to zone up as you typically would in a disadvantage situation.
The Simple 7 with Defense gets us through the first couple weeks of practice. Once we add more layers, we will change up the scripted layers for awhile, and then eventually work to where Trips 4-7 are ‘take the layer the defense gives you’ trips.
Here are some Full Court Trips diagrams that walk you through the ‘Simple 7 with Defense’
Hopefully this helps answer any questions you may have about the drill, but if not, please leave a comment below to continue the discussion.
