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Tribe Success Stories

Wins Big & Small from our Better Basketball community for the 2021-22 season!

Seaman High School — Topeka, Kansas, USA

The Seaman High School Boys Basketball won the 5A State Championship in Kansas. Our primary offense was the Read & React which we started using a few years ago.

Advice for Other Coaches

Better Basketball provides you with a system that will help you be organized, simplify your coaching, and give you the freedom to adapt to your teams personnel.

Favorite Course or Learning

This year we incorporated the Zone Offense course vs. zone defenses and liked how it didn’t require put in more individual zone offensive sets for each of the zone defenses we faced.

— Coach Craig Cox

Notre Dame Preparatory - Pontiac, MIChigan, USA

Advice for Other Coaches

  • Take time to plan out your practice schedule and stick to your plan. It is very easy to want to get to the more advanced areas before mastery of the other levels is obtained.
  • Be prepared for some layers to go very fast, and some to take much longer than expected.
  • Finally, don’t get overwhelmed with all the information. It is easy to seek quick fixes and scan through all the material.
  • Focus on the fundamentals, accept the fact that there are areas that your team will not be able to handle early on, and stick to your plan.

I coach a Varsity Girls Basketball Team that is historically made up of non basketball players. By that I mean their sport that they focus on and spend their offseason working on is not basketball. While they are great athletes, they did not have a lot of game experience outside of the high school season.

I had been used to running set offenses, but this often resulted in players standing around and not knowing what to do and an inability to react to defensive changes.

I researched the Read and React and felt that this would accomplish some major goals:

  • The first being movement with and without the ball.
  • The second, forcing the girls to play basketball and not run plays.
  • Third, place an importance on everyone on the court.

 

Fast forward to our season, it was immediately apparent from game 1 by all watching that our girls were moving better with and without the ball.

 

They were communicating better, and as we added more of the Layers, became more and more of a threat offensively as opportunities opened up.

 

The biggest success was the girls were learning to be basketball players. With the improvement I saw in the girls with the first year, I am very excited to see the growth as we continue to add, refine, and improve the Read and React into our program.

— Coach tom Kocik

YCMHS Varsity Girls D1 — Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

We started read and react 4 years ago at the varsity jv and junior high girls program. The first tournament we went to with our junior girls they made it to the finals using only pass and cut, dribble at and read line cuts. No basket drives.

 

Fast forward to 4 years we have accomplished so many first time things at our school. Previously our school had never won a D1 game. Never been closer than a 40 point loss this two power houses and we beat them both this year. Went 20-8 and finished second in our league. What I like most about it is the ability to talk to players about what they did wrong. Often the kids will tell you what they did wrong before you even get a chance. And they just play basketball. Best clinic/ money ever spent.

Favorite Course or Learning

  • Read and React (obviously)
  • The quick Read and React courses
  • Fusion (for sure)
  • Stages for individual skills.

Advice for Other Coaches

Once you do it kids are accountable. Never have to say “you are doing _______” because they know and so does everyone else.

— Coach Brent Schean

Campbell High School — Smyrna, Georgia, USA

We had another year in the positionless basketball system. Our team benefited greatly from it.


We won our region Region 2-AAAAAAA and got to the Final Four. Had chances to win our final game which is all you can ask. Lost to the eventual state champion.


I am very happy with our progress and mindset. Girls are moving without the basketball and making more options for our team to be effective. This year I graduate 6 seniors that have been with me in the system the whole time they have been in high school and it showed in key moments of our season. I have some refining to do over some of those awkward (stale) moments where we could have done better had we stayed the course. I believe it has made us a better program. 

Favorite Course or Learning

Drills for the various layers. We have only implemented layers 1-6 and I have been running this system for about 7 years

Advice for Other Coaches

Get this system and install it over a period of time. You will be happy with the habits you see develop.

— Coach Randy McClure, Sr.

Alta Aurelia High School — Alta, Iowa, USA

I finished my first year as Head Coach of the Boys Basketball team for the Alta-Aurelia Warriors. I’ve coached before, however, this was my first year implementing the principles of the Read and React Offense.

 

My team was very inexperienced as we had only one returning player with any varsity experience, and had 5 sophomores and 1 freshman on a roster of 12. So with a young, inexperienced team, a new coach and a new system, needless to say it was a steep learning curve for both players and coaches.

 

We finished the season overall at 5-17, however, we lost 5 games by a combined 16 points, so we are looking to make a big jump next season with 8 letter winners back and several newcomers who will really help us. Having run the R&R for a season will allow us to play in a summer league and further develop our team chemistry and continue to sharpen our basketball IQ within the R&R offense.

 

Despite not winning a lot of games this year, we had very good team chemistry and no players quit, despite our poor W-L record, and losing 5 close games takes a toll on your mental side of the game. We just resumed open gyms this last weekend and will continue to work on individual skills and participate in a summer league to help us improve as individuals and as a team.

Advice for Other Coaches

Be patient with implementing the R&R. Due to time constraints, I tried to throw too much at the players at once. Just focus on Layers 1-4, for the first half of the season, then depending on how well the players pick up the concepts, add from there depending on your personnel.

— Coach Scott Randall

Bridgeport High School — Bridgeport, Texas, USA

I have been coaching 36 years now and have been a devoted Read and React coach for the past 15 years. I made a change to a small 4A Texas HS this year and it is the third school I have had the pleasure of introducing this offense.

 

It’s fun to see how well they will pick it up and make a layer or two a natural habit. I had 1 varsity player returning from a team that had been to the final 8 in the state two years in a row. A team that had 6’3, 6’2, and 6′ in the front court, and this is HS girls! We were now 5’8 and under.

 

I began the trek in July in summer workouts introducing the basic pass n cut, readline, laker cut, and circle movement, and I basically focused those all year. I had 2 seniors, 2 juniors, 2 sophomores, and 3 freshman.

 

Our first game was ugly and you would almost think I hadn’t taught them any layers! We scrambled from 18 down and lost by 5. The next game started the same way, except this time we came back from 16 down and won by 4. We then reeled off 11 straight wins and the girls were having fun. Backdoors, circle reverse backdoors, and finding the NP or SV on a circle move became something they took pride in and they would look for each other and fed off each other.

 

We opened district with a 11-20 3pt shooting to upset one of the top teams in our district. We had the number 1 and number 12 ranked teams in our district, and even though we couldn’t get past those teams, we definitely competed well against them.

 

We were able to finish tied for third in our district and got into the playoffs, which was something I wasn’t sure we could do, and if we did, I figured most likely a first round exit. Somehow, the girls proved that the whole can be much better than the parts when is flows on the offensive end, and we made it to the third round, which put us back up against the number 1 team in the state which we had lost to twice in district already, but I was so proud of how our girls competed.

 

They really enjoyed drills that “collapse the time frames” where we could teach multiple layers. They loved “slicing” up the defense with backdoor cuts and they took pride in it, plus it allowed us much more time to spend of three point shooting, which during the season we had a 6 game stretch where 4 of the games we hit 13,11,11, and 13 threes. The girls even made up three point “dances” on the bench for certain players.

 

At 57 years of age now, it was like being a kid in a candy store. While most of my friends have retired, I want to do this for as long as I can. Impacting kids lives and just having the local parents and even grandparents that all graduated from Bridgeport HS coming up to me saying “thank you for what you do for those girls” is all the fuel I need. God is good all the time, and both times I ran into the politics of the outside forces of school board parents or new Athletic Directors bringing in “his own man,”

 

God has allowed me to be a blessing somewhere else. It’s not a job, it’s a mission. As Rick Warren stated in his book “The purpose driven life,” the first 4 words of the book, “it’s not about me.”

Advice for Other Coaches

My first year in college coaching, the head coach told me, “teach what you know, but learn as you go.” and “Never be afraid to try something new, it will keep you young.”

— Coach Darryn Shearmire

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