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18 Jun

Posted at 21:20h in Archive, Dynamic Defense by
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To understand Level 3 in the Dynamic Defense, you must first understand Situations. So, what's a Situation? Put simply: a situation is an offensive action that demands a switch or a double-team in order to stop the ball. That means if help and recover techniques (Level 2) are not enough to stop an offensive attack, that attack has just been escalated to a situation and now requires a Level 3 defender. A Level 3 defender can recognize situations and either switch or double-team to stop the action. Well, as you can imagine, it would be difficult to list every Situation so instead I've focused the lens on a typical action that creates a Situation for many teams: Feeding the Post. The video below is an excerpt from Dynamic Defense, our newly released DVD series on taking your defense to the next level… literally. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwCTNrSydVc&feature=youtu.be Now, feeding the post doesn't always create a situation. If the post player can be defended one-on-one, then there’s no Level 3 Situation. But, oftentimes that offensive post player demands the attention of a double-team.

13 Jun

Posted at 19:26h in Archive, Dynamic Defense by
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Here's what I mean. Within Dynamic Defense, there are four basic defensive levels for players to achieve. The first level requires you to be able to guard the ball and keep it out of the middle one-third of the floor. To achieve the second level, a player must not only guard the ball, but he or she must be able to defend away from the ball. That means being in a position to help a teammate keep the ball from being shot, driven, or passed into the middle one-third. A Level Three defender must be able to guard the ball, guard away from the ball and to also guard situations. What’s a situation? It’s an offensive action that has forced the defense to switch and rotate. You’ll know you’re about to define a situation when your players say, “Coach, what do we do in this situation?” The Level Four defender knows the best way for everyone to rotate out of a Level 3 situation, and get back to their original responsibilities, without giving up a basket. Now, what’s dynamic about those four levels?

28 May

Posted at 17:12h in Archive, Dynamic Defense by
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Dynamic Defense is a leveled system for teaching individual and team basketball defense. It includes first a grading system so that players and coaches (and parents for a lot of you) can be on the same page as it relates to an individual's defensive development. Then, a curriculum for improvement within each level and also through the levels. Level 1 teaches what it means to Guard the Ball and then spends the rest of the time equipping the player with the skills to meet those requirements. Within Level 1, there are three grades of defenders: Great, Good, and OK. The following video is an excerpt from our new video package, Dynamic Defense. You can check out the breakdown of each video as well as the Dynamic Defense trailer here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeEDqymhfzQ Of course, we all want our players to be Great Level 1 defenders but that’s not always how it works out. It’s even possible (according to my definitions of Great, Good, and OK) to be a Great Level 1 defender when guarding Player X while being only a Good Level 1 defender when guarding Player Y. If you’re a Great Level 1 defender, you take away all three aspects of an offensive player's Triple Attack: The Shot, The Drive, and The Pass.

24 May

Posted at 13:54h in Archive, Dynamic Defense by
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Every basketball coach wants their players to take charges, but let's face it, on just about every attempt to draw the charge it's a 50-50 chance that the call goes either way. With the speed of today's game, it's getting harder and harder for officials to determine (in a split second) what is and what isn't a charge. Ultimately, it comes down to what a ref thinks she sees and even then many times the reasons given for the call don't sound anything like what's in the rule book. When I saw Mano Watsa and Sefu Bernard teach this skill during one of their PGC Basketball camps, I knew I had to capture it for Dynamic Defense. Their teaching progression and drills were simply excellent! You’ll find two of their teaching points on this excerpt from Level 1 of Dynamic Defense.

22 May

Posted at 03:14h in Archive, Dynamic Defense by
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Ever since we released the Read & React Offense a few years ago, coaches have been asking about the other side of the basketball coin - defense. Actually, they would ask, "So, what about a Read & React Defense?" And, for almost three years now, we've been teasing you about a leveled system of teaching defense. We're calling it Dynamic Defense instead of Read & React Defense, though. Actually, we never considered Read & React Defense because… well, because it didn't make sense. So, why Dynamic Defense?

11 May

Posted at 18:18h in Archive, Motivation by
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In a previous post, we mentioned the importance of visioneering and highlighted this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Every great endeavor begins with a vision of something greater than yourself, but until it's shared and internalized by the team, it will get no traction. So, as a coach, you are responsible to create (or at least mold) your team's vision. You are the captain of that ship after all. You can develop a successful vision for your basketball team by making three commitments:

07 May

Posted at 23:00h in Coaching the Read & React by
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I define a "situation" as an offensive action that engages two or more defenders simultaneously. For example, most screening actions create situations, an attacking drive generates a situation, and many times just feeding a competent post player instigates a situation. If your opponent lacks cohesion as a defensive unit, a single situation may be enough to break them open for a score. The reality, though, is that most defensive teams are better coached and more prepared: they are capable of helping and recovering as well as double-teaming and rotating back without giving up a scoring opportunity. Read & React Offense Basketball Pick and Roll But, just because a team can handle one situation doesn't mean they can handle two or three in a row, or even two or three simultaneously. Set this as a goal for your Read & React team (especially when you come up against better defensive teams): every possession, force the defense to handle more than one situation back to back or at the same time. Below are a couple of examples of how you can do that.
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