Transition Synergy

This is an idea I've had in my mind for a long time, but haven't really gotten around to writing it. In my opinion its very important that you have a cohesive philosophy as a coach. Something that is often overlooked, even by good coaches, is whether your offensive system and defensive system work together to create a team system. If you have an offensive system that operates on completely different premises and values than your defensive system, you might not be getting the most out of your team.

When I played for my high school team, my coach had an well balanced coaching philosophy. Our offense was designed to create multiple predictable scoring opportunities in the paint in half court sets, and we were encouraged to slow it down and run our sets if we didn't have an obvious fast break advantage. On defense we rarely pressed, relying instead on changing defenses often based on offensive outcome and sometimes that would change each quarter or half. This forced the opposing team to use a significant portion of their offense to attack us, and waste quite of a lot of shot clock identifying and deciding how to do so. My point in discussing this first is to give you an example of a philosophy that worked well. Maybe you can see the synergy already. On both ends of the court we used or extensive offensive and defensive sets to test the other teams preparation and focus. We were a strong rebounding team, so we tried to minimize the possessions per game and try to come out on top of points per possession. Offense and defense felt the same, it was never jarring mentally to transition from one to the other. This isn't how I currently coach, but in retrospect I can see why it worked for us.

Why NCAA Pre-Season Polls Need to Go

I have so many other things I want to write posts about - not the least of which is in regards to the article about CourtVision I've recently read, or the series of articles about coaching defense. But this is something I need to post about, so here it is.

Pre-season polls for NCAA basketball and football need to stop. Its a pointless and ultimately damaging item that would be better served being eliminated. This is a purely emotional post, I'm not going back and looking at old polls or anything like that. But I think - intuitively - that I am right about this.

Read and React Review

The season ended on Friday with a bit of a whimper, along with the very strange experience of being ejected from my first and only game in 12 years (without a warning, or any time between the first and second technical foul - and no, there was no profanity involved - it was...inexplicable). We faced the top seed in our playoff bracket, a team we had lost two games earlier in the season by an average of 36.5 points, and were down 24-17 halfway through the 3rd quarter when it happened. So while I'm pleased with the way the team had played, it certainly didn't end the way I wanted. C'est la vie.

The real reason for this post is to review my first season with the Read and React offense. Hit the jump to read more about our offensive transformation.

RnR Offense Installed

It has been almost exactly one month since the Read and React offense made its way into my playbook. I have a lot of things to say about it, but only one statement sums it up. I'm never looking back. This is the most dynamic offense I've been able to teach. And the thing that I'm going to discuss in this post is something I was never expecting.

The RnR is the most coach-friendly offense I've used. No contest.