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.

Creating a Practice Plan

Maybe this is a little simplistic for a blog post, but its still a very important thing - especially for new coaches to get right.

An organized practice is critical to accomplishing what you set out to do each day. I've gone through multiple different plans, both written and typed before my current template, which is done on computer and printed out before practice. I've placed download links below, one for Microsoft Word, and one for Macintosh Pages.