Bigger and Better

We have created a new website called "Melrose Girls' Basketball" at Melrosegirlsbasketball.com to spread the wealth. The site will provide details on the Melrose program, including schedules, rosters, game results, and so forth.

The site will emphasize what's out there for Melrose girls basketball, and is specifically not designed to promote individuals.

I've put up a new article on the blog contained within.

Only One Way to Get Better

Not a lot to say. Form leads to function.

Jeff Mate' has created a new website...Melrosegirlsbasketball.com. Easy. I'll be contributing and that'll start soon....

Cross-Sport Characteristics

Athletes benefit from playing multiple sports. Playing helps develop two of our key tenets, FITNESS and TEAM SPIRIT. Sport-specific skills require separate training.

In this month's Lacrosse Magazine, the author enumerates some important qualities for superior athletes.

• Leadership
• Consistency
• Mental Toughness
• Big-Game Presence
• Poise

As our players gain more experience and develop, we will be looking for 'court leadership'. A leader can help inspire the players around her, and transmit high energy play. Consistent players will be able to bring reproducible skills (e.g. rebounding, blocking out, defense, passing), even when some parts of their game (e.g. shooting) might be off. Mental toughness is partly innate, but players who know they have prepared can lean on that preparation in the critical moments. 

We look forward to a terrific year with both teams. 

Hat tip: Jeff Mate'

We Hold These Truths...

Great notes from Butler coach Brad Stevens...the intersection between basketball and life

Highlights...

In 11 years, never had a player in the program that worked his tail off on the defensive end that wasn’t a great teammate/student

Your team is never too far away from being great, and never too far away from being bad

Goals for transition defense
Stay in front of the basketball
Protect the basket
Pick up the basketball
Find good shooters

Tony Dungy example from his new book: Concept of “regenerative leadership”  Older players spreading the culture to the younger players, and the younger players continue the cycle when they become older players

Awareness can allow a marginal athlete to become a very good defender—more so than a great athlete with marginal awareness

Rated PG

Steve Nash has words of wisdom for point guards. Understand that point guard is the hardest position to learn and the hardest position to teach. I had my daughter play point guard as a middle schooler because I wanted her to learn to think 'pass' first.

Worth a look... remember, we will always emphasize that what makes a complete player is what they can do for those around them, not just themselves.

Giving Back

We want our players to recognize that they succeed with the help of players that have gone before them and that we will ask them to help contribute to younger players' development over time.  They should expect to be leaders on the court and in the classroom, to have high character and high competitiveness.

We recently held tryouts for the Winter season and have created two teams, including a second team of combined 5th and 6th grade players. The latter will also play a River Valley schedule and selected Middlesex League games. Both teams are practicing hard outside working to become better players.


The 6th Grade 'A' Roster for 2010-2011

Post Players (3s, 4s, and 5s)

• Victoria Crovo
• Katie Donovan
• Bella Federico
• Leonora Ivers
• Lauren Joyce
• Kat Torpey

Perimeter Players

• Colleen Denning 
• Shannon Jones
• Kaitlyn MacInnes
• Anne Morrison
• Caroline Nolan
• Rachel Pfeiffer

Spacing: a video example

Pay the Price

There are no shortcuts to improvement. Sad to say. If basketball becomes important to you, you will need to spend time practicing just as you would to play an instrument, dance, or become a great chess player. Malcolm Gladwell talked about "10,000 hours" in one of his books, as the time needed to become expert at something.


Here's a video that discusses improving at ball handling.

Remember the five offensive skills:

• Ballhandling
• Passing
• Shooting
• Pivoting
• Rebounding

We want to emphasize the importance of a good process (practice), using good physical technique, and an improving UNDERSTANDING of the game itself. 

For the new players, here's a little video from the 2004-2005 Melrose High season. You will see the physical play and toughness that these girls demonstrate. 

Building Your Skills

We emphasize three areas within the Pyramid of Success.

• Skill development
• Conditioning/athleticism
• Team Spirit

Players have to learn five general skills in basketball.

1. Dribbling
2. Passing
3. Shooting
4. Pivoting
5. Rebounding

The two most key parts of rebounding are 1) positioning and 2) desire. And a big part of "positioning" means blocking out, also known as boxing out or screening out.

Great Thoughts for Basketball Coaches

From Coaching Toolbox

Excerpts:

Young players desperately need to hear this: “YOU’RE ENTITLED TO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN THIS GAME.”

No excuses

Are you in your players’ top 3?  If your players were to name their 3 most impactful people in their lives, how many lists would you be on?

New Season to Come

First, I realize that we are no longer the 5th grade travel team, and I'm not sure if I can change the title. Second, congratulations to the players selected for this year's team. We are confident that you will have fun, learn a lot about basketball, and have success.

General rules:

• One, two, three. Family, school, basketball. We expect you to concentrate while you are on the court, but family and school take primacy.
• Communications. If you have other obligations, please let us know. 
• Expectations: Play hard, play smart, play together, have fun. 
• Bring red and white shirts to practice for scrimmage purposes.

Goals:

• We're here to help you develop as basketball players and individuals. You are role models and many of you will be leaders as you move forward in your lives. We expect you to learn to take responsibility for your actions. 
• We want you to enjoy and to learn the ins and outs of basketball, to have a comprehensive understanding of what we do and why. You won't have to learn overnight. The inventor of basketball remarked, "Basketball is an easy game to learn, and a difficult one to master."
• I would like you all to have the ability to coach players by the time you've finished high school. 
• We expect you to reflect our coaching philosophy: team play, aggressiveness, and toughness. Success breeds confidence, and confidence breeds success.
• Great players are great because of what they do for the team. They make the players and the people around them better; they know how to win and stop up in the big moments. No bad teammate is ever a great player. 

Coaches don't make great players. Great players make coaches successful. Every player who becomes highly skilled does so because they develop the individual skills, athleticism, conditioning, and team spirit that great players show. We can help you but we can't help you as much as you can help yourselves by practicing. 

They're Called Coach

http://www.coachingtoolbox.net/filingcabinet/theyre-called-coach.html

Coaching Priorities

A thoughtful piece from the Coaching Toolbox.

An excerpt:

2)       Show the participants examples of how to be successful in life and basketball.
Stress the importance of honesty, trust, enthusiasm, discipline, sportsmanship, dedication, reliability, teamwork, sacrifice, dependability, integrity, loyalty, and hard work.
We will be successful at the varsity level with players who:

• Take coaching and understand the need for discipline
• Love Basketball and appreciate hard work
• Dribble, Pass, and Shoot the ball proficiently
• Play very hard

We understand that this is an exciting week (tryouts) that is just part of the basketball journey. Making a team is not the end of the road...just the beginning. Not making the team isn't the end either; there's a long way between developmental basketball and the summit of one's life skills. We encourage every player who loves basketball and competition to stick with it.

I happily recall a teammate in high school who played on the freshman 'B' team. Later on, he had a key blocked shot in Boston Garden against a high school All-American and Celtic draft choice, to help win that game. In the next game against three time state champion Lexington, he was the high scorer in the old Garden to help us win the Division I North championship in overtime. He never quit and got a scholarship to play basketball in college and became an executive in the oil industry.

We Care About Our Players and Your Child

Alcohol is a drug, plain and simple. Adolescents are profoundly susceptible to its harmful effects. We aim to educate our players and your children to take care of their bodies and their minds, and need your cooperation to help us. We care.

Let's Talk Sports will discuss the problem of alcohol in the community on this week's show.

Habit Forming

Harvard Business Review might be an odd place to think about basketball. But maybe not.  HBR gives six keys to becoming excellent at anything.

It's not as difficult as it might seem. 



Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

The Greatest Basketball Commentary I Have Ever Read

I've read a number of books about coaching basketball, and I try to learn as much as I can to become a better teacher of basketball. But inside, I believe that teaching sports is about teaching life. Jealousy, envy, selfishness...they destroy teams. Sharing, caring, and team spirit create life for the team. 

If you never read anything about basketball, just read what Carril believes and embrace the truth.

Excerpts from former Princeton coach Pete Carril follow.

Whatever you emphasize and to the degree that you do, you get better at it.

There's a tendency for players to believe that because the coach is talking to someone else, they don't have to listen. If they're all listening, the coach won't have to repeat the same thing to the guys who weren't involved.

The quality of their work habits can overcome anything: praise, criticism, good or bad coaching. 

I can check the level of your honesty and commitment by the quality of your effort on the court. You cannot separate sports from your life, no matter how hard you try. Your personality shows up on the court: greed, indifference, whatever, it all shows up. You cannot hide it.

Passing makes everybody feel a part of the game, a part of the team. No single aspect of basketball does more to develop good team play than passing

The essence of character is what I call mental and physical courage. Everybody has the potential for courage, but some people -- because they have had to demonstrate it all their lives -- are good at it, whereas others are not until the need suddenly arises and they have to learn to react. Basketball brings out the need for courage.


Defense is the heart of our game. Good defense is recognizable even when you're losing.

When you demand a lot, my experience has been that you get more.

Size is not the most important thing about rebounding. Knowing how to use your body, seeing where the ball is going, that's what counts.

Pivoting is one of the most underrated techniques and skills, and when you go to teach it, someone always asks, "Why bother?" 

Fakes are like lies. The first thing I tell anyone about faking is that if you're going to fake, your move has to look like the real thing.

How do you know if your team has camaraderie? I can tell by the way they walk off the floor at the end of practice. You can feel their happiness vibrating; you can see how they work out together; 

When players who have had good high school coaching walk on the floor in college, there isn't much that a coach has to do. 

I don't recruit players who are nasty to their parents. That shows they are giving less than they can give and can't forge the bonds essential for a good team. I look for players who understand that the world does not revolve around them.

There are so many things that don't show up on the stat sheet, or in the win and loss column, that no one can explain, but you see them and they affect the outcome of games.   

Use your assets: You have to take advantage of what you have. Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren did that, and we do it, too. If you have a fast team and you don't run, you're being stupid. And if you have a slow team, you must take the run out of the game.

"Be Quick But Don't Hurry"

One of legendary coach John Wooden's sayings was, "be quick but don't hurry." For example, make the good pass quickly, but don't hurry and throw it away.

How do you get quicker? Here's a 'cone' or 'cup' drill. I takes discipline to train, attitude to succeed, and motivation to be your best.

The Greatest Challenge

The great challenge for basketball players is to MAKE THE PLAYERS AROUND YOU BETTER. The best players have the greatest capacity to do so.

How do you do that? You must develop individual skills and have the awareness to create for and utilize your teammates.

Some examples:

• Moving without the ball
• Passing to open players
• Setting screens, and rolling to the basket or popping to open spots
• Help defense (and recover as needed)
• Blocking out to allow your teammates (or yourself) to rebound
• Hitting the outlet pass AFTER securing the rebound

Although I'm often tasked with coaching the fours and fives (which involves a lot of footwork), I grew up as a perimeter player (and mostly as a baseball player to be honest)...

Here's a brief article from the Coaches' Toolbox on what perimeter players need to develop. Becoming an accomplished player means acquiring and refining a broad individual skill set and learning how to use it. If we are successful, you will be able to become a coach someday and share your knowledge with your students. As we say in medicine, "see one, do one, teach one."

Baker's Lesson

We talk about "getting separation" all the time...and PREVENTING separation defensively. Here's why.

Practice, Practice, Practice

A couple of shooting drills. I don't care for the way he drops lowers the ball before he squares but that's just me.

Practice

Click the photo to ENLARGE