HoopClinics

by Coach Ken Sartini

When I took over the program the school, I wanted some continuity in the program to make the switch easier so the players would be comfortable and play with some confidence.

Some people might come in and try to make wholesale changes, they have to make that decision… but in this case the past coach and I were certainly on the same page defensively… Man to Man! This was the basis of our program…. I did add the match up zone that year… playing around with different fronts before finally deciding on the 1-3-1 match. We continued to use m2m on the lower levels as our base defense. I told our coaches this…. I want you to teach the fundamentals of m2m at every practice, IF you want to switch to a zone late in the game to ensure a victory that would be fine with me…. (at that time we were zoning inbounds plays anyway so it wasn’t like they weren’t familiar with it.)

I wanted every level to teach the standard 3 out 2 in motion…. teaching the kids to set screens, set their man up, read the screen and make the appropriate move.

As far as set plays I gave them the freedom to add anything they might like, thus allowing them to grow as a coach and put their own touches on their level. My head coach allowed me to do that and I felt that was important.

We met as a staff three times in the pre-season.

1- to discuss the rules of the school district, uniforms and equipment, Parent Permission slips and a Doctors permit. Under NO circumstances was any athlete allowed to try out without those two forms. (this was more of a get together BBQ sort of thing.)

2- offenses
3- defenses
We had a lot of give and take in the 2nd and 3rd meeting… brought up problems and how we were going to solve them – any suggestions that might make the offense run more efficiently along with different situations defensively, especially our match up Zone. We solved a lot of problems with these meetings. At one point I was lucky to have 3 coaches that were head coaches at other schools so I wasn’t afraid to give them some input.

Listen to your coaches people, you never know when they will come up with a great idea to help your program. Our school wasn’t the type where you could just say we are going to be a m2m team and run every time we touch the ball…. our talent level changed from year to year. By the time I retired 40 different countries were represented with roughly 57 different languages spoken in the building.

Basketball Coaching