The first week of practice is in the books. It’s gone pretty well. I have worked them harder than I did the boys, which is to be expected since they are the next age level up. The boys would do around 6-8 crushers then maybe 10ish sprints (1 sprint is down and back). The number of crushers increased towards the end as their conditioning got better, and the number of sprints went down by about 1/2. The girls have started off with about 8 crushers and 25 sprints. The boys went cross court, so it wasn’t quite the full distance…the girls are going full court, so overall it does add up to a bit more running. Add to that the drills they are doing and overall they are working pretty hard. There has been some complaining back and forth between the girls, but overall I think they get why they are doing this. This type of conditioning we’re only doing for 3 days. After that, the amount of running goes down and we spend more time focusing on basketball skills and team drills. They will still need to run to keep their cardio up…but there is more fun stuff mixed in. I was a bit concerned about how they would handle it, but they’ve done well.
I wasn’t sure what to expect with this group of girls, but they have the skill levels you would expect at this age for the most part. Some of them are advanced, some are catching up…but over all they are where I would expect them to be. The main thing we are going to be struggling with is the length of the season. From our first game week till the last week there is 13 game days in 6 weeks. We can practice 4 days a week (we don’t go wednesday, school policy not mine). During that time we lose 2 practice days for thanksgiving, (prior to the first game week we lose 2 practice days to school breaks as well…). That gives us 7 practice days once games get going. We have 10 practices before the first game, one of which falls on a Monday of a game week…so that gives us 17 practices total. That doesn’t seem like near enough to me. I’m not a huge fan of how compressed the season is. It would be nice if it was a couple – 3 weeks longer with the games a little more spread out.
Something else that has me a little disappointed is that the 8th grade doesn’t have a tournament, and the 7th grade’s tournament is the 3rd game day of the season. I’d really like it if both teams had a tournament and they were at the end of the season. It gives you something to work for. Looking over the schedule the team I expect to be the toughest for us we face twice, once in the middle of the schedule and once at the end. I’ll use that as my measurement game, it will tell me how far the girls have progressed over the course of the season.
We’ll work with what we have, I expect every team will be facing the same challenge.