For the 2nd game of the season the Girls played the Mustangs of MLS. When my boys played these guys it was a ridiculously rough game…so much so that there came a point where I didn’t want to play these guys anymore. My boys were “basketball” tough, but the MLS guys were playing football. I hoped the girls played more of a basketball game than a street brawl.
The practice before this game I started implementing the first layer of “read and react”. The following video gives you an idea of the “5 out” scheme. I went “3 out” (high and low post).
For the first quarter they ran these principles fairly well. We ended up with more than a handful of layups, scoring on 3 or 4 of them. For this point in the season that’s fine. After the first quarter they decided to just stop doing it…and basically do nothing. After that our offense really struggled. On the upside, so did theirs. We missed a lot of shots, some of them should have been gimmie’s…we also shot around 50% from the free throw line. That really surprises me. During practice they shoot so much better than that. The ones that are getting to the line are our better free throw shooters…so I dunno. I think the problem is they are too worried about the crowd or whatever is going on around them. Obviously I need to train this out of them…it’s not something that is that easy to do though. I takes time and work.
The 2nd and 3rd quarters were about the same. The girls hustled, dove on the floor, played solid defense for the most part…but just couldn’t get the ball in the hole. They would get quality looks…the ball would just rim out. They kept diving on the floor and working for the ball…got a few break aways…they just missed their layups. I talked to them several times about feeding the post, working things around, making their cuts…but we couldn’t buy a basket. On the upside MLS had similar problems. Due to our defense though, their offensive sets were much longer than ours. We would break them down and get a layup quickly…they, on the other hand, had to work the ball around quite a bit to get a semi-decent look. They got a couple of open shots, but over all we challenged it the majority of the time they took a shot. Us making them take quite a bit of time to get a shot is the way I want the defense playing. My girls made a couple of good breaks on the ball when they had the chance, and picked off a couple of passes…but overall I’ve told them to not press the ball on the parameter. I don’t want us getting burnt for an easy layup. They also started working out of bounds under the basket defense quite a bit better. They clogged up the lane well and didn’t surrender a layup. Each time they had the ball under the backboard we forced them to outlet it to a “safety” player.
In the 4th quarter they decided to go back to the passing and cutting offense to some extent. This worked out well for us and we finally started to pull away from them a little bit. Our defense remained strong for the most part…I did have a couple of girls that seemed to doze off a bit, or just get lazy on D. We lucked out and they missed the layups that came off of these lapses…but if we play a better team we are not going to be able to afford these mistakes.
I wasn’t sure what to expect out of this game. I tried to establish an offensive concept that was entirely new to these girls…the practice right before this game. That’s not a good idea at all, but I really dig on what the read and react teaches. I still feel it’s important to drive home the concepts this offensive philosophy teaches and will continue to do so. Some of these girls work really hard on the floor, they dive all over the place… sacrifice their bodies and have that winning drive. A couple have some nice natural ability, but don’t seem to have the drive to push forward. It’s going to be a challenge to motivate these girls to give their all every second they are on the floor. So far though, I’m liking what I’m seeing…there is lots of upside to this team. If they keep working they could go places as they get older.