A young coach I know recently asked me about how to attack a zone press. I responded with two so-called 'rules of thumb' that I acquired over the years 1) attack zone presses by in and out passing 2) don't react to it; attack it. The first part was pretty basic knowledge that most coaches would tell you; the second part was knowledge learned the hard way, via personal experience.

      My first traumatizing ass kicking happened the first year I coached, a middle school boys B team who were drubbed by thirty points by a mid-court 1-3-1 trap. I felt that we had we lost because I didn't know what to do. Later that season, we returned the favor because I had learned four important lessons. The first was to keep a safety across and slightly behind the point guard (two guard front) which allowed us to change the angle of the entry if needed. Next, we threw over the top of the first line of defense, but the most important lesson was teaching that first receiver what to do when he received the pass which was to take it as far away from where the first trap would have been in order to make the defenders have to run a longs ways  (creating gaps by making the defense have to cover space). We then dribbled or passed the ball into those gaps and attacked the back side weakness of the press. Finally, we unleashed our own full court trap on them (Rule of Thumb: Most pressing teams don't like being pressed themselves). When the coach had the audacity to complain that I kept the press on until we had a thirty point lead, I responded by saying, "Well, it didn't seem to bother you all that much the first time."

         Most lessons that I have learned about breaking presses were not all that immediate; they have taken years to learn and were usually prompted by someone teaching me the lesson like one of those old school teachers using a yardstick to drum the point home. The last  really important lesson that I've learned was when one of the best teams I've ever coached was totally demolished by a great, probably the toughest team we ever faced, Edison High School girls team. That lesson was never to lead your point guard into the corner to be trapped. Since that night, I've always screened one of my bigger players into the corner and reverse pivot-posted my screening point guard in the center where she had more room to operate. We also began to use jailbreak concepts to get the ball out and moving forward. There were times when we placed our attacking wings as far away as the opposite corners. We usually didn't have an in-bounder who could throw it that long, but by then, I had also had picked up another important rule of thumb which was 'never overestimate the intelligence of the opposing coach' (The opposite is just as true which is a much more painful lesson to learn).

     Placing those attacking wings that deeply means the other coach has to deal with it; you can't just leave people that near your basket unguarded. It creates coverage problems which allows your primary ball handler room to operate. More recently though, we placed our attacking forwards at half court to combat the more aggressively trapping teams.  If their defenders are guarding up the line, we took them a few steps forward and then broke toward the basket. A jail break action would quickly turn the press break in a three-on-one fast break. This strategy served us well and made a lot of topflight pressing teams stop pressing us. 

        The success of the strategy led to logical conclusion that became one of the greatest 'rule of thumbs' that we employed which was 'you can  be pressed all night unless you hurt the press'. Because of this truism, from the beginning of the season, we would attempt to drill it into our player's head that being pressed worked to our advantage. The value of teaching your players not to be fear a press cannot be overstated as a large part of a press's effectiveness stems from the panic and anxiety that it creates. I've seen way too many coaches who unknowingly increase the pressure on their own team by keeping too many players (with their defenders) in the backcourt to plug up the escape routes.

         It was a friend asking for advice that inspired me to write this. I have a whole pile of strange shit in my head, painfully learned, most of it, that I sit on the top of like a fat dragon guarding his pile of gold. I generally try not offer people unsolicited advice (unless I've been drinking in which case, I start talking prolifically as a nervous school girl on her first date). I've been reading this great book Primal Wisdom of the Ancients: The Cosmological Plan for Humanity. It's about this tribe in Africa called the Dogon who have been guarding some ancient cosmological knowledge concerning the origins of the universe for thousands of years. They will share what they know with anyone as long as long as that person can keep asking the right questions. I've seen enough glazed over looks and rolled eyes when I've forgotten that  rule to not know how jealously we each guard our own thought processes and prerogatives. I fully understand that.

      But another lesson that I've learned is that we humans have a tendency to listen and learn more when we have been emotionally aroused. There ain't nothing quite emotionally stimulating as getting your ass kicked by thirty points because you don't how to handle a press. Rather than go through that twice, it is probably advisable to go ask an old person how to avoid getting bit by a snake. He/She might roll their own eyes at you, but chances are they'll answer something to the effect, "You got nothing to fear from a dead snake, Pilgrim."
              

          

          

  I got up this morning and first thing checked my Facebook feed and saw a post entitled something like "Ten Things You Should Always Remember", and the first thing mentioned was You Can't Change the Past. I thought to myself that this wasn't quite true. I don't remember what I was reading the time, but some months back I came across the idea that you can change the past. I'll get to how in a moment.

   I was worried about going to practice today because of the comments that were made after our game last Saturday. We had beaten a legendary coach and program by 18 points, and the coaches should have been happy, but we weren't. We hadn't played particularly well, and that fact had been partially masked by an amazing three-point shooting performance by one of our players, and the fact that we had pressed the tired and short-handed opponent hard in the third quarter and got a lot of steals. In the game however, we made a lot unnecessary turnovers and displayed a lack of understanding of what we were doing with our zone offense.

   I felt bad when I left the locker room after criticizing the players because they had worked hard all weekend and we had won by such a large margin. I also felt that it was needed criticism though. The head coach felt like I did too and let it be known that we would have to take some much needed steps in practice to toughen them up a bit before the next tournament. It is never a good feeling to leave your team in such an unsettled state after a hard week-end of tournament play.

    I had tried to mitigate things somewhat by letting them know that I've had to criticize a lot of hardworking kids many times before and never felt especially good about doing it. The community where I began my coaching career was located in one of the most economically depressed areas in the country. Our little piece of paradise was known for its social/economic disadvantages (The Tulare-Kings area had overtaken Appalachia in this regard), teen pregnancy rate (we were once #1 in entire USA, and low educational achievement (also in the bottom nationwide).

    In this area, vocations like teaching and coaching by necessity have to be regarded as something more than just a job; there is definitely a spiritual aspect to serving the youth in the Central Valley of California. It doesn't mean that every coach or teacher realizes it, but it's always there, just the same. 

     I explained this to our college kids just like I explained it to my high school teams back in the day. There were several times when I had to fight the urge to tell a bunch of tired and emotionally drained kids they had played well, or the urge to just give them a hug and console them after a tough loss. We had this tradition after every game, win or lose, where we talked first about what we had done wrong and sometimes the list was pretty lengthy and the discussion ran over into the time that we could have been celebrating. We called this exercise "Washing Our Dirty Laundry".

      I felt that if I resorted to lying to them, no matter how small the lie,   or merely comforting them after a tough loss that nothing would ever change, and it would result only in maintaining the status quo which was just a slower way of losing ground. Yet, noble motives never made it any easier for me or them.

      I had inherited a varsity girls team that had gone 30-1 with a section title the year before. I added about four or five underclassmen from a group that had been pretty successful at the junior high school level. For whatever reasons, we didn't mesh real well at first with the only common denominator being the doubt a few of them had about my ability to coach. Things got so bad to where there was practice scheduled where it looked like it was going to be more like an episode of Jerry Springer than a basketball practice. It was my first year as a head coach, and I was already dealing with enough self doubt because of their success the year before. I didn't know what to do.

    Right before going to practice, I had a sudden inspiration and showed up at the gym with a couple five gallon buckets of ice cream, some bowls and some spoons. Instead of a Battle Royale we had an ice cream social. They came with their guards up, ready to defend their aggrieved sensibilities, and the ice cream got them to lower their guards and talk. I learned that day that sometimes people just want to be heard. We worked our problems out and went on to win a second section championship, setting a section scoring record in the process.

      When I showed up at practice today, Coach had placed a bunch of football pads on the court. He had the girls put them on, and we ran some drills wearing them. The tactic was just odd enough to pique their curiosity and lower their guards reminding me of that practice many years ago when the ice cream had served a similar purpose. It allowed us a chance to talk to them where we got past their defensive mechanisms, and we had a chance to restate and clarify what we had tried to tell them the previous meeting. This time they listened intently,  and most importantly, we had a chance to praise them for showing up and facing down their fears of what lay in store when they first entered the gym. It was a great practice. They worked very hard and learned a thing or two about themselves. They are a very talented group of kids, but for some reason we haven't always maximized that talent. I believe we will however.

    The night after the last game, Utah State knocked off a 12-1 San Diego State Football in the Mountain West Championship game. The Utah State coach said in the post game interview that he never wanted his team to get too comfortable as it prevented them from making progress. I took that statement as validation that we were on the right track. You see I believe that truth validates itself. I arrived at that idea after reading a book about the Dogon in Africa, a tribe who believes that they have been charged with guarding the cosmological secrets of the universe for thousands of years. They believe that there's a plethora of falsehoods that surround us at all times, and that the way to distinguish truth from all of the lies is that truth self validates. I can't say enough how much I love that notion.

   We have lost three tough games against top level competition. Some time in late March, we'll look back on those losses and either we'll regard them as the beginning of our failure to reach our team goals, or as  three important stepping stones on our way to reaching the Final Eight in state.

   You see, what I learned a few months ago was that you can always change the past by using the present to change the future.

  In most of my coaching career I would not allow a mid-range jump shot. I wanted lay-ups, and if I couldn't get the lay-up, then I wanted the free throws that resulted from the effort to get lay-ups. I would also be cool with a rhythmed three coming off a kick-out.

    My thinking on such matters could largely be explained by an article I read entitled The Free Throw Game. The article explained the value of certain types of shots as related to each possession. Lay-ups, and-ones, free-throws, and three pointers were the highest rated with each yielding a  plus one point per possession. The only shot that was lower than one point per possession was the mid-range shot, and this basically told me that my teams should concentrate on shooting threes, making lay-ups, and getting to the free throw line.

     It has taken me quite a while, but I've finally reached a point where I can see some value of the mid-range jump shot. Firstly, because I've watched our girls shooting them off the dribble and see how quickly they can align the shot and pull the ball into the correct shooting pocket with the elbow up and pointing toward the rim. That doesn't happen all the time with threes, even off of kick-outs. Too many kids like to hold the ball at waist level or out in front of their body to begin their shot.

      Secondly, there are several times in game where an attacking player gets into a situation where the drive is stopped and there is no passing option. It is a moment that requires that the player shoot the ball, and it is always better from a coaching perspective to be prepared for such moments than it is to just throw up some random bullshit. I've learned that the caveat at such times should be don't throw up random bullshit and not don't shoot the midrange jumper.

        Finally, I've watched way too many games not to realize that the truly great players have great mid-range games. They are able to put shots up in traffic that not only add points to the total but also great artistry to an already beautiful game. Coaching with analytics does not have to be boring.

         I would add a condition though. Stats don't lie (people do, not stats), and the fact is that attacking the rim will statistically always produce more points than utilizing the mid-range game. This needs to be acknowledged in how teams prepare. In certain situations, the stats change though, and it becomes what has a better chance of scoring when a player is caught in traffic, a hastily thrown up piece of crap, or something that has been practiced?


       Practice time is severely limited. So, I would still emphasize daily practice on offensive execution, attacking the rim, shooting rhythmed threes, and free-throws. I would tell players who want to shoot the mid-range shot jumper the same thing that I  tell them about shooting threes which is that "you have to earn the right to shoot". That shit ain't guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. I would also mention how much I hate people who shoot just inside the three-point line, and how I would disown my own daughter for doing so.

         But if I had a player who wanted to excel and raise his/her game to that next level, I would have tell them to work at shooting pull-up jumpers on on their own using timed pressured drills and requiring  the making of consecutive shots. 

         And more than likely, it would be their number I would call when the game was on the line.

         

      

      I've been sheltering in place for over forty days. It's truly been an unholy experience. I've got a kid next door who shoots on a portable hoop in his driveway. He got a nice stroke too. His basket doesn't have a net though.

       I had one in my garage and gave it to him. He wore it out in no time. I got him a new one. I was thinking that if you want to be a shooter, you need to have a net. You need to hear that twang of perfect shot caused by the stretching of the strings.

    I've coached thirty-three years, and in that time, I've seen thousands of great warm-up shooters; kids who can hit every shot they take in the fifteen minutes leading up to a game, but once the ref tosses the ball into the air, forget everything they ever knew about shooting. I figure it's because they learned to shoot with their elbows tucked and with their wrists over their elbows and flapping down as they dip into the cookie jar.

     They learned to shoot by the book. Unfortunately for them, you can't read a book during the game. They should have concentrated on aligning the rhythm of the dribble with the music inside of them and with that little p-f-f-t sound that net makes when the ball doesn't hit rim.

     I gave the new net to the kid's dad and told him, "Shooter got to hear them strings stretch, Man."

       He understood. Must have been a shooter himself back in the day.

          

     
    Just over ten years ago, the Corcoran High girls basketball team was riding high having just garnered their eleventh section title since 1993. The following year we were placed at the behest of the Competitive Equity model into a higher division despite losing six seniors and four starters from the 2010 championship team.

     I believed at the time and still do that a grave injustice was done to our program as we were systematically being denied an fair opportunity to compete in the natural division where our school's population placed us.

      After watching the recent Valley championship games, I cannot help but think that the idea of leveling the playing field was never the true intention of Competitive Equity, but that it was used in order to move us into the system that is currently in place, a system that favors the larger urban school districts at the expense of the smaller rural communities.

     I remember reading somewhere, possibly in the archives of the minutes of the CIF meetings, that at one point, the idea was being kicked around that smaller schools should/could/might be contented with winning valley championships and not state championships which would/could open up state berths for larger, more deserving schools. (italics are my own)

     If this true, it makes it possible to discern where the pressure to change the system originated, not so much from the smaller schools, but from the larger schools who felt that they were being denied an opportunity to compete at state because they felt that they deserved the opportunity more than some lowly rural school district whose only valid claim for getting to state was because they didn't have enough kids in their district. 

      In any case, we now have the specter of Yosemite Division schools winning section championships in the lowest divisions which were once the safe harbor of the smallest and most vulnerable schools in the section.  

         What has been lost in translation is why these divisions were created in the first place, and that was probably to guarantee that the teams with smaller populations be given an equal and fair opportunity to compete for state championships too, not so much to see to it that larger schools who didn't fare well against their own divisional bullies, can now drop down and beat up on the smallest kids on the playground.

             And if that's the case, why have any divisions at all? 
​

  A long time ago I was in a bookstore and came across the great Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi's classic book on zen philosophy and sword fighting techniques The Five Rings.  Musashi killed over sixty men in combat and lived a long life, so I assumed he had something to say about gearing up for a fight. I bought the book.

    I pulled it off my shelf this morning and found the notes that I had made when I first read the book. I was pleased to find that I made such a good summation of some of the key points as they pertained to basketball and that those key points were still very relevant.

    Here are the three key ideas that I got from the book.

    1)  Never show fear. Never believe that your opponent is smarter than
         you, and never put yourself in an inferior position. Let's say, you
         back three feet off your man on your close-out on the ball. You
         just told your man that you don't think you can guard him. Or, if
         you let him walk across the lane into the low post, same thing.

    2)  Know why you are doing things. Musashi says that a lot of
         competitors reveal their lack of strategic knowledge just by
         how they dress, carry themselves, or in how even in how they
        warm-up. I used to watch what the other teams did during their
        warm-up to see if they would reveal a lack of intelligence. I would
          see coaches line their whole team around the free throw lane
         and have them shoot two free throws and stomp their feet
         on makes.  That shit don't happen in games, so why do it?
         (Which happens to be a another point the master makes,
​          "Don't do useless things.")

    3) Strike through the spirit of your opponent. You have to do
        things that unsettle the person or team you are playing against.
        On offense, this means you have to strike quickly and figure
        out ways to get by your man. On defense, it means to impose
        your will on him. Do not let them do things they want to do. 

 
      These things apply to team offense and defense as well as individual
play. There are lots of other things he says that make a lot of sense. For example, he emphasizes the fact that a lot of people fail because they divide their life into too many compartments. Musashi says you only have one life and all elements within it need to brought into proper alignment with your ultimate goal and not divided into different goals and wishes.

      Another good point is not try to counter your opponent's moves, but to attack first, quicker and harder to knock them off balance.

      There is a lot of knowledge contained in a relatively small book.
      

  

      Our season has started, and, in our first game, it became painfully obvious that some of our girls had not fully internalized the basics of our defensive philosophy. This is usually the case year after year

       I have come to the belief that, under stress, young players naturally revert to the way that they have always done things in the past. In large part, it is probably because defensive basketball is so full of contradictions.  I ran across the quote above in a book I was just starting to read the morning after we had suffered a very painful, three-point loss in the first round of our very first tournament. For most of our kids, it was also their first collegiate game.

           Say, for example, take the command to never lose sight of your own player and then add in the second command to never lose sight of the basketball.  This is split brain stuff. It leads to contradictory demands. Or, how about being told to defend your player and not let them score while also being told to make yourself available to help defend another person's player if they drive past your teammate toward the basket?

         These are contradictions, and, believe me, there are many, many more. And as Lord Whitehead points out, getting caught on the horns of  such contradictions can lead to defeat. In basketball, it usually leads to a player shedding one of his/her responsibilities, or worse sometimes freezes them in the middle where they can't perform either task well.

              Lord Whitehead goes further though. He says that learning how to resolve such contradictions is where real progress and learning takes place. In collegiate basketball, it is often the difference between what a player learned in high school and what he/she still needs to learn.

           Great basketball defense involves learning how to resolve these contradictions as they come at you relentlessly. It is all about learning to be more of an instinctual player. Repetitive drilling is involved, but it is game pressure and the need to make seemingly impossible things happen quickly that can turn good players into great players.

      Lord Whitehead was referring to life in general and what he says makes a great deal of sense. Life, like basketball, is made up of endless contradictions and the failure to resolve the real important ones often leads to much more painful consequences than a three point loss in a basketball tournament. The failure to resolve life with knowledge of our own mortality, for example, can lead to madness and a squandering of the time that we do have at our disposal. 

          It is the lesson of the Great Myth where the narrative of human life on this planet is often told in terms of where we actually are and where we really want to be. Thought of like this, resolving contradictions is the difference between a life well lived and a life not lived to its fullest.

         This makes the lesson in basketball not only about the difference in winning a game or two, or thirty; it is great training for life.

     If the process of shooting a basketball involved a whole lot of abstract thinking, Einstein would have been a great player. I think that shooting the basketball well is more religious in nature. It takes great amounts of discipline, learned behavior, self-forgiveness and faith that the shot is going down. 

        Shooters need to quit thinking so much and get right with the Lord.

        I was working at basketball camp for high school aged girls when I noticed how little they listened. These were good kids too, not slackers or kids who didn't respect the coaching; they were kids who would have listened had they known how.

         I have seen this happen so many times over the last thirty years that I have detected a pattern. When kids are under pressure to perform they instinctively revert back to what they know best, even if it includes not performing in the way that they were instructed.

          The task we had them doing involved opening up when the player you're guarding goes to screen. It was a somewhat complicated drill that involved opening up to the ball so that the screened defender could slide through.

      The instructions were prefaced with the statement, "You must always jump in the direction of the pass before you do anything else."  This command is basketball #1. It is what the triple threat stance is to offense. It is a developed habit that would be carved into a stone tablet if Moses had been a basketball coach. Yet, judging from the problems we had teaching it, it was easy to determine that it's not being taught.

       Boxing out is another such "commandment" skill that is suffering from lack of attention. I have to believe that most coaches think it is something that kids to naturally. Problem is, they don't. What kids do naturally is watch the ball and grab it if it bounces their way.

        So the problem, as I see it is, is that kids are suffering from uneven coaching. They get something; they get what their coaches think is important, and all too often, it is not something of primal importance like jumping to the pass, or boxing out.

         Driving home, I came up with the idea that maybe we need some standardized testing of sorts. I always told the kids that I coached and taught in English class about this famous Marshmallow Test, where a group of five-year-olds were given a marshmallow and told that if they waited five minutes before eating it they would be given another.

        It was a longitudinal study where the kids who participated were tracked over several years. It was determined that the kids who waited were more likely to be happier, contented, and successful. Those to went for the immediate gratification were more likely to be alcoholics, divorced, prone to drug use, and less successful.

             So, I got to thinking that maybe we should take a bunch of young athletes and show them a doughnut and tell them, "If you jump to the pass five times in a row, we'll give you the doughnut." Or, "If you box-out five times in a row, you'll get the doughnut."

             That way, we can tell them later, with some scientific support, that if they don't jump to the pass every time, they are probably going to end-up an alcoholic, divorced, miserable excuse for a human being.

               Just kidding. Really.

     Today was our first day of basketball class at COS, and we spent a lot of time making lay-ups.  This is one of the most basic skills in the game of basketball, and most of our players have been making them for years, but I already spotted some things we need to work on. 

      This early in the season, as a coach, you need to say things to the players in a way that serves three purposes. You need to say things that are informative and helps them learn more than they already know about a subject, you need let them know that they don't know everything even if it is about  something as simple as making lay-ups, and lastly, you need to let them know that you are not as dumb as you look. Okay, let me restate that; our other coaches are not really dumb looking, just me. 

      If I could have all of our player's former coaches in the gym with us on the first day, I would show them how to teach basic lay-ups. I'm pretty damn sure this would stir up a lot of resentment and garner a great many angry looks. I would explain to them that it is possible to win championships without know a good lay-up drill. I did it. I won four valley championships without being satisfied that my lay-up drill was any good.

      Then, I attended a clinic in Fresno that featured a coach named Pete Sharkey. Peter is a local legend and has traveled the world teaching basketball. He started out with a simple lay-up drill where the player would start on baseline and roll the ball out toward the wing. Then she would run, pick it up, and carry it to the basket.

       This is a perfect drill for teaching players to jump off the inside foot and to kick up their outside foot. After they get used to it, then you have have them take one dribble with their outside hand, then two or three. After that, it doesn't take long for them to get the steps right and you can go back to to using the regular dribble up or pass to basket drills.

       I think the coaches would be stewing about this time and even making not so subtle remarks under their breath. I would try to mitigate things somewhat by explaining my own lack early of expertise on the subject, but I'm still pretty sure they'd still feel insulted.

      I would have to explain why Coach Sharkey's drill was so revelatory to me. You see, it got to a point where I needed all of my girls, not just the good ones, to make weak hand lay-ups, and I needed to teach them how to do it.

           Every year, a sizable group of the girls that we recruit are less than confidant in their weak hand lay-ups. I have to assume it is because most of the coaches did like I did and played the weak hand stuff off because it was hard to teach. Yet, players who reach college level basketball should always have confidence in their ability to go to their weak hand.

         To get our girl's attention I would use the statement in the title. I would use this provocative challenge to get them to understand that as much as they think they already know, there's always much more that they need to learn.

       This is the case about pretty much anything. I've learned over the years that most teenagers are not stupid, but they can be willfully ignorant in that they are in time and place in their lives where they are trying to get the separation from adults that will help them to learn to function on their own.  It's not that they don't want to listen, but that they are trying to learn to trust in their own judgment.

      They have to know for certain that what you teach will actually help them. Too many adults think that this is true about everything they say, yet it is not usually the case. For example, I myself have sat in way too many  grown-up meetings when the vast majority of what I listened to didn't really need to be said. I imagine it's worse for a kid.



The Basket Has a Sweet Spot 

      It is right under top bar and three inches either side of direct center. The ball falling from directly overhead turns the basket into a circle and increases the size of the basket to where two balls could pass through at once. Putting it in from the side angle turns the basket into a oval shape and lops off as much as a third of the basket. 

     This means that players need to see the sweet spot, take the ball to the spot, and taught to finish high and soft off of the glass. It sounds easy enough, but its actually hard to do because as I said in a paragraph above teenagers are a lot like glazed pottery and not particularly porous when it comes to soaking up new ideas about things they think they already know. It is up to us as coaches to figure out ways to penetrate the glaze.


Verbal Cues are Important

      Stan Kellner was one of the first to come up with a cybernetics program that trained athletes to use their mental abilities to increase athletic performance. One of his principle tools was verbal cues.  According to Kellner, every time you run a lay-up drill is a great time to have your players say out loud, "High and Soft" as doing so will remind them to train their eyes on the backboard and to kiss the ball off of that sweet spot. There's also an added benefit in that using verbalization can help block out the negative noise of a hostile crowd and help the player to stay focused on the task at hand, i.e. placing the ball softly off of the sweet spot.


Weak Hand Work Transfers to the Strong Hand

        I read an article that talked about the process of transference wherein what is learned from working on the weak side transfers to the dominant side. I have since tried to rediscover the article but have so far failed. I do remember, however, the light bulb that turned on over my head.  It was a rule of thumb back then that you worked twice as much with your weak hand as you did with your dominant hand.

       But, this article says that once you have the skills needed to perform with your strong hand, it makes sense to spend most, if not all of your skill development time improving your non-dominant hand. After reading the article, whenever we did lay-up drills in practice, full court dribbling, or finishing drills, we did everything on our weak side. 

          This not only improves your player's non-dominant hand, it also makes them into a more "complete"  player, a state that has a synergism of its own. It is no longer  a simple equation of 1 + 1 = 2. It becomes more like 1 + 1 = 3. It  can mean that their further development become more a case of geometric progression than linear. In other words, they develop faster and better.


            It takes a patience to get kids to accept these practices. They think they already know how to make lay-ups. The practices do work however. When we started using them regularly in our skill development, every girl on our team learned to get to the basket with much more confidence in their weaker hand. Now, I only wish I knew as much about shooting free-throws.