In a previous post, we mentioned the importance of visioneering and highlighted this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Every great endeavor begins with a vision of something greater than yourself, but until it’s shared and internalized by the team, it will get no traction. So, as a coach, you are responsible to create (or at least mold) your team’s vision. You are the captain of that ship after all.
You can develop a successful vision for your basketball team by making three commitments:
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I define a “situation” as an offensive action that engages two or more defenders simultaneously. For example, most screening actions create situations, an attacking drive generates a situation, and many times just feeding a competent post player instigates a situation.
If your opponent lacks cohesion as a defensive unit, a single situation may be enough to break them open for a score. The reality, though, is that most defensive teams are better coached and more prepared: they are capable of helping and recovering as well as double-teaming and rotating back without giving up a scoring opportunity.
But, just because a team can handle one situation doesn’t mean they can handle two or three in a row, or even two or three simultaneously.
Set this as a goal for your Read & React team (especially when you come up against better defensive teams): every possession, force the defense to handle more than one situation back to back or at the same time.
Below are a couple of examples of how you can do that.
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