Preseason is underway

The team has been training for a couple of weeks although the foreign players will not arrive until early September. We’ve started putting in the Dribble Drive, although only very limited parts of it.

So far we’ve only done full court Dribble Drive drills and the players have yet do scrimmage 5-on-5 – although we’ve done a few full court 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 drills.

We’ve reworked coach Walbergs Daily 45 offensive drills a bit and it seems to be working really well. After pre-practice skipping and stretching we go into shooting and layup drills. Then we work 10 minutes on full court 5-on-0 dummy fast break, putting in a couple of new options every practice. So far we’ve covered positioning, fast break positioning, and lane, middle and wing penetration positioning.

Next we will be be adding some drop zone options before going into some more detail with the secondary break.

On the individual level the perimeter players are working on beating their man with speed. It’s incredibly important that the guards can go by a defender in the middle of the court at full speed, not having to slow down to make a move. Coach Dave Smart’s swimming technique is incredibly useful teaching this.

The post players are working on ball handling and dribble drive specific shooting drills. The 8 Shot Post shooting drill is a real favorite of ours. The players go through a sequence of eight shots covering pretty much every kind of shot in the Dribble Drive offense, including high post options, inside seals, give-and-go-to-the-post and the tip dunk. So far we’ve only covered enough of the offense to use four of the options, but as we add more offensive options we’ll add more.

Generally practice consists of 40 minutes of offense, 40 minutes of shooting and 40 minutes of defense. I’d like to shoot more, as I think shooting is the single most important part in making the offense work, but this early in the season we have to work on running the offense correctly too.