Alan Stein Cutting Edge Clinic: Lennox, South Dakota

Coaches,


There is a great clinic opportunity coming to Lennox, SD May 5th. Alan Stein is a great clinic presenter and does a lot for the basketball community. Here at Tea, we use many of his dynamic warm-up elements as well as his in-season weight lifting program. The inclusion of both of these elements have greatly helped our players with injury prevention, flexibility and athletic performance. I strongly recommend coming to this clinic. The attachment has the specifics of the clinic.

Alan Stein Cutting Edge Clinic

Youth Offense Philosophy

As coaches, we all know the importance of having a well-established feeder system to help build the longevity success of our basketball program. As always, there are multiple ways to organize a feeder program. These are just the steps that we go through each year.

We feel that it is important that our feeder systems have the foundational fundamentals built into them. It is our responsibility to equip the feeder coaches with the proper offensive and defensive philosophy, the proper verbals and language, and proper fundamental development. We feel that if our youth can learn these 3 elements along with team chemistry and effort that they will come into our high school program with a good base. We meet with our feeder coaches before the season starts and discuss with them our expectations and philosophy to the game. We explain to them that we are more concerned about the fundamental development of the players rather than the number of games or tournaments that they win. The feeder coaches are given a packet of fundamental drills and offensive/defensive elements that we would like them to implement. Therefore, listed below are some of the specific items that we emphasize in our feeder programs.

1. Man-to-Man Defense: At the high school level, we play an aggressive 1-1-3 match-up zone with our boys’ team. We apply lots of ball pressure all over the court and use a variety of trap and stunt schemes. However, we feel that in order to properly play this style of defense, kids need to know how to defend the ball, get into help position, front the post, get the ball to a side and force baseline. Granted, you can do all of these out of a zone set, but we feel that man-to-man is better at teaching these concepts to youth players.


2. Base Offense: We feel that all players need to be confident passers, dribblers, cutters, shooters and understand proper spacing. Therefore, we believe that using an open post offense allows us to effectively teach these elements. Too often, players are labeled as post players just because they are tall and never develop any skills away from the basket. Years later, that same kid has not grown at all and is now expected to play on the perimeter but has never developed the skill set to be successful. We just start with basic pass and cut principles and driving actions with proper spacing. From there, we start building in other elements such as down screen and curl.


3. Transition Offense: After years of running a traditional middle break, we made the switch to running a sideline break package. I had numerous conversations with a coach name Wayne Walters, founder of SWARM Enterprises, and his justifications for running a sideline break just made a lot of sense to me. We started putting it in at the high school level and had a lot of success with it. Therefore, we are starting to put it in with the feeder programs. It really allows us to advance the ball up the floor quickly and put constant pressure on the defense.


4. Fundamental Development: All of the drills that we have our feeder programs use are drills that we use at the high school level or at least teach the same fundamental concepts (footwork, language, shooting mechanics and so on). This has tremendous carry over to the high school level because they have a foundational knowledge base that they can continue to build on the first day of high school practice.


By no means is this a perfect setup. We are constantly making improvements and adjusting our methodologies. If you have any interest in studying youth basketball development, I highly recommend contacting Brian McCormick. He has some amazing stuff on youth basketball development.

Game Winning Specials

A while back I did some research, watched a lot of game film and compiled a bunch of special situation plays.  I included a bunch of different scenarios and some different approaches for each scenario. 

Check out the eBook and hopefully it will help you out.

Game Winning Specials

Greetings

Greetings,

After about a year of deliberation, I finally broke down and decided to start a blog. As a computer science teacher, one would have thought that I would have dived in a long time ago.

As a basketball enthusiast, I hope to share some of the things that I have learned over my short 6 years of coaching basketball. I spend a lot of my spare time studying basketball related items (clinic notes, X's and O's.....). I really enjoy the ability to network with other coaches through the Internet. It has made me a better coach, as well as helped me appreciate the various basketball philosophies that are out there.

One of my favorite things to do is to pass along coaching notes to other coaches. There a number of coaches out there that have been nice enough to pass along things to me, so I see my passing along my basketball resources as a way to give back to the coaching community.

One of the things that I learned early, while networking with other coaches through forums, is that the coaching community is a pretty close knit community, even if we don't all know each other. We all go through the same highs and lows in some form or another, so it allows us to appreciate those trials and tribulations when we go through them.

In closing, I hope to give back to the basketball coaching community some of my limited knowledge on the game of basketball.

Stay tuned.