That Basketball Life

After your team spends a difficult possession playing great defense against a tough opponent, the other team forces up a difficult shot.  As a coach you have to be excited about that until you see the other team get the offensive rebound and get an easy two points.  One of the most vital steps to coaching defense is boxing out.  It is an area of defense that will always be covered by coaches but many times it is not covered enough. Rebounding is about desire and focus.  In order to keep an offensive player who wants to get to the boards away from the ball you need to be prepared to work hard and be aggressive.

Over the last year we have written many posts related to man to man defensive principles and all of them are important.  One of the most important defensive principles is also one of the most overlooked.  The specific principle I'm talking about is defensive transition. Before we get into details, let's make sure that we understand what defensive transition means.  To start with let's go to the offensive end of the floor and talk about the fast break.  Every basketball fan loves the fast break because of it's speed and flair.  Every coach loves the fast break because of it's ability to create scoring chances for your team when the defense is in a vulnerable position.  It is this vulnerable position and how to defend against teams that want to take advantage of it that we want to discuss in this post. When your team plays a zone it is a lot easier to play transition defense that when you are playing man to man.  When in a zone the coach simply has t...

If you have spent anytime reading our posts here at TBL you will realize that we have a huge amount of respect for the North Carolina way of basketball.  In particular we love the famed secondary break and have highlighted in a past post .  The secondary break is a great tool to include in any team but it is awfully tough for younger groups to understand.  What we have done below is simplified the famed secondary break to a point where it can be incorporated with younger kids.  The break described below also uses our positioning rules for low post and high post entry.