The game at Langdon was the last Jr. High girls game for this season. The games were originally scheduled to be JH, JV, and V. They called a week before and said they didn’t have enough kids to play the JV game…so the JH game was set to be against 7th 8th with some of their lesser skilled freshmen. That sounded fine to me, as I have 6 8th grade that will be/have been playing with the freshmen team.
We get there and I’m watching them warm up…they seem like a very sharp team. If this is their lower skill players their upper end must be pretty good. Whatever, it is what it is. The girls will go out and play hard. I spoke with their coach briefly before the game…he told me this was their JV team and he would be playing a couple of their varsity starters. He confirmed with me that we brought our 8th grade team. After talking to him, he said they do in fact have a Jr. High team. I was a bit confused as to why we were not playing that team.
I let the girls know out of the gate what they were up against. I told them about mid season that I expect some of them to be challenging for starting jobs on the c squad and a couple of them to have a really good shot at some time on the JV team. I told them this would be a good test for them, and to come out gunning.
For this game we had 3 refs, 8min quarters and a shot clock. I didn’t expect the shot clock to come in to play at all really…even on our slow days we don’t slack that much on offense. I saw the 3 refs as being beneficial to us…a lot of our game is based on free throws. It seemed like more refs would mean a better chance for accurate calls. The 8min quarters I was a bit concerned about. My rotation is based on 6min quarters…so I’d have to make an adjustment. It’s not really as simple as a rotation adjustment though. The girls have been conditioned for that type of game…their speed and endurance relies on getting rest at specific times. I had hoped using time outs and subbing could make up for that…during a normal 6min game it’s got to be pretty bad before I’ll take a time out.
The girls started off very well. They were running the floor, moving the ball…getting easy layups, defensive stops…I was quite impressed. At the end of 1 quarter we were up 13 – 11. That is probably the biggest point total the girls have put up in a first quarter all season. It was clear after this quarter though they were more winded than usual. I did burn a 30 sec time out to set up a press breaker…they executed well, but it didn’t give them the rest I had hoped for.
I lay the blame for their being winded on myself. I didn’t have a practice after xmas break started. The starters were practicing with the high school, and at some point one of the other girls started working with them as well. So that left me 6 girls that were not getting practice. Also, the freshmen practice doesn’t focus on conditioning as much as I do. Just different coaching philosophies, I’m not going to say ones better than another. Couple those things together and we have a team that was a bit different than the one we had before the break. Clearly this is what college football coaches feel like during bowl season! Working with/against the freshmen has helped these girls a bit. They are seeing different and higher level competition every practice and clearly that’s paying off. I wasn’t sure how they would respond. Two of them I figured would work very hard, then there were a few that started out kind of in a “shell” with me. They seemed timid on the court and really didn’t like physical contact. With the freshmen team they are building on what they have been trained to do…and are working out well (IMO).
Starting the 2nd quarter of this game, we started to let up a bit. A lot of the mistakes we’ve been making all season at times started happening all at once. We were not rebounding, our defensive rotation was slow and our passing got very sloppy. Any one of these mistakes would have made for a difficult game for us…all of them at once opened the door wide for them, and boy did they take advantage of it. We started to fall behind and seemed all out of sorts. At this point, I started subbing in the other girls that would be done after this game. I wasn’t sure how we would open up in the 2nd half, so incase the starters came out and played inspired basketball I wanted to make sure that everyone made at least an appearance.
Given this was being treated like a JV game, there are certain expectations of team behavior. Generally at half time with my teams I do not go in the locker room. I huddle them up, give them a quick break down of what needs to keep going right and what we need to work on…then it’s water and shooting around. During the JV and Varsity games they expect you to go into the locker rooms. I wasn’t going to until I saw they had half time entertainment lined up…little kids (3-4th grade) playing some ball for the crowd.
We went into the locker room, and it was the longest half time I’ve been a part of. I believe you do your coaching in practice, and come game time you just make minor corrections. While we made several mistakes over and over again…they are all common and really don’t need that much conversation. Instead of lecturing or drawing many plays on the white board, I gave the girls the opportunity to talk with each other. Several of them had things to say, and all the information was topics I would have covered. They talked about technique, expectations and things of that nature. What that didn’t do, which I was most pleased with, was rip on each other and yell about the negative things that were going on. We were down 30-15 and they were trying to work together to correct things and not just blaming each other for problems. After the entertainment finished, we took the floor…instead of warming up, the girls huddled up with each other at the bench and again tried to encourage each other to work hard and do all they could in this game. I think they even prayed. I’m not a religious guy…but I’m not going to discourage them from making choices to do that stuff. As long as they are not pressuring other teammates and making them uncomfortable, it’s fine.
The second half didn’t go well. We continued to have the same problems, which was unfortunate. When it became clear we were not going to close the gap, I again put in the girls that were going to be done after this game. This caused the score to be a little more lopsided that it would have other wise been, but these girls deserved some time.
The season went well for these ladies and they improved a great deal. The parents and the girls themselves seem happy with their improvement and seem to want to improve themselves even more. At the beginning of the year, they seemed like a group that was content to “just play”. Once they discovered that they actually have the potential to be a very good team their drive kicked in to gear and they worked very hard. I’m happy with the progress they have made, but I’m disappointed we won’t get another month or so to work on things. If we could add a game or tournament and spread everything out over another month I think we’d have a pretty decent season for them.
This group of girls has a very solid core to build on. They have 5 starters, none of them being forced into positions they are not natural for. They have a few reserves that can easily fill in…they have a very nice grouping. The major deficit of this team is their lack of another slashing point guard. I tried giving a few different girls time handling the ball but we just didn’t have the practice time to develop someone as much as I’d like. I would love to have had another slashing point, but even a “ball control” point guard would have been good. There are a couple of girls that could fit this role, but they have not had the playing time with the ball in their hands to develop as much as they should have. Next year, with the freshman team, these other girls will get more game time with the ball in their hands…that should help out their development quite a bit.
It will be interesting to see how these girls develop over their high school years.
Article source: http://www.hillbillycoach.com/2012/01/11/langdon/
