High school hoops 101: The offseason

It’s about balance.

The best athletic director I ever worked for, Bob Wilson, told me once “I want my kids to beat down the door to get into the gym, not beat down the door to get out.”

As a coach, of course, you want your players to get better, and to some extent, the best way to do that is have them working on individual skills and your team concepts as often as possible. But here’s another key ingredient: Enthusiasm.

When players are excited about basketball, they play harder and work harder. But when they do the same old drills for what seems like to them the thousandth time, excitement is hard to come by. Which leads to this: Habits.

If your offseason open gyms and summer workouts are a grind, players will arrive with a mindset of “Let’s get this over with” – and they won’t be as focused as they should be. And if that mindset carries over to the regular season, if that lack of enthusiasm is contagious, then your team will simply lack the fire it needs to reach its potential.

Adding to the offseason confusion is that different players (and coaches) will have different attitudes. Some kids (though not as many as we’d like) will embrace every opportunity to work out and would gladly show up four or five days a week. Others will be happy with once a week, and forcing them to do more will not only bleed away enthusiasm, but also result in the habit of not giving 100% effort.

So the first question about offseason isn’t “What will we do?” but rather “How often will we do it?”. Adding to the complexity is that some, but not all, of your players will be on club teams, and will be practicing and playing a lot already. Others will not, or will be playing a different club sport.

Sadly, one size does not fit all. You have to judge just how much commitment you can reasonably expect given your players and your program. A program struggling to rebound will probably be better off with a low-key, fun-heavy offseason that doesn’t depend on 20 kids showing up every time. But a school with a deep playoff run in mind can ask a lot more, and expect a positive response.

But even within those parameters, there are some constants. A lower-level program might not do as many events, say, but doing some of each of the following is pretty much mandatory:

1) Open gyms. And by “open gym,” I don’t mean “practice.” If you want to do a couple shooting drills to warm up, and maybe emphasize some team concept fine – but let the kids play. Make it fun – play five-on-five, three-on-three, one-on-one (especially good for girls, who almost never play one-on-one). Sure, you don’t get to run plays, but plays are probably the most overrated part of basketball success. Yes, you need them, but it’s very likely the ones you’re running in February are not the ones you’re working on in July.

But what about your motion offense? You could run that, and there are offensive advantages – but there are huge defensive disadvantages.

So let’s say it’s pure pickup. Kids go five-on-five, man-to-man, screen on the ball, and just play basketball. The defenders have no idea what’s coming so they have to be fundamentally aware of what’s going on, just like in a game when they face a team that runs a different motion, or pretty much relies on quick hitters.

But if you’re running your motion, everyone knows where the next cut is, where the next pass is going, and the kids will, inevitably, get lazy.

Yes, you’ll get better at your motion, but one would hope it’s not so complicated that the players can’t master it in regular season practice – especially if they’ve been running it in the past.

And pure pickup is just more fun. No coach will yell about not making the right cut, and the players can just be free to enjoy playing the game. If the kids know that open gym is going to be two hours of just playing basketball, they will indeed be banging on the door to get in.

2) Practices. If it’s going to be practice, don’t call it an open gym. And don’t do any conditioning. Make the practices as painless and as fun as possible. (And why do any sprints? So you can get in shape for nine months from now? What you do in June or August or October will have zero impact on your conditioning in postseason.)

Now practices should still be serious, but there’s no reason to make them any more unpleasant than they need to be.

3) Leagues and tournaments. Playing some games in the summer and/or fall is good. It serves as a focus for what happens in open gyms and practices, and players like to play games.

But note that often summer and fall leagues are not full 32-minute games, so bringing 15 kids to one game makes little sense. In fact, bringing more than eight to any game, regardless of length doesn’t really work – if you have seven or eight, everybody plays, everybody gets a chance to show what they can do, and nobody wastes their time.

So if you have a lot of kids in the program, play in two or three leagues, or have a different group of eight show up for every game. The same thing with tournaments. If you’re going to travel – highly recommended in the summer for developing chemistry – and you have 25 kids signed up, have three teams. The players can overlap if necessary, but nobody wants to go on the road for a tournament and play seven minutes a game.

And with multiple teams, you can mix and match, allowing contenders for a varsity spot to play with returning varsity players on a rotating basis. Give everyone a shot in the summer – even the parents won’t care that much if you lose a few games.

Also, consider putting your middle school players and incoming freshmen in a JV or low-level varsity bracket. Sure, they’ll likely lose, but they’ll be excited to play in an event for their school and that enthusiasm will carry over to the school year – which is really all that matters.

The offseason shouldn’t be like the regular season. It shouldn’t be as intense, and it shouldn’t be focused on winning. The offseason should allow players to make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes, in an atmosphere that is more relaxed and forgiving. After all, no one will care who won that game in July, or took home a trophy at some August tournament in the middle of nowhere.

If your players show up for the first day of tryouts better than they were when the last season ended, and excited for the long season ahead, your offseason has been a success. If that first day of tryouts, though, is just another grind-it-out day in the gym, you could wind up having a different kind of long season.

High school hoops 101: Recruiting

High school hoops 101: Scheduling

High school hoops 101: Conditioning?

Photo byKylie O'Sullivan for Unsplash