Long Distance Coaching

As the summer quickly ended and the new school year began, the "regular" roles of our Cadet team coaching staff have also started. I think if we all had a preference we would move all our potential cadet team World Championship athletes to a localized area for the year and train together. Unfortunately the size of our country, and the fact that our coaching staff has full time jobs makes that is a little difficult (thankfully we are teachers and full time coaches of other teams - so we are able to escape and enjoy the privilege of coaching the cadet team).

My goal with this blog is to post relatively regularly on our happenings during our cadet team "off season"...hopefully about once a month, to provide some insight on how we try to keep the program and our athletes operating from a distance.

After the National Championships (held in Winnipeg) ended in August, where we were able to complete further player evaluation, we have been working on a plan to regularly communicate, monitor and have our athletes progress in preparation for the World Championships next summer. Not the easiest task when most of us are several miles apart.

Thankfully, technology these days will hopefully make this easier and help us to shrink the country a little bit. First, our coaching staff has been able to connect via - phone, email, text, bbm, conference call, skype, etc...and with the availability to share video and other content on several different internet sites and programs we hope to be able to provide athletes with video examples of what we would like them to be working on, as well as have them return video of them performing specific tasks. The only difficulty with this is getting the video recorded and set up (who, when and where will this be done). We also hope to regularly communicate with on site coaches who get to work with the athletes on a day to day basis, and provide the athletes with an appropriate physical training program to aid their development in areas other than just basketball skill.

If things work out as we hope, our next training camp leading up to the World's will be around Christmas time which should provide a great in person progress report on the athlete's development in addition to what we will receive .

As we continue to work I will keep you posted!

Bronze Medal Game vs Puerto Rico

This is a long overdue post to summarize our final game of the FIBA World Qualifying tournament. It is amazing how as soon as the team divides up after travel home real life starts up in full force again and the environment you were completely immersed in for 2 straight weeks gets quickly left in the dust.

Final reports have been submitted on our season, and I now finally find myself making time to write the post on our Bronze Medal victory over Puerto Rico which earned us a spot in the World Championships to be hosted in Holland next August.

We had already played Puerto Rico earlier in the tournament, and although our previous game was a hard fought and close battle, we knew our game plan needed to be very similar in order to be successful and victorious again. I think already having played Puerto Rico really helped our team in mentally preparing for this game. Throughout the tournament we struggled to find the right arousal levels going into our games - we were either too worked up or too nervous depending on the competition or the environment. Having already played Puerto Rico meant we knew what to expect, and more importantly that our athletes knew what to expect.

Following a great deal of disappointment from our Brazil game the night before, the girls deserved a lot of credit for preparing themselves to play this game, embracing the opportunity to earn a medal and a spot in the World Championships next summer.

We came out very focused and intense, locking it up on the defensive end and forcing Puerto Rico into several shot clock violations in the first quarter. Despite our stellar defensive effort, we really struggled to put the ball in the basket. Although we were dominating, our inability to finish on the offensive end didn't allow us to pull away. Further, our momentum was stalled when a Puerto Rican player fainted on the court and was down for 8-10 minutes due to low blood sugar. This also seemed to give Puerto Rico a bit of a boost and we took a narrow 3 point lead into half.

We were never phased and never panicked, and continued solid execution of our game plan in the second half. An adjustment offensively to get the ball inside more to our size advantage got us to the foul line, got us some easy scores, and extended our lead as we continued our defensive presence. In the end we pulled away and earned a sound victory.

Watching the girls enjoy the victory, do the John Wall together on the bus, receive their medals and take photos together has been one of my most memorable coaching moments to date. Not necessarily because they "won" but because of how they came together as a true team, learned to sacrifice for each other and experienced the rewards that can come from always focusing on price, unity and tenacity - three things we emphasized from day one.

Canada vs Brazil

We knew going into this game that Brazil was going to be a tough test. They have a very athletic group with one of the best players in the tournament to help run the show. Their style of play is relatively simple - playing almost all player to player defense and offensively mostly just pass and cut with X cuts in the post. But, they play tremendously well as a group and with an incredible amount of passion. One thing that differentiates the North American teams from the South American teams in this tournament is the way they cheer and play with an extra level of external emotion. For example, every time Brazil walks into the gym it is in a line as a team and they are clapping and chanting together. This energy transfers on to the court where they are constantly applauding each other and fist pumping on every good play.

With our team we have been talking a lot about unity and giving energy, but with such a short preparation time together it is hard to create a level of togetherness that Brazil exhibited. This is not to say it is not in us, but our culture isn't always as naturally passionate either (except when we are hosting the Olympics) and the Brazil team for example spent a longer time training together and getting comfortable with each other prior to the tournament. I can't emphasize how important it is for players at this level to be energy givers to allow for our team to form and gel in the limited time we typically have together.

In our game vs Brazil they came out likely a bit over-aroused for the game while we were under-aroused. We managed to keep things together at the beginning and were actually leading 4-2 early on as Brazil's over-arousal left them throwing some passes out of bounds and shots over the rim. However, their ball pressure on defense began to wear us down quite quickly and we struggled to get the ball to the areas we like to attack from. As great as we were defensively (holding a dynamic, fast-paced Brazil team to 56 points for the game), we did not click offensively. If there are any skills that are clear we need to work on as a nation after facing this pressure they are: staying and playing under stance when pressured on and off the ball, how to read, cut, attack, and use our physical strength to manage the pressure, and most importantly how to pass against aggressive defense. We continue to be world class defensively as a nation, but need to encourage our top players and athletes to improve skills constantly as their athleticism does not create the same advantages at the international level.

These things were evident to us as coaches, but also came from the girls in our debrief which is great news as we know they experienced a tremendous amount of learning throughout this game.

Most were very disappointed following the game as the loss meant we would not have a chance to play the US for gold and we would have to wait another day to officially qualify for the World Championships, but we regrouped and had a great final effort vs Puerto Rico for Bronze the next day. Post on the Bronze Medal game to come soon!

Off Day in Mexico

Yesterday was an off day for the tournament. We still had a one hour practice to use as prep for our semi-final game vs Brazil tonight, but otherwise the rest of the day of free. Prior to practice we took the morning to do a little sightseeing downtown on our way to visit a local school. The local school was unbelievable. The kids were so excited to have us there, and it was an incredibly experience for our girls as they were signing autographs and singing songs (Justin Beiber to be exact - a lot of the little girls were asking if we knew JB). This experience was amazing for our athletes. Playing basketball in another country is a very memorable experience, but there is no doubt our girls will remember this experience likely much more than anything that happens during the games.

In the afternoon after practice we took a trip to downtown Merida to do a little shopping at the market. It was a very hot day so we limited our walking around time to 45 minutes as we needed to be sure not to expend too much energy to maximize our recovery. Nonetheless, the girls had a great time and were excited to be somewhere other than the gym or the hotel. The change of scenery left them refreshed and energized for our final 2 games here.

Here is a video of some of our adventures during the day and how we made use of our downtime. Happy viewing - time to finish our prep for Brazil!

Canada vs Mexico

Coaching this game vs Mexico was one of the most fun basketball environments I have experienced in person. Mexico is the host country and has had fantastic fans throughout the tournament so far. In addition the screaming fans there was also a band of drummers and trumpets that played throughout the entire game, and a siren also sounded until Mexico scored their first basket.

We anticipated the noise so in our pre game shoot we implemented some other forms of communication in order to make sure messages were getting from the bench to the floor. Of most importance was the addition of hand signals for some of our play calls that we only had verbal cues for to date.

The energy from the fans gave us a ton of energy on the court, and we had a great start. Our defense set the tone and led to some easy fast break scores and we never looked back. We got contributions from a ton of players this game and it was an enjoyable experience for everyone. We have officially qualified for the semi final game and take on Brazil Friday night at 6pm Mexico time. We will keep you posted.

Canada vs Puerto Rico

Yesterday was our first real test as we took on a feisty and crafty Puerto Rico team. Although not huge in stature, they are very quick and compete incredibly hard. We knew we would be in for a battle.

For most of the first half our nerves got the best of us and we played more as a lot of isolated individuals than as a collective group. Our defense was relatively strong in the first half, but we turned the ball over too much - 11 times in the first quarter and the first four possessions of the game. In order to combat the turnovers we decided to change our defense - first to a half court zone which created a couple steals and easy scores, and then to full court zone pressure that really took Puerto Rico out of sync. With a strong final 2 minutes to end the half we took a seven point lead into the break.

When we talked at half time as a staff and looked at the stats we discovered that our guards had taken down more than two-thirds of our rebounds. This was disappointing as we knew we had a huge size advantage. So at half time we challenged our bigs to get into the paint and control the boards - they stepped up to the challenge. We also made an adjustment to recognize who between our 4 and 5 players were being guarded by a smaller player. Whoever had the better advantage we put them inside to our 5 spot. This gave us an even greater post up advantage inside and pulled the little size Puerto Rico did have outside to the perimeter.

These small adjustments, combined with an improvement of team work and making the effort plays we needed, allowed us to pull away.

We head to practice shortly to prepare for Mexico. The game tonight should be a memorable experience as Mexico has been competing with a full house every night which provides them with lots of extra energy. A major emphasis in our prep today will be defending without fouling. Although we were tremendous at getting to the paint and subsequently shot 54 free throws last night, we fouled too much. We will emphasize adapting to who we are guarding and understanding that our length advantage at almost every position thus far means we don't have to be as tight on the ball when applying ball pressure.

Managing the Heat

As I mentioned in my previous post, we have been very fortunate thus far on this trip - great food, fantastic accommodations, and extremely friendly and helpful hosts. The lone major adjustment we had to make was to the heat of the gym facilities.

We arrived in Mexico Friday evening after a long day of travel. We had a great night's sleep and great breakfast and prepared to head to practice for 12pm - basically as the day was reaching its hottest point, and of course this day was predicted to be about 40 degrees Celsius.

Likely a combination of nerves and fatigue from travel, but largely due to the heat we had a very poor start to practice. We were unprepared for the temperature in the gym and lost most of our focus and concentration on what we were trying to accomplish. We are very fortunate to be traveling with a tremendous staff - Head Coach, 2 assistant coaches, manager, physiotherapist, doctor - all who have a lot of experience and knowledge of which we put into use right away.

Tracy, our physiotherapist has been fabulous at emphasizing the importance of hydration and monitoring intake of both Gatorade and Water since the beginning of our training camp in Toronto. This became that much more important in Mexico. To start, we are unable to drink the Mexican water so Jodi our manager and Julia our doctor are making daily runs to refill our water supply. Both Julia and Tracy have been fantastic now that we are in Mexico at monitoring and enforcing our fluid intake even more. In fact, we are the only team walking around with our water bottles wherever we go.

Beyond our fluid intake we took some other measures to help our bodies adjust to the constant heat. After our practice Saturday afternoon we got cleaned up then went for a walk - nothing too exhausting but enough that the girls were warm and getting used to breathing in the hot, humid air. We then spent some time by the pool which allowed them to relax and cool down while still being in the heat. We also have wonderful air conditioning in our rooms. However, we have set guidelines on how much they can use the air conditioning, and what the minimum temperature that can set it to. This means that there body temperature will not fluctuate as much and subsequently not feel as uncomfortable when playing.

So far so good with our heat management, hopefully this remains as our only off court obstacle throughout the tournament...

PS...notice our friend Carlos in the attached picture (shown again here). Carlos is a kitten who was hanging around with us before and after practice...we did not pick him up though.

Canada vs Guatamala

So, some posts may appear out of order, as I was not able to keep up with posting regularly during our training camp in Toronto, but over time I will contribute posts about our training camp and our adaptations. For now - it is tournament time!

Yesterday we tipped off in our first official game of the FIBA Americas tournament. As far as international competition goes, we are living on the high end. Great hotel with air conditioning, great food, friendly people - so it looked as though it was going to be smooth sailing. However, at our first practice on Saturday afternoon we met our first challenge - the heat of the gym, and no air conditioning. I will post at a later date exactly how we adapted and worked to make the heat a non issue; for now I will mention how great it was that we were tipping off at 4pm yesterday and a huge rain shower hit around 245 pm. Two straight days this has happened due to the humidity which is helpful to us because it significantly cooled down the temperature of the gym. The greatest challenge was to work around the small leak in the roof, that was directly dripping into our first time out - my white board got a good washing, and we moved our timeout seats further down the bench for the following breaks in play.

We played Guatamala, a team with little to no size. We had not seen them before hand but we knew they were small so our game plan was to apply pressure on defense, run the floor offensively and dominate the boards on both ends of the floor. We were very successful from the opening tip. Despite some nerves associated with our first international competition, we played with energy and lots of passion.

We managed to obtain a significant lead pretty early, so then the decision had to be made on what our strategy would be for the rest of the game to ensure we were continuing to build habits and improve for the rest of the tournament. We showed very little of our repertoire offensively and defensively since there were lots of team scouting us in the crowd, but we really tried to be detailed in our half court defense (we played both zone and man), and emphasized moving the ball on offense. We saw all zone against Guatamala so we worked on trying to attack the zone in different ways. We also rebounded very well, but at times struggle to finish our put backs, so we also tried to focus on taking time to finish so we are improved when were are matched up with a team closer to our size. Beyond that, we took the opportunity to provide lots of rest to our top players. With the length and intensity of this tournament (5 games in 6 days) this is very important. Regardless of the competition, we need to find ways to give everyone rest so their body can perform for the entire tournament.

Today we play Puerto Rico who again is not as big as us, but are very athletic and really look to push the ball in transition. We will focus on containing their dribble penetrators and using our length to alter shots. This will be a much tougher challenge so I better finish this up so I can make sure we are ready.

I will let you know how we make out!

Monday June 6th AM Training Session

Our second practice (Monday AM) implemented our defensive philosophy. Again with such a short training camp we needed to keep things simple. From the moment this practice started it was clear that the athletes nerves had settled a bit and their comfort level was improving. It also became clear very quickly that our defense is going to be a major energy giver to our team. A number of these athletes are incredibly competitive and intense, almost to a fault at times as we began to notice a couple athletes going full out in warmup.

We try to talk about intensity and concentration levels in most of our drills, and we made a conscious effort to slow down a couple athletes in some scenarios. With a camp of this length it is really important that the athletes don't burn out or obtain overuse injuries on the second day. Since we are in try out mode until Tuesday night, the girls want to be high intensity all the time, so we are reminding them frequently of the when and where.

We started with basic 1 on 1 closeouts and we got after it. We had good communication and high intensity throughout the practice. This was very exciting to see!

Sunday June 5th - Practice 1

Going into camp we knew we would be adjusting our plan based on how the girls learned and applied our teaching, and how their fatigue levels were as 2 practices a day for 5 days is exhausted for not only the athletes but the staff as well. You can nit emphasize enough the importance of getting proper rest - napping between practices and of course at night as well.

Our first practice was Sunday night, which was a travel day for more than half of the athletes. The travel day combined with a high level of anxiety made our first practice average in terms of energy. The practice included a lot of review from our Easter camp, so most things were familiar however we were not as sharp as we would've liked. We were happy with the first practice but we quickly discovered that we would not be able to overload our athletes with too many options and sets in the quarter court. We will have to be selective with what we decide to use from our original technical package, and as planned continue to emphasize the importance of our defense and creating easy scoring opportunities off of our defense.

Pre-Camp Technical/Tactical Plan

Attached below is the original camp proposal sent to the coaching staff. Since our staff was located in different areas across the country, we tried to complete a plan ahead of the camp through email and phone calls since we were unable to get together in person prior to the start of camp. This plan is copy and pasted exactly as sent out to the staff. Even at the start of camp there is still lots of items in question, as with a 5 day camp it is very difficult to determine what the learning curve will be and how the athletes body will manage the physical and mental demands of such an intensive camp.

*Unfortunately the play diagrams were not able to be copy and pasted as the text was...also, highlighted sections are those which were left for discussion for our final week before camp.

Technical / Tactical

Strengths	Weaknesses
· Size, length, athleticism · Rebounding – both ways · Ability to disrupt, deflect and annoy defensively	· Consistent outside shooting presence · Point guard position · Ability to handle full court pressure · Guarding 1 on 1 on the perimeter
Opportunities	Threats
· Pressure defense in the full and half court · Offensive transition / fast break · Creating scores off of defense	· Full court pressure defense · zone defense from opponent ·

Defensive Philosophy

Calls:
1 – player to player
Double Fist – zone pressure full or three quarter court
X – half court zone pressure
2 – 2-3 zone

General principles:
Force outside – keep the ball out of the middle
Cutters must “remember the trip” when we are defending them
No ball side help – stunts and fakes
Active hands
Communicate every action

Half and quarter court for 1:
On ball position – keep the ball out of the middle. “Nose on shoulder”, and chest in front
One pass away – full denial while in drive line and be prepared to stunt at dribble penetration.
Two passes away – help position
Defending the post – keep it out! Drive line position.
Off Ball Screen defense – switch, muscle/tail, slide,
On ball screen defense – switch, squeeze?, over under?

Full Court for 1:
Same half court principles apply

· Scenarios for defending ball out of bounds: on in bounder and off in bounder front and back on guard (“Cookie”)

Zone Pressure:

Full & ¾ court zone pressure: 1-2-2. Fall back to 2-3 zone.

Transition:
Rebounding spots – below the foul line extended = crash
Safeties – above the foul line extended fall back. Smaller guards - Safeties whenever possible.
“Protect the rim” and “contain the ball” – funnel ball to the sideline

2-3 Zone:
standard 2-3 zone. We won’t spend much time teaching it, but we will be prepared to use it if need be. Could be a good weapon with our length.

Offensive Philosophy

Fast Break:
Sprint the floor, attack advantage situations.

Transition:
Move the ball on the pass, push to wing attack spot. Primary options include:

· First big running to the rim

· Attack with dribble penetration from wing attack spot

· Post entry, cut and play. Load to 2^nd cuts (Agnes).

“Motion”: ball side low post, 4 out (Renato standard motion offense)
a. Post Entry : 1) Basket cut and secondary cut (when/ if necessary). 2) Up screen with weak side dive
b. Pass and cut principles:
c. Penetration principles: movement by post dependent on positioning. Perimeter circle cuts

d. Back screen: on top-top reversal pass. Visual (fist) and verbal cue (teammates name) when screening.
- reads off screen: Basket cut, ball cut, fade cut (least used and emphasized option).
- Load: “Screener” has option to back screen or cut block to block (primarily to keep “5” player inside).

“Basic”: weak side mid post, 4 out (from Renato phone call)
-pressure releases: dribble entry to wing. On reversal 4 can back cut is over played and 3 fills.

“Quick Hits” and “Special Situations”: ** Reminder: Be sure to include pressure release entries

Looking for input on last second plays from sideline inbounds. Need to decide on our go-tos if we need a 2 or 3 at the end of the game. This might be sorted out as we continue to get a better feel for our players.

We will not necessarily implement all of the following. Please provide any feedback you have on the following…We will also be able to find some other quick reads out of motion and basic.

Fist (out of motion set):

Five (out of basic set):

Shooter: two options – let me know if you have any comments on which would be a preference if we are to implement…

Zone offense attack:
- See how we run basic and motion vs zones…and/or….

BLOB:

Suggestions here? Do we need two baseline plays? Renato shared a good one on our call, should we use that in addition to what we have already sent out to the girls (as shown below)?

“2”:

SLOB:

I am open for suggestions for slideline out of bounds… do we use plus, or a different set?

Press Break: