Where I Started

Eleven games, one dial

I have spent the last two days back home at the Buhl Ballers summer camp. My niece is one of the assistant coaches, and together with my nephew’s wife she built the whole thing, all three days of it, for boys and girls from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

The organizing alone was a mountain of work, and it shows. So does something harder to teach. They understand why you start with the fundamentals, and that the foundation has to be poured early. I wish it was more than three days. It has been so much fun. I came in to work with the groups, and this is what I did with one of them.

That group was the seventh and eighth grade boys. Across two days I taught them the same lesson eleven different ways. I never changed the skill once. I only changed where the defender started.

On the Intensity Dial the defender is one lever, sitting next to Time, Space, and Decision. Almost everything I ran with them lived on that one lever. Behind the offense. On the ball handler’s back. Shoulder to shoulder at midline. Hands down until they earned the right to use them. Same offensive job every time. Win the angle, get to two feet, finish. The only thing that moved was where the defender began.

Then I added a body and went to 2v1, and the defender stopped being the obstacle. Now the defender was the information. Attack the middle and the help slides, and that slide tells the second player where to go. Catch on the baseline and the help turns, and the read changes again. The kids stopped guessing. They started reading.

A clock made it honest. Five seconds of pressure, escape, relocate. Ball moving, shoot on the read. Pressure is just one more defender constraint. It only changes how fast the answer has to come.

By the end of the second day the games looked different from across the gym. They were not. Same skill both days. The kids thought they were playing eleven games. They were turning one dial.

Seventh and eighth grade is the right time for that. Hand them moves to memorize and you build a player who runs out of answers. Teach them to read the defender and they keep finding new ones.

It was good to teach the simple thing in that gym, in the town I grew up in, where I have been coming back a long time.

🦴 over Cones