The Trap is Set

I am not a coach, at least not in the traditional use of that term. I am a Player Development Specialist. I focus on helping individual players improve. I consider myself first and foremost a teacher, and the players that I work with are my students. Current and former students include junior high and high school players as well as college and professional players, including P.J Brown of the world-champion Boston Celtics and Greg Monroe of Georgetown University.

I am now the Program Director at Above the Rim Gym, a state-of-the-art facility in Madisonville, Louisiana. This position has allowed me the opportunity to colloborate with various All-Star and AAU teams and their coaches. These coaches are volunteers, guys who are fathers of players on these teams, guys with full-time jobs in "the real world." Initially I was asked to help with improving each players' individual fundamental skills, such as shooting and ball handling, but, as time has gone by I have become involved in helping with overall team offensive and defensive tactics and strategies.

The offense that I have always been interested in is "the motion offense." The philosopy of the motion fits my philosophy of basketball: share the ball, move, maintain spacing and court balance, and work to develop each players' overall "game" instead of limiting players to narrow roles as much as possible. This is especially important with young players.

One of the tools that I am using to expand my knowledge (limited) of how to teach the motion is a Bob Huggins video, The Cut and Fill Motion Offense. Coach Huggins makes a great point in this video, (actually he makes many great points), when he says that "if you run sets, players get good at running sets, if you run motion, they become good at reading the defense, thus instead of running basketball plays they learn to play basketball."

Many youth coaches teach a few set plays, then they instruct their players to run these plays over and over, until they are good at running them. This is a short-term approach, it looks good at first and then when the set doesn't work or the defense adjusts, the players don't know what to do. Teaching the motion offense is the opposite, the players struggle at first because they are so used to running set plays, however, as they learn the concepts of the motion they are learning how to read the defense, how to set up the defender, and thus they learn how to play basketball. This should be the goal of every coach, become a better teacher so that your players learn how to play basketball. Focusing on this process, ironically, will produce a great product: a team that if fun to coach with players who are learning to play basketball.