Most coaches spend a lot of time on the bigger components of offensive and defensive strategies and quickly breeze over the finer points, such as faking. If time was spent breaking down and perfecting the footwork, eye-head-shoulder fake, ball and hand fake and total body fake, then players would be able to dictate more of what the defense does therefore freeing up themselves and teammates for offensive opportunities.
Faking is an art. If it is executed well, then you can put a defender, or an entire defense, on a string and move them how you want.
Fakes are not always big, dramatic expressions. They are often subtle, big direct movements that create the illusion you are going to do something different than what you intend to do.
Fakes are used to get early reads on what a defender or defense is going to do. You can learn quickly Read the rest…
It is fresh in all our memories on how quickly a season can end with a knee injury. It happens thousands of time every season, with most being non-contact injuries.
Many times non-contact injuries are something that might not have been helped. There was simply a predisposition for the injury to occur. There are definite measures we can take to reduce the risk.
One of the measures I personally believe can be taken to reduce the risk of injury is proper technique. When an athlete loads the system correctly through proper posture the chances of injury should be reduced. Read the rest…
Yesterday three new athletes start training with me…a brother, a sister and a friend. They are between 10 and 12 years of age. My typical starting point with any new young athlete is to find out how their posture is during basic running exercises. To see this I use low cones. (Low cones allow them to run over them-one step between each). With this exercise, I am looking for how the athletes maintain tall posture while lifting their knees and driving their arms. What typically happens in younger kids when executing posture runs is they become short and don’t extend the hips- really easy to fix… Read the rest…
Many times I have written about coaches who make poor fundamental decisions as youth coaches. Some of these coaches are involved with travel teams, AAU teams or local youth sports. The important fact to understand is, “Do these coaches know better and just refuse to do the correct thing or do they just not know any better?”
I can remember speaking with a coach this past year who told me he loved AAU so much more than regular high school basketball because it was all about running and gunning, pressing and trapping and shooting when open. I immediately knew he wasn’t a basketball purist. It bothered him that certain players on a high school team were told when and were to shoot versus other players who had a green light. This is a coach that doesn’t understand basketball Read the rest…
In all my years of training athletes, I have spent at least a total of seven years, training out of my home training facility, a.k.a my two car garage.
The funny thing is I have had just as much, if not more enjoyment, training out of my garage as I did a 6,000 square foot facility.
Far too often we base our training program on what OTHER trainers or facilities do. I have always been able to look at my current facility and see all the great training I could do out of the space I have.
My home facility has a plyorobic flooring, multi-purpose squat rack, varying height boxes, 6 wall attachments for Jungle Gym Straps, Read the rest…
