3rd-Grade Basketball. REALLY necessary to full-court press the entire game?

I've got two replies to this thread.

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and

2.)

 

A lot of kids' leagues play games to set time limits, with running clock except for the last minute or so of the game. A 40-minute running-clock game is probably about equal to a 24-minute game under normal clock-stoppage rules.

 

Yeah, it's running clock except for the last 2 minutes of each half.

 

There you get the result of all the Bobby Knight acolytes who go on an absolute fatwah over their point (which they usually present as a non-negotiable demand, usually with snotty snarky insults to anyone who may think of voicing any alternative opinion) that all kids' leagues must always play nothing but straight man-to-man every single second of every single game.

I usually teach helpside man principles as my main defensive philosophy: direct pressure on the ball, deny the lanes on the strong side, and on the weak side sag off into the lane. This usually brings screams of "zone!! zone" when the opposing star point guard (almost all kids basketball teams are built around a star point guard) dribbles into the lane to find three people in his/her way. (These same Bobby Knight acolytes usually get highly pissed off by anything that actually forces their star point guard to pass the ball.)

And usually, they win; the high-school JV players reffing the game are told "anytime you see more than one defender on a player, it's a zone."

So, when that happens, I just say "fuck it," and run complete clear-outs with my own star point guard. Or variations of the 'tease freeze' which usually turns the spread-floor situation into 3-on-1 halfcourt fast breaks.

 

Malcolm Gladwell just wrote 4,500 words on the lessons NBA coaches can learn from Rick Pitino and the guy who coached against exmediahack's team.

 

I don't know if I've heard that quote before, but it's gold.

 

The vindictive part of me would have just had one or two players handle the ball on offense for a while (I assume there's no shot clock, and if there is, it's very long) while the other three just run rampant around the court to tire the defenders out.

 

I complete agree with Zag's point about plays. You need kids to learn about moving off the ball, but all you get with plays is kids moving stiffly. At most, I teach give-and-go and pick-and-roll, stuff that's relatively easy to understand and work on in the limited practice time we have.

As for man-to-man, in the rec leagues I coach there is one big problem -- the first time anyone subs. I tried and tried and tried to get kids to communicate on the floor who had who, but we'd give up three baskets before anyone figured it out, and then the next wave of subs came in.

So I stick with 2-3 zone, and I tell them not to go outside the 3-point line. I did make an exception in a championship game two years ago, running a triangle-and-two because one guard and one center were the team's focal points. I think the coach must have ordered no one else to shoot. (The center was a 6-foot sixth-grader whose mom played at UConn, so I could understand why the coach would lean on him. On the other hand, at that level you lean on one player at your peril, because that's a lot of pressure to throw on a preteen.)

 

You cannot press in the third grade. That is insane.

Conversely, I think it would be novel to do away with zone defenses at that level as well.

 

I refereed basketball for 37 years - - and did a boatload of recreation league games for kids (boys and girls) ages 8 and above. From an official's standpoint, a wall-to-wall game of full court pressing for little kids is horrible - - because you are going to have little kids shooting foul shots early in both halves and kids that age cannot shoot foul shots. The game will be a drag...

Best rec league I ever worked for was one that had a simple "house rule" for all teams under 13 years old:


You can press all you want UNTIL the score differential is 12 points. If you press with a lead of 12 or more points, you get one warning. After the warning, you forfeit the game.


Pressing in that league happened only when it was "necessary" and coaches were really careful to call it off when the differential got anywhere near 12 points. The downside of a mistake by a kid was more than most of them could bear to withstand.


Here are the objectives that coaches at that age group ought to realize are paramount:


1. No kid gets hurt.

2. Every kid has fun.

3. Every kid is a better player at the end of the season than he/she was at the beginning of the season.


Who wins and who loses in any given season in a rec league is more trivial than can be expressed easily. Too bad coaches don't get it...

 

ahhh, well, I'm not arguing because obviously if you have 37 years of experience you know what you're talking about, but a 12-point lead in a below-junior high-level league (13 = 7th grade, usually) is a huge lead, equivalent to something like a 30-40 point lead in college. A high-scoring 6th grade team (the upper limit of this age group) rarely averages more than 30 points a game total.

and if both teams press the whole game and neither team takes a 12-point lead, you end up with one of the immortal 11-7 games mentioned earlier in the thread.

Basically, pressing should simply be illegal in levels below junior high school, with the only exception the team trailing in the final moments of the game.

Unless, of course, your kid is playing in some ultra-advanced superstar travel league where each and every one of the players is a hotshot specifically recruited for his/her great skills. In that case, throw the gloves off -- let everybody press, play zone, shoot 3's, whatever they want.

But if you're playing in a reasonably normal house league/rec league/ low-pressure grade school league where half the players are not finely tuned basketball performers, but just the kids who show up, just get rid of it.

 

As I mentioned, the problem with doing away zones is that man-to-man requires even more communication, particularly when people are subbing en masse (as often happens), and everyone is confused about who has who, if they're even thinking about it. Plus, as a coach, teaching young kids about when to leave their man to help on a player who has lost his or because someone is driving the lane just never worked out. Finally, even for my fifth- and sixth-graders we played a regulation full court, with a roster of nine total, that often because of whatever reason was cut to seven, six or five on game day. I can't have them play man if I don't want them to die on the court (especially because I had two asthmatics this year).