Of course, the most important part of educating is that of your team. You must constantly communicate to your team as to what their roles are and why they are so important. Individual player meetings can be extremely helpful. It is important for players to understand their role and why, but they need good feedback as well. If their primary role is to screen, the player needs to know they are doing a great job screening or they are not. Again, video is important, not just with the team but individually.It is also important at this time to make sure we understand that some players will have the role of scoring. Often, the word “role” makes many think non-scoring. The role of scoring is extremely important and your players with the ability to score must know that they are expected to execute their role.
A tremendously important part of developing roles is within the structure of your practice. Part of what we have already discussed is the way you communicate to your team. But you can also go a long way in solidifying roles by your practice. We do a lot of drill work on the fundamental parts of the game. That alone gives value to those areas.
While we will go into detail later on our teaching methods, we are always looking to make drills competitive. To do this, you need to keep score, have winners and losers, and consequences for the losers. This is not an earth-shattering concept. But what you can do is keep score differently. We may play four-on-four but the only way you score is by setting a good screen. If you make the basket, your team gets to keep the ball but there is no point value for a made field goal. Obviously, the good screeners become very important in this game. You can give a point value to post feeds or any other part of your offense (or defense).
(to be continued)
