Mamba Monday

This is what hoopaholics do just 24 hours after completing a grueling, grinding weekend, week, month of nonstop basketball: meet up at the park for practice.

Again.

Today, we got to work with low-post drills first. Turnaround jumpers — baseline and inside pivots. Up-and-under footwork. Drop-steps. Shimmy and pivot turnarounds. It's tough doing these drills alone. The monotony is not every player's cup of tea. But with six, then seven of us, it became fun. Competitive. Chris, Tanielu, Walter, Mackie, Kyle. Then Brent. Then Jared. Then Felix and Yong. The work went on and on. Perfection? Of course not. But the footwork gets better, squaring up to the basket becomes more natural and attaining solid, low center of gravity BEFORE the entry pass becomes a normal part of the process. Positioning. It's the difference between success and failure on every single play, every single game.

For the record, the best low-post footwork today was consistently done by Walter (our youngest player at 10 years old), Kyle and Brent. Everybody else was good to average. It doesn't matter though. What matters is improving every day. The player with average footwork today can chip away one day after another, improve a mere 1% each time, and will be twice as good in just over three months. Four times as good in little more than a year.

We also got some solid halfcourt zone offense work in. Makakilo, our 13U foe in Thursday's championship game, used a 1-2-2 zone against us when we met a few weeks back. We sliced that up fairly well then, but a refresher is always good. (See the game video highlights right here.)

Plus, we have a somewhat new '2 Out' offense for 1-2-2 zone defenses, and everyone today got a good feel for it today. We also worked on our 'Flash' cut offense against 2-3 zone. We haven't used it since early spring (or was it last fall?), so today was a perfect opportunity to soak it all in again.

Our zone defense continually fails at engaging the offense, positioning and boxing out. Often, we don't create contact and wind up failing to box out. This has been a major problem for our 17U and 15U, but I want our 13U to learn good habits, so we worked on this a little today. Communication, physical contact on the offensive cutters ... it's all about awareness and CARING. An uninspired defender is often on the losing end of a game. Five tenacious defenders are often on the winning side. Offense is fun stuff. Defense is hard work. I like to have fun and work hard, and I always hope our players feel the same.

This is a key week for the 13U, so we're paring back the scrimmages and focusing on basics, team-based stuff. We'll get much-needed conditioning in before the title game — Tanielu was running sprints on his own before practice — but I'm loathe to risk injury for any of our Thunder.

We're also roughly two weeks away from starting new fall seasons for 17U (Pa‘a and NJB All-Net), 15U (CAL and Pa‘a) and 13U (CAL). Several of our 13U players will again play in 15U. If there's enough interest and funds (re: Car Wash), we may add an 11U team for the first time (if CAL has an opening). CAL is a great league, so I would love for us to have a competitive team in a new age division. Chris, Micah and Walter are young enough to play in 11U. I wasn't sure if Chris would be interested, but he says he wants to play point guard in that division.

No comment on that. I just think he'll get plenty of chances to run the fastbreak off rebounds, a la Magic Johnson, if this 11U materializes. That should satisfy his PG cravings. All in all, if we somehow field an 11U team, I may limit our other age division teams to one each. If Coach Larry is busy with an all-Roosevelt team in the new OIA fall league (Saturdays) and/or the Ikaika league (Sundays), we'll lose a big chunk of our 17U players. That would make being in two leagues impractical; no way I want to be forfeiting games due to scheduling conflicts.

Same with 15U. If we don't have big numbers, having two leagues is less practical. But with our younger players fortifying that team, I don't really mind having two leagues for the 15U.

Overall, it's a great time to be 11, 12 or 13 as a Thunder player. Some, like Chris and Micah, could play in three age divisions this fall. Others like Tanielu and Jared might play in two age divisions, football commitments pending. The sooner I find out from all our players what their level of availability is this fall, the more I'll feel comfortable about our teams and leagues.

I LUB THIS GAME.