Sunday, August 15, 2010

The Triangle

While coaching 3 years of JV ball, I came to a couple of conclusions. First, JV coaching is the worst coaching gig in the world. This is a topic for another blog. Second, and the beginning of my current offensive philosophies, is that at a JV level you never have an offense in, or plays in that suit your personnel. It could be that your Varsity program has an incredible shooting guard and your off guard is your weak link however every play that you work on in practice is suited for the off-guard. It could simply be that your JV team has been running a different offense as younger players and the new offense is simply new to them. Either way, I spent 3 years trying to simplify every aspect of our offensive catalog to allow our teams to be successful and so I didn't have to waste all my timeouts to draw up a play that fit my players.
When I got the chance to coach at the Varsity level, I went out looking for an offense that followed 3 philosophical rules.
  1. Intricate enough that it engaged my older players yet simple enough that my younger players could run it.
  2. It had to be able to feature specific players and be ran no matter the personnel, that way each age group could learn it and be successful in it and not have any continuity problems from year to year and it would not matter who the "best offensive player" was from year to year.
  3. It taught players how to play basketball through concepts rather than teaching a player how to run a play.
Enter Tex Winters. Actually, check that, enter Courtney Brooks. Coach Brooks is the Head Coach at Southwest Christian School in Georgia. He coached, among many others, Javaris Crittenton and Dwight Howard. He put a video out detailing the triangle offense for high school. I had always heard of the triangle but had no idea what it entailed. It was associated with Phil Jackson and anything involved with him seemed too cerebral for me and definitely for high school kids. That being said, I gave the video a shot and It met each of the things I was looking for.
I am sure I will detail more of this in future posts about how it has fit in with everything I was requiring.

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