Recovering From a Loss

We were blitzed, hammered, chewed up and spit out by West Virginia Wesleyan on Tuesday at home in Eddie King where we should play our best basketball. We didn't. In fact, it would be generous of me to say that we played team basketball at all. What we did was a lot of one-on-five offense and take-care-of-my-player-only defense. Neither was very successful.

So how did we get from Tuesday when we were horrible beyond repair to Saturday where we defeated Shepherd at their place? Good question. Was Shepherd a bad team? No. Not at all. In the matter of a few days, we had made the decision to play team ball.

After our devastating loss to WVW, we had a video session on Wednesday with the entire team. We had them pull out a sheet of paper from their notebooks and create several columns. The headers for the columns were as follows: number of passes, number of post seals, number of picks-on-ball, number of dribble hand-offs, number of combination screens, and number of good shots. We then watched each offensive possession we had and filled in the correct numbers which was not difficult since we averaged 1-2 passes and 0 in the other columns. Then we watched WVW on offense where they averaged 6-7 passes, took great shots and had several screens each possession.

It was easy to see why we could not score. It wasn't difficult to defend us since we didn't run an offense. It is easy to play defense when a defender never has to move from ballside to helpside or when they never have to fight through a screen.

While we didn't break down our defense like we did our offense, we did have some serious discussions about lack of effort and lack of talking on defense. Then we allowed the players to tell the coaching staff what they needed from us. How could we make practices better? How could we better prepare them for games? The players felt they needed more five-on-five in practice. As a coaching staff, we agreed to make certain we would allow them more opportunity to play in specified five-on-five settings.

Finally, the players pull out another sheet of paper from their notebooks. We asked them to write down all the ways they could personally help the team become better. Then we had them write down their personal goals in terms of what points, rebounds, or assists they could average according to the playing time they received.

It was awesome to see how they responded to the WVW loss and how they came back after watching themselves on videtape. It gives me hope they will continue to learn and grow and that they have the desire to become the best they can be.