May 7th, 2008

Today at camp was a little bit of a struggle for me. All of the time slots were the same. It was a struggle today because the focus of the day was how to defend the pick and roll. What frustrated me was that almost all of the kids seemed like they had never seen this before. The pick and roll is the most commonly used play of all time in basketball. When I mentioned the term "hedge", some kids looked at me like they never heard that word before. This got to me.

It wasn't a struggle because the kids took a while to understand it, it was more because it came to me that most coaches are not doing the players any good. Coaches like that are the exact reason that I aspire to be a coach. If a child wants to learn to play basketball, I would be doing him a disservice by not teaching him correctly. At the same time that this made me frustrated, I was happy as well to know that I am making an impact on these kids.

I am proud to say that both underclassmen and the older group were guarding the pick and roll much better at the end of this session. I would like to have another session that involves guarding the pick and roll before I have the kids scrimmage on Saturday so I have to rearrange my practice schedule for the remainder of the week to practice this skill more.