I knew all of the second-graders because of the time I spent playing with them before summer. Ryo was tall and lanky. Ichitaro was short and often held the ball too long. Yuya grew his head out like a mushroom, but had a lot of raw skill. Masaki was what I imagined a Japanese junior high school version of Charles Oakley would look like. Naoki was a decent player but had to get his shots off whether they were good or not. Takayuki looked like a deer in headlights when the ball swung over to him. The first-graders were like blank slates, and I none of them did anything for me to remember who they were on the court as well as in the classrooms.
The first thing I did was to teach the kids how to support each other on the court. I didn’t want whoever was going to emerge as the main scorer to be isolated all game long. The main problem was too much emphasis and pressure was put on the point guard doing all of the heavy-lifting. They all wanted to be that main guy. I wanted to eliminate that. I wanted them to be themselves, and to learn about what each other liked to do. I needed them to see that they had to play smarter together, and that they had to not only trust each other, but be dependable enough to be relied upon. To do that, I would need to design drills that forced them to use their teammates and be used by their teammates. I wanted to force them to watch the defense and react accordingly, before it was too late.
My first drill was called “two guards, all court”. Only two guards were on offense. They had to travel the distance of the court and put the ball into the basket, and they had to do it against ten defenders. There were five in the backcourt, and five in the frontcourt. There were four defenders at each trap zone and a rover. In their zones, the defenders had to apply ball pressure, trap, and cover. To succeed, the two players would have to protect the ball and use their dribbles efficiently, find the soft spots in the defenses and move to the next soft spot after the pass. Not one pair of them did it successfully. That didn’t mean it was not a successful drill, though. The drill was meant to teach them about failure. I allowed them to fail. I needed them to fail. Failure is beautiful. Only from failure would they try to re-evaluate what they had been doing. And after they had all gone, and they had all failed, only then were they willing to learn something new.
The biggest mistake they all made was more a fatal flaw that would need to be corrected if we were going to make any progress; a lack of imagination. Without a coach or a captain barking out what to do to them, they had no real purpose of motion. In basketball, they might as well not exist on the court at all. Screens were allowed, but the kids soon found out that screens were useless, since there was another defender waiting for them beyond the screen. Many of them made ill-timed moves and cuts, without even considering the actions of their partners. How would I stop that from repeating was the real question.
I decided not to lecture. My Japanese was too poor for lecturing. I taught them by letting them do it again. Only this time, I would be their partner, which meant one of them had to check out, hopefully to watch and learn. From the best player to the worst player, they started to see that the drill itself was not as impossible as they had thought. I did not do anything a junior high student could not do. I did not dribble behind my back. I did not go through my legs. I did not spin. I made jab steps. I made hesitation dribbles. I made crossovers. And I was in the right place every time, one direct line pass away from my partner.
They did the drill for a third time, rejoined with their previous partners. I reminded them about talking to one another. No pair was able to finish the drill with a score, but they had gotten better moving without the ball. They had gotten better reading the defenses. They had gotten better positioning themselves in attacking areas. These were things that lecturing was not as efficient teaching. These were things that could only be done on the court, learning and watching others who knew how to do it.
I was able to see their strengths as I looked on. The best ball-handler and passer was Ichitaro. After teaching him how to shield the ball with his body away from the defender, and even using his off-hand to punish them for trying to take the ball away, I could say he was trustworthy. Ryo had a decent handle, but was dribbling the ball like a smaller player. No one ever explained to him that since he as taller, it took the baller a longer amount of time to return to his hand. He could correct this simply by dropping his arm lower to receive the ball, rather than waiting for its return. He was quick to pick it up, and appreciative for the detailed explanation. Yuya had incredible concentration, and if locked in, I was sure he could probably defend anybody at this age level. Masaki was clumsy and often traveled with the ball, but nobody was going to be able to take it from him. He had the strongest hands on the team, and fought for everything that came toward him, whether it was a clean pass or not. Naoki was really good at reading the floor. Of all of them, he was able to see the soft spots, as well as force the defense into compromising floor positions. That was a skill even several high school players couldn’t do. Takayuki was a solid on-ball defender. He was scrappy, and stood his ground against anyone, myself included. He also had a quick right step that I hadn’t noticed before, and a fairly accurate midrange shot. I had completely underestimated him, thinking him the most useless player on the team. I was dead wrong.
I had things to learn about coaching, especially in a foreign country. I was working with kids who played small amounts of youth basketball, or mini-basketball, as it was called here, instead of coaching kids who had so much playing experience. Their only experience was when they got into the gym. There weren’t many blacktop courts in Japan, at least I haven’t found any, unlike soccer goalposts and baseball diamonds. So not only were the students limited in their experience, they were limited in gaining potential experience, too. And when they were put into games, they weren’t relied on to actually score, the best part of basketball. During their practices, they primarily worked on fundamental drills, like ball-handling or defensive sliding. These were all very important things, but without the right level of competition, could only achieve so much. How could a student at 145cm visualize stopping another one at 165cm? Sooner or later, they really had to match up, to use in real life what they practiced in theory.
On the second day, I focused on half-court defense and the offensive transition game. I knew they did the shell drill. Every coach in the history of basketball did the shell drill because it taught the players where to rotate for help defense as well as how to see both their mark and the ball. After letting them do their conventional shell, I decided to tweak the rules a bit. I allowed them to take a max of two dribbles. That meant they were allowed to go to the rim. At first, the defense was hardly there. There was help, but there wasn’t any help for the helper. The opposite wing did not rotate down to take away the open post. It was as if they had never thought something like that would happen, or they just accepted that there was nothing they could do about it. Again, a lack of imagination led to problems in all areas of the game.
I had to make a decision. I could tell them to hurry up and recover. It won’t help them become better perimeter defenders, since they couldn’t magically become faster. Even if they did develop more foot speed, so did the other players they played against. It was a technical issue, meaning one involved more with technique than with desire. Or I could change their regular pattern of defensive rotation. It might be able to fix a fundamental problem with their defense, the ability to stop the ball at the point of attack.
The trick here was to make them remember that even though they were in man-to-man defense, they had to play five-on-five, and not stay glued only to their mark. Since they were trained to watch ball and mark, they all knew where these two objects were. All I had to do was train them to focus on three instead of two. I needed them to use their peripheral vision to see the other offensive players nearby. From there, on dribble penetration, they were to leave their mark and rotate to the next closest one to the ball in their territory. The player that was beat, instead of quickly recovering, was now to take the next player closest to the outside. This switching would still keep them at five-on-five.
There was risk. The risk was that the driver would suddenly pull back his dribble, leaving him open for a second to take an uncontested shot in a very makeable spot. It was the only play he could make, since the wings rotated in, and took away the easy dump passes near the basket. That pull up shot would require enough body control to pull off, and at the junior high level, it wasn’t a guaranteed basket. I was willing to take that risk, since only a very talented player would be able to consistently torch the defense with that lone shot.
I also knew that by not collapsing the defense from the top down, I was also leaving a window for a fast break. This would be another positive, and another reason for why to implement the change in defense. If we could get quick points in transition, we’d look less poorly in the half-court offense. Since Toho basketball was known to struggle creating offensive opportunities, I decided it was worth the risk.
Once the students got used to the rotations, once they allowed themselves to break from habit, they started to see that defensively, they could play more efficiently. In their old strategy, if the ball was kicked back out or rebounded by the offense, they would have to reset and play defense again. Over time, that strategy wound up wearing them out. I was telling them to allow a slightly higher percentage shot in the key, but if the shot did not go in, they could then get the rebound, ending their defensive possession. I told them to keep playing, and to look for the fast break. Now, the player getting beat was no longer feeling depressed about not making the defensive stop. If his teammate got the rebound from the miss, he could make up for allowing the penetration with a basket of his own.
It began to work. It was as if a light bulb went off in their heads. They had not seen such rewards for playing defense before. This was different than playing press defense. This was something they could do throughout the whole game and still get points off it. I could see it inspiring their intensity. Basketball now became more than just a game of offense and defense. Basketball was an ebb and flow of motion and momentum. There was now a way for them to grab on to that momentum a little.
The defensive rotation scheme did have its problems. The first-year players got lazy, allowing the penetration in order to try to have the upper hand for a transition basket. I didn’t even have to say anything to them about that. Their sempai did it for me. I just had to make sure the discipline did not get out of hand. Other than that, I allowed them to do what Japanese society had trained them to do their whole entire lives. Yuya and Ichitaro yelled at them for not doing their jobs defensively and scolded them. Ryo, while often quiet, had the full respect of all of the first-years, probably because he was a seibu selection player. I didn’t know what he told them, but it seemed to be working. Takayuki showed them how easier it was to get a fast break if they did stop the ball, something he was very good at, rather than depending on a teammate to get the rebound, especially if they had to try to box out Masaki, who was a real force on the glass. Naoki seemed displeased by the first-years thinking they could take the easy approach without properly earning their stripes. The club system made the older players better too, because they also had to think about what they were going to say to their kohai. It allowed me to conserve my energy for other things.
After they got a handle on the fast break, after they had a taste for it and couldn’t let go, I needed them to also protect the ball, rather than throw it away just for a chance at a quick layup. I showed them how to run their lanes in order to finish off the break. They hadn’t heard of primary and secondary breaks before. I told them if the fast break pass was made and they couldn’t score, the primary break was over, and the secondary break would begin. The one who received the pass had to dribble back out to the 3 pt. line and watch for cutters. The secondary break could also be made without the initial deep outlet pass. If the fast break pass couldn’t be made, which after a while was the case, since everyone was starting to expect it, then the rebounder had to get the ball to a ball-handler, and the ball-handler had to take it quickly down the middle of the floor, looking for cutters, or setting it up so cutters could find the right pass to make to complete the transition. It was not an offensive system, but it did require for every player to understand where they were going.
In game-like situations, it was difficult for them to think about, which was why it needed to be drilled. The drill was called 5-3-2-1. It began with a five-man weave, and a score, either on a lay-up or a three pointer. The players would then transition to three-on-two basketball. The kids on offense had to get a quick score by making quick decisions and reading what the defense was doing. If a coach wanted to emphasize scoring quickly as part of his philosophy, that coach could add a shot clock to this part, giving the three offensive players only seven or eight seconds to score, or attempt to score. After the attempt, the two defenders quickly became offensive players, racing to the other end of the court, trying to make a basket on the previous scorer or shooter, who now had to run back to play transition defense. I didn’t care about the perfection of the drill. I only cared about whether they filled their lanes in transition, and made the cuts to the basket when they could. Basketball was a five-on-five game, and stressing too much of anything else was suicide.
Once practice was finished, I was receiving a lot more smiles and high fives. The kids always knew that I understood basketball well enough from when I joined them during club time. Now they also understood that I could teach them what I knew in a way that they could understand. I did not have to yell at them or ask for their submission to do it. In fact, without their submission to their coach, I probably could not have done what I did those two days.
Most importantly, the students knew more was expected of them, and if they didn’t rise to the challenge, they couldn’t get on the court. There wasn’t room for all of them at once, and time was running out, even if their first tournament was still a few weeks away. The second-graders understood there was no nepotism. Other than Ryo, there weren’t any guarantees who the starters were going to be. Masaki’s tenacity would only keep him on the floor if he did not create silly turnovers. Takayuki’s defense was smothering, but if he didn’t improve his dribbling, Toho would be playing four-on-five on offense, and no team I’ve ever heard of won games that way. Ichitaro’s heart was bigger than he was, and the team would need that kind of inspiration moving forward. Naoki would be taken more seriously if he himself didn’t turn the ball over as much, too. Yuya was probably the second guaranteed starter, but he’d need to be more aggressive. The first-graders knew that if they played hard enough, they’d get court time, too. I was not the one to make that decision, but I did show them that they had more control than they thought.
I left them feeling like basketball players, in the full account of the word. They weren’t perfect, but nobody was. It was no longer about perfecting a drill. It was now perfecting themselves, and in so doing, their teammates and their team would be more perfect than before. They now understood the ebb and flow of the game, which was something that sometimes took a foreigner to teach.