Defensive Essentials

I always find it challenging when coaching groups that shoot poorly or need a lot of general and specific work on their offensive fundamentals. Given my druthers I would input our offensive scheme the first 3 weeks of the season and then spend the rest of the year refining offensive fundamentals to match. This would free up almost my entire season for defensive concepts, skills and wrinkles.

Unfortunately short of a top university or provinicial program no one gets that sort of luxury.

Since I live in a universe in order for me to spend as much a time as possible on offensive development while still getting defensive work in to become the team we want here are the essential defensive drills that we emphasis and use as our base teaching methods:

Foundation Drills:


- Closeout Footwork + Inital Move Footwork (Daily)

- Positioing and Footwork Drills (Regularly Early in the Year, Less Frequent Late)

- Doubling Positioning Drills (Once per week)

- *3 vs 3 Purpose series (1 every day)

- Shell Drill

Competitive Re-Enforcement Drills:

- 1 vs 1 Full Court

- 3 vs 3 or 4 vs 4 get the ball over 1/2 court.

- Shell drill with less d then offense. Short chot clock, o gets points for getting shots up that hit the rim.

- 2 vs 2 continuos focus on player picking up early the 2nd taking the rim runner.

Defensive Conditioners:

- Seagull Slides (Figure 8 around court)

-Army Slides (3 perimeter spots, 2 check points. Players closeout take 1 slide then sprint to check point. Do all three return to end of line.)

- Wall Sits

- Explosion Sqauts

- Team Hustle (PLayers slide and dive across the key # of times chosen by coach then sprint to the other end.)

- Body Moving (Training Course Requiring to move quickly through a series of jumps, slides, sprints in a circuit for 10 minutes.)


* 3 vs 3 Purpose series.


We set up specific 3 on 3 scenarios that have program initail movements for everyone then after the defensive sequence is execute we go live. 2 possesions per group then rotate a group in.

ie.
Kill the Big - Weak side block big and 2 wings on offense. Ballside wing drives, big defender comes to shut down the baseline, weak side wing defender must drop hard into the big. Once the ball is trapped and the big is hit we skip the ball at which point we are live.


ie.
No Middle - 3 Perimeter players on offense who may only pass bleow foul line extended if they dribble through the foul line. Offense gets points by getting through the foul line on the dribble or taking a jump shot that hits rim. 3 d must work together to keep ball pressure to bounce but not allow it through the foul line.
We set up very specific densive goals in 3 on 3 settings to practice movements wheil requiring the offense to attack a specific way to program our defensive responses.