Written Articles by Rick Torbett
THE READ AND REACT™ STORY
I know that the phrase
“thinking outside of the box” is overused and worn out. Critics will
tell me that there’s “nothing new under the sun” when it comes to
basketball. Well, I’m not talking about a new way to shoot the ball, or
dribbling with your elbows, or playing defense on all fours. I’m not
talking about a new way to use ball screens or a different twist on the
last hybrid of offense. I’m talking about a new approach to developing
players, teams, and even coaches.
In order to understand the
advantages of The Read and React Offensive System™ (from here on
abbreviated R&R), we need to agree on the nature of the problems
that the R&R System is meant to solve. The frustrations with these
unsolved problems are what led me to develop the R&R Offense:
When my playing career ended nearly thirty years ago, I entered the
coaching field, and I had a very simple goal: Continue to enjoy this
great game, while teaching others how to play it. Pretty lame, huh? No
Hollywood director’s going to make a movie out of that! It goes without
saying that I wanted to win; I wanted to win every game and
championship possible. But I wanted that “Road to the Championship” to
include the day-to-day joy of teaching kids how to play the game.
I found out quickly that I could teach math to anyone at any time of
year, but when it came to high school and college basketball in
America, it was ILLEGAL to teach before a certain date. Oh sure, I
could work with at most two players at a time. No one else could be in
the gym; no one could even LOOK in the gym! Teaching basketball to
youngsters “out of season” is like treating those under quarantine for
the Ebola virus! So if I wanted to teach 12 players per day, then at 2
per hour, I would spend an extra 6 hours per day after school, without
a bite to eat. That puts me home at about 11:00 pm, and starving
nonetheless. And people wonder why coaches dress funny!
So when can I begin coaching my team? Oh wow, three weeks before the
first game, how generous! Of course, with tryouts included, that means
I’ll have about twelve or thirteen practice days before we begin to
tally those Ws and Ls that will determine whether I have a job next
year or not. Of course, when I was hired, an administrator assured me
that wins and losses were not a factor in my employment. Yeah, right,
this was the same suit that told me my summers would be free!
And so, every season began the same way: Begin with the fundamentals
and as my guys master them, move into the principles that allow them to
play as an orchestrated team. But with about 5 days of practice left,
DESPERATE REALIZATION would set in. Not only has there NOT been nearly
enough time for my players to come close to grasping the fundamentals
and all the intricate principles of the game, they also can’t break a
press, get the ball in-bounds, run a primary fast break, secondary fast
break, man offense or zone offense. Not only that, when I explain the
multiple defenses that we’re going to run based on keys, my players
give me the same bewildered look as a cow looking at a new gate!
So, with only five practice days left before our first game against
our powerhouse cross-town rivals that our girls coach scheduled because
she’s loaded with talent and will surely win, I resort to what my high
school coach did: I drop all pretenses of teaching the game and drill
my players to run plays like a bunch of little robots. And sure enough,
my players became very good at running plays, but not learning how to
play. Once we got into post-season tournament play, all of my tricky
plays were scouted and you can imagine the rest. When little Johnny
can’t pass from point A to point B, he passes to anyone (hopefully with
the same color jersey) who uses his 1-on-5 skills to force up a shot. I
then pray that my football players, who are just now getting used to a
ROUND ball, can rebound some of the misses and put them back in.
Do I sound like I was frustrated? I needed the summers “off” in
order to recover and convince myself that I could do a better job the
next year. But every spring I was even more motivated to go to every
coaching clinic my 1975 Ford Maverick could get me to. I would take
copious notes on the 15 set plays and quick-hitters of the current NCAA
champion who used them to win with his 15 former high school
All-Americans that he had hand-picked to fit his now famous “Fabulous
Fifteen Set Plays.” I was sure that little Johnny and teammates back
home could run this championship offense with its 100 counters to
trapping, helping, rotating MAN-to-MAN defenses! Of course, the next
year, 19 of my 20 opponents would run zone…
In the mid-to-late-90’s, three incidents came together to create a turning point in my thinking.
1. After a rather average season, my assistant coach asked me if I
was happy. I replied, “Not particularly.” He asked what I would do
differently if I could scrap our entire program and start all over. I
said that I would teach our kids how to play the entire game by
principle. He then asked, “Why don’t you do it?” The honest answer was:
I didn’t know how. I had a lot of pieces, a lot of 2-man and 3-man
principles, but not the entire thing. The whole thing seemed like a
pretty tall order: to create a seamless offensive system that would
encompass transition offense, man-to-man offense, and zone offense
without contradiction, and without being limited to only one “set”
(5-Out or 4-Out or 3-Out), and without needing a certain type of
players, or players ideal for a particular style of play. (Stay tuned,
the Read and React does it!)
2. Using the previous season’s videotapes, I charted all the points we
scored from free throws, offensive rebounds, fast breaks, set plays,
broken plays, etc., and found an unsettlingly ratio. 80% of our points
came from broken plays, transition, and other PRINCIPLED basketball. We
only scored the way our set plays were designed about 20% of the time.
But in practice, the ratio was the opposite: we spent 80% of our
offensive time on set plays and less than 20% of the time on PRINCIPLED
basketball. I had to ask myself why I was spending 80% of our time on
only 20% of our point production?
3. At about the same time, I experienced some success with a team built
around six players who played together from 7th grade to 12th grade. We
went to the Final 4 their last two years. Were they talented? Yes, but
not to the extent you might think. Only two went on to play on the
college level. Their real talent was their coordinated effort. They
“knew” each other. They moved like a school of fish. Was I responsible
for this? Had I suddenly become a coaching genius? No. Our success was
due mostly to the fact that they had played together for six years. In
fact, each year they were in the program was characterized by fewer
plays and more principles.
Why do the players entering my program have such an incomplete set of
skills? Why don’t they know more? Why do I have to start all over with
every new player?
Let’s step back and take a look at the big picture: In the USA,
there is no unifying system of teaching the game of basketball to
players from the youth up. And because of that, a 10-year-old might
have 10 or more different coaches by the time he or she is 18. This can
create at least four problems. And I can speak confidently about these
problems because I’ve done each one at some point in my career. Here
they are:
1. Each coach might teach different things that don’t build on each
other from year to year, and sometimes the things taught might even
contradict each other.
2. Some coaches teach too much too early and overwhelm the kids. The players become “Jack of all trades and masters of none.”
3. Some teach only what was taught to them by their former coaches.
This would be just fine if their former coaches were great teachers of
the game. But what if they weren’t? A poor technique might be passed on
from generation to generation just because “it’s what my coach taught
me.”
4. Most of the time, each coach starts over and tries to teach the game
from the ground up. But with time limitations, each coach can only get
so far. Therefore, the player only develops so far.
So, instead of each coach at each level starting over and teaching
the game from the ground up, I have a VISION of coaches, at each level,
standing on the shoulders of those before them, using the Read and
React System.
But before we get too deeply into my vision, we have to admit that
part of the problem is not simply a matter of what’s been going on in
the past. Another part of the problem is that most of the youth coaches
in our country are simply parents who see a void and want to help. So,
what do they teach? Where’s their curriculum? I really feel for these
“parent-coaches” facing this impossible situation: “Here’s a ball, 12
kids, two goals and you’ve got one hour, twice per week. Teach them how
to play right now, because games will begin in a couple of weeks.” What
an impossible task!
Can you imagine if we tried to run a school this way? Give a group
of first graders to someone who’s NOT a trained teacher, has NO
curriculum and can only teach ONCE per week for only a few months? How
could we expect the kids to get to the second grade? And if they do,
second grade starts over with a different system! It’s no wonder that
even at our highest levels of basketball, you see 4 players standing
and watching a teammate play 1-on-1 until he or she forces up a shot
against 3 defenders. That’s what they were doing on the playground in
the 1st grade, and that’s what they’re still doing in the pros.
You see, under our current system, as each player gets a year older,
it usually means a change of teams, a change of coaches, and therefore,
a change of systems. But what if all parties involved were teaching the
game via the same basketball system? What if this system had layers of
skills and levels of game principles that coincided with the players’
age or years of experience in the system? Imagine what would happen if
each coach at each level were on the same page, using the same
terminology: Each coach would not have to start over. He or she could
pick up where the previous coach left off and add the next layer of
skills and principles. In this manner, we could truly stand on each
other’s shoulders and our players would reach new heights.
And can you imagine what the coaches at higher levels could do when
they apply their knowledge of the game to players brought up through
this type of system? I know for a FACT that we don’t see what many
college and pro coaches have up their sleeves because the players they
inherit or recruit have a mish-mash of incomplete skills, habits,
fundamentals and game principles. The coaches are forced to try to
catch players up or fill in missing gaps in their games or their
fundamentals. Many times the coach must settle on an offense that can
best be defined by what their players CAN’T do!
I have a solution to these problems, the Read and React Offense.
At high levels, the entire Read and React Offense could be taught to
players in a single season; it would be a complete offense to counter
anything that any defense could do. Yet, on the other hand, the system
could also be taught to our youth; a layer at a time; a year at a time.
And even with only a few layers of the R&R installed, a youth team
would have an offense that has been proven to work in real games!
Can you imagine what our basketball games would look like in a few
years if all organizations that deal with different age levels began to
teach R&R to all of their teams? The 10 year olds get the first 2
layers, the 11 year olds add the next layer, so forth and so on. The
players would have an entire season to “cook” the skills and principles
of that particular year until they become “habits of play.” By the time
a player was age 15 or 16, R&R would not be an offense. It would
simply be “offense”; how players play anytime and anywhere!
And I propose to you that with this system, any coach can teach any
group of players to play offense by principle only. While developing
this system, I had to ask myself, am I being unreasonable? I don’t
think so, and here’s why: players are expected to know how to play
1-on-1 and 2-on-2 by principle, but not 5-on-5. Why is that? And we
expect our teams to play DEFENSE by principle. So why not OFFENSE?
There’s a certain amount of chaos in the game: it’s what makes the
game exciting and unpredictable. Can we train our players for it? If
not, then how do coaches get players who “just know how to play”; who
have “basketball savvy” or a “high basketball I.Q.” If you’re a coach
at the college or higher level, then you just recruit them. But if
you’re coaching below the college level, then you wait and hope. For
the most part, that makes us opportunists and not teachers.
I believe that most coaches want to develop their players to have
“that high basketball I.Q.” The R&R System will teach your players
how to play and develop their basketball I.Q. No longer will you have
to wait or hope that you accidentally get some players with basketball
savvy.
Motion offenses are principled offenses, but they demand both a high
basketball I.Q. and a complete set of skills from all of the players in
order to run it. In the traditional type of motion or principled
offense, the players without the ball have an almost infinite amount of
options depending on where they are, what the ball is doing, and what
the situation is. Most players suffer paralysis by analysis and do
nothing. Other players do too much at the wrong time or in the wrong
situation, and create a turnover.
The R&R System removes the complicated decision making process
from the movement of the players without the ball. Each player has one
and only one reaction to what the player with the ball does. Let me say
it another way: each player without the ball READS the teammate with
ball and REACTS accordingly with ONE predetermined movement. This means
that the entire offense is built upon very simple, very teachable
“2-player reads and reactions.” And in the Read and React System’s 17
layers, these SIMPLE 2-man reads create the opportunities for every
aspect of good offense. To name just a few the R&R’s 2 man habits
create: single screens, back screens, and double and triple staggered
screens; give and gos; dribble handoffs, European 3s, dribble
penetration, and whatever type of post game you want to play!
These 2-player Reads and Reactions that make up the offense are
taught through a series of drills. These drills (that come with the DVD
set, even down to the detail of how to rotate through each drill) can
be run by as few as two players with one coach. What good is that?
These drills can make up your entire pre-season or off-season workouts.
Not only will your players be getting in the needed reps for shooting,
dribbling, passing, screening, etc., but you’ll be building your
offense at the same time. In this manner you can have 90% of you
man-to-man and zone offense engrained in your players before season
begins!
These 2-player Reads and Reactions must become HABITS in order for
the offense to work. HABITS do not require thinking. They require
repetition. The advantage is obvious: ANYONE can be taught a HABIT with
enough drill and repetition. And once something is habit, a player is
fast. If little Johnny has to think, he’ll never react in time to take
advantage of the situation. But with the R&R HABITS ingrained by
the R&R DRILLS, Johnny will immediately “read and react.”
Once these habits are instilled in your players, the R&R Offense
will never require the players to break those habits as the system is
developed to higher and higher levels. If your players learn these
habits at age 10, they’ll be the same habits needed for the offense
when they’re 20 years old!
The glue that ties these 2-player Reads and Reactions together into
a coordinated 5-player offense are contained in a few simple rules
described as LAYERS in the offense. These layers build upon each other,
which means:
1. New layers will not contradict previous layers.
2. The sum of the layers together is greater than each layer in itself.
This means we’re building coordination of the whole offensive game, not
just teaching individualized parts that are independent of each other.
3. Each new habit of each new layer fits with the previous habits
learned by your players. It’s a logical progression so it’s easy to
explain “why” to your players. When players understand the WHY, good
things happen.
4. A team can begin to play together and experience success with as few
as the first three layers of the 17-layered system. In other words,
mastery of the whole is not required in order to see immediate success.
5. A player who has mastered the first three layers (as an example) can
still play with a teammate who’s mastered the first five layers. The
less-developed player will not hinder the abilities of the more
developed player. Now your team is no longer only as strong as your
weakest link.
1. You’ll have a framework out of which you can customize the R&R
to the strengths of your personnel. If you have a strong inside game,
then play 4-out 1-in or 3-out 2-in. On the other hand, if 5 guards are
your best players, then no problem, play 5-out.
2. No opponent can scout you successfully again.
3. You’ll have an offense that only gets better with time.
4. Your defense will be better than ever because they can’t “play the
play” during practice ever again! They must honestly defend each moment
in practice.
5. You’ll have an offense that allows players to naturally hide their weaknesses and play to their strengths.
6. You’ll have a framework out of which you can customize the R&R
to your philosophy. The Read and React will accommodate any style of
play. If you like set plays, then run them. Look at it this way: If
your play doesn’t work (and we know how many times that happens in a
game), then your players aren’t lost. They can take advantage of
whatever opportunity is there, or whatever the defense has taken away,
and still play together in a coordinated 5-player attack, using their
Read and React principles.
To conclude, the Read and React Offensive System can be both your
“Offense” and your “System” The coaches already using it will tell you
that the reason they like it is the same reason the players like it:
“In the final analysis, its just basketball”. Players have a chance to
“be all that they can be”, and coaches will have the time, methods,
drills, and structure to teach the game we love: basketball.
THE THEORY AND RATIONALE OF THE READ AND REACT™
In
2003, I took some time to consider my basketball life up to that
moment. After my playing career and then over twenty years in coaching,
I knew there was something missing. After much contemplation, I decided
to create the Read & React Offensive System™. Why would my
reflection motivate me to launch into such a daunting project? More
importantly, what problems was I trying to solve?
Let’s toss all
of my experiences, observations, and problems into one giant pot, and
stir them around for consideration, because that’s exactly what I did
in 2003. Here are the ingredients in no particular order:
1.
Team defense seemed easier to teach than team offense. In other words,
getting five defensive players to move and react as a 5-man-unit was
easier than getting five offensive players to do so. Why?
2. Plays work well at the beginning of the season and in our
non-conference games. But they lose their effectiveness by the
post-season when we need them the most.
3. When plays don’t work, our players break down into 1-on-1, or at
best, 2-on-2 situations. Why can’t they continue to play as a cohesive,
5-man unit? e to play as a cohesive, 5-man unit?
4. I charted an entire season’s point production and found that about
80% of my team’s points came from individual execution in situations
where players simply played principled basketball. Only about 20% of
our points came from successful execution of our plays (and half of
that was from out-of-bounds plays). Yet our practice time was the exact
opposite: We were spending 80% of our offensive time on set plays, and
only 20% of the time on teaching principles.
5. I had played in a motion offense in college. I loved the freedom to
read your defender and take what they gave you, but there was too much
freedom for all 5 players to stay coordinated. And if just one player
lacked the same basketball I.Q. as the rest, he could really mess up
the offense.
6. When I was a player, 1-on-1, 2-on-2, and 3-on-3 were fun to play
because every player was always involved. But as soon as the game went
to 4-on-4 or 5-on-5, it was difficult to play by principle. A few
players were always left standing around.
7. The most successful seasons I experienced as a coach were the direct
result of having six players of the same age who played together for
six straight years, starting in 7th grade, and grew to totally
understand each other’s games. Each season was characterized by more
principles and fewer plays, and we finished their last two seasons with
back-to-back Final Fours. I wanted to re-create that scenario: five
players who moved and reacted to each other like a school of fish. But
most teams cannot stay intact for years at a time like these six
players did. Most teams are comprised of different members each year,
and many of them are on different developmental levels.
8. Young players have a different coach almost every year. As a result,
a varsity coach doesn’t know what he’s getting each year in terms of
what skills the players have been taught, and what knowledge of the
game they have (basketball IQ).
9. While running camps overseas, the coaches in Belgium shared with me
how they teach their players using an age-based curriculum. The players
are taught only a few principles the first year (and as you might
guess, with only a few principles to play by, the players get extremely
good at executing them). The next year, another principle is added, and
the players get real good at that. The next year, another principle,
and so forth and so on until by age 18 they understand the game on an
instinctual, habitual, principled level. Being a small country with a
club-sports-system, they created a curriculum that could be implemented
the same way academics are taught in our schools, with each teacher
standing on the shoulders of the teacher who came before him or her.
10. My personnel, and hence the talent level of my team (or lack
thereof), changed year to year. Whatever offensive system I was going
to create could not have any prerequisites in terms of the types of
players, level of their skills, or basketball I.Q. In fact, it should
create basketball I.Q. rather than require smart players to run it.
11. This whole system should be transferable to the coaches and teams
that feed my program. It must be simple enough for anyone to
understand, but with the cumulative complexity that would allow the
offense to counter any defense.
12. The offense must allow for spontaneity from players and the
inherent chaos that defines great basketball. Only with that
spontaneity, could this offensive system take advantage of whatever the
defense gave it on every possession. Further, the sequences of “Reads
and Reactions” must be allowed to happen in any order, without
contradiction. By doing so, the offense could not be scouted.
13. The system should be built on “habits” for two reasons. First,
habits can be drilled into almost anyone with enough repetition.
Second, to require thinking on the parts of the players would only slow
them down and violate my principle requiring no prerequisite level of
basketball IQ for the players.
14. To build this system of “habitual layers”, no two layers could ever
contradict each other. Once a habit of reaction or movement is trained
into a player, I would never require him or her to react differently as
we build the subsequent layers of the offense.
15. And as if all of the above wasn’t ambitious enough, I wanted one
offense that could be used against both man-to-man and zone defenses.
With
a goal set as lengthy and complex as this, I wondered how to go about
building a principled offensive system. My answer? By examining how we
build defense…
First,
we teach players the skills required to play defense: their defensive
stance on the ball; their defensive stance when in help position; their
denial stance when one pass away; how to defend in the post; what to do
with their hands when their man is dribbling, driving, or shooting; how
to block out or check out, rebound, and outlet the ball. These are just
some of the tools that each individual defender needs to bring to the
table. There are encyclopedias of drills to build these tools into an
individual player. But these tools are not enough to build team defense.
The
next step is to tie these individual players together in a
5-player-coordinated defensive unit. We all have our own preferences
and twists, but traditionally, we split the floor into ball-side and
weak-side halves. How do players know what side they are on? By reading
the ball in relationship to their man. On the elementary level, it ’s
as simple as this: if you are one pass away (ball-side), then be in
your denial stance. If you are two passes away (weak-side), then be in
your helping stance; perhaps halfway between the ball and your man (or
in the lane, or on the midline, etc.) As the ball is passed around, we
expect coordination as a whole, even though each defender is simply
reading the ball. I would call this the first defensive layer. I think
you would agree that there’s no need to move on to the second defensive
layer until the players have mastered it.
Defensive layers are added one at a time, and are never expected to
contradict the previous defensive layer. We must add how to defend ball
screens, how to defend screens away from the ball, how to defend basket
cuts, how to defend flashes into the lane, etc. There is also a
teaching progression to these layers. As an example, post defense will
be taught before we teach the other players how to help down on the
post. The bottom line is that regardless of what you teach and when you
teach it, I think you’ll agree with me that we don’t teach it ALL at
one time and that we try to teach it in a logical, building-block
progression.
And as we teach these defensive layers, we are limited to what the
players can absorb. Obviously, if you’re on the youth level, you
probably don’t get beyond the first step. You’re happy if you can just
get all the kids in a defensive stance at the same time! But if you’re
on the college or pro level, you expect to get mastery of all the
layers in only a few weeks. In other words, the progression is the
same, but how far you get depends on the level of your players.
1. Give the players their defensive tools.
2. Drill their defensive rules until they’re reactionary habits.
3. Tie all the rules together into a 5-player-coordinated defense.
4. Move your expectations to principled situations.
I understand that you might have a different progression. Certainly
your defensive details will be different than mine, but my point is
that there’s a teaching progression with defense. No one jumps directly
to step 4 (Principled Defensive Situations) without first demanding a
command of the first three “defensive layers.”
So, how do we transfer this defensive progression to the offensive
end? We follow the first step by teaching the players how to shoot,
dribble, attack one-on-one, get open, screen, etc. In fact, Better
Basketball has seven videos devoted to these skills. They’re extremely
important to the success of any offensive system. However, they cover
only the first step in the progression. Traditionally, the next step is
to go to plays, patterns, quick-hitters, sets, or whatever you like to
call them. This is where I wanted to break tradition. I wanted my
offense to follow the same progression as my defense. I wanted my
players to play offense by principle, and most importantly, as a
5-player-coordinated unit. And that’s exactly what the Read and React
Offense does: it provides a framework that can be used as an offensive
system to develop players, teams, and programs. Or, it can be an
offense for one team, an offense that builds upon itself, with a
counter for anything any defense can throw at it.
I knew there would be problems if I taught offense the way I did
defense. Like defense, my offense would NOT be able to execute to
perfection at the beginning of the season. But, on the other hand, just
like my defense, my offense would get better at playing by principle
with each layer and by the end of the season, tournament time, we would
be at our best.
The specifics I’ve used to accomplish these goals and solve these
problems is laid out in the Read and React DVDs. The intricacies and
adjustments are many, but always very simple. Here’s an outline of the
system.
The first five layers of the offense are grouped into a “Level” that
I term “Laying the Foundation.” The habits taught in these layers take
care of the two most common actions that occur in offense – dribble
penetration, and passing the ball to a teammate one pass away. The
layers will work regardless of the formation (5-out, 4out, or 3-out).
These five layers ensure good spacing and floor balance, give each
player on the floor built-in-motivation to react quickly and correctly,
and solve the problems of aggressive perimeter denial defense without
using hand signals or verbal signals.
I termed the next Level, “Completing the Foundation.” It has four
layers, and they bring screens into the offense, but not in traditional
ways. For example, in the Read and React System, a player WITH the ball
can actually act as the screener in a pick and roll (the R&R System
explains the details). To some who have seen the R&R, these four
layers are the most impressive of the system, as they create some
normally complicated 5-man movement, including double and even triple
staggered screens without the players having to read anything more than
the simple 2-man action of that layer. This level also provides
European 3s and back screens, among other scoring opportunities.
The next four layers are concerned with Post Play. The offense can
now easily morph into various sets with players positioned in the low
post, the mid-post, the high post, or even the short corners (an
adjustment that has of course proven particularly useful against
zones). This level adds a great deal of flexibility to the offense
without changing a single acquired habit from the previous layers.
These layers allow you to imitate a dribble-drive game, a power post
game, a blocker-mover game, the UCLA high post game, or many others.
The only thing that post players MUST do is react correctly to dribble
penetration. Other than that they are free to do whatever a coach wants
to emphasize, whether it’s back to the basket post moves, two posts
screening for each other, a post or two screening for their teammates
on the perimeter, or a particularly talented player moving from the
inside to the outside and back.
The final Level contains four layers, and I term it “Icing on the
Cake.” It provides the best counter to sagging man or zone defenses,
the pin screen. This is one of the habits that could be taught out of
order without affecting the offense. As an example, if a team was
playing with only the first 5 layers, the coach could add layer 14
without contradiction and without teaching anything to link this habit
to the first five layers. Morphing the offense to attack zones is
explained in this level. It contains no new habits and completes one of
my primary goals: the same offense versus man or zone defenses.
Finally, the system ties your transition game into your half court game
without having to stop and set up. The defense won’t know where your
fast break ended and where your half-court offense began.
Every habit in the R&R offense has its own 2, 3, 4, or 5 player
drill to teach it to your players. I’ve included them all, from the
most elementary drills to the most advanced, on DVD #3 in the package.
My reason for the drills is two-fold:
1. The fewer the players in the
drill, the more reps they can get. The more reps they can get, the
quicker the Read & React habits will form. The quicker the habits
form, the sooner the offense works efficiently.
2. The drills allow you to collapse time frames: In the
off-season, these drills will not only allow for fundamental work like
shooting, ball handling, passing, one-on-one play, and conditioning;
but by using them, you’ll have 90% of your offense ready to go by the
first day of practice.
After two years of trial and error and experimentation, I was ready
to implement the whole System, but because of the success of Better
Basketball, I was no longer coaching and therefore had no team or
organization of my own with which to use it. So, I gave the system away
to many of my coaching friends. It was absolutely the best thing that I
could have done! They’ve provided three years of “laboratory”
experience that I otherwise would not have. The Read & React has
proven to be adaptable to any style of play or any coaching philosophy
at any level, boys or girls.
So what’s next? That’s up to you, and how you use it. In some
respects, the Read & React is just a tool for teaching the game.
But it can give you things that no one else has:
a. Five-player-coordinated-offense-by-principle that can’t be scouted and grows with your players every day you run it.
b. A better defensive team. Why? Your own team must guard it every day
in practice. Because the Read and React is not a scripted pattern or
play, and because the layers give players a natural counter to anything
the defense might do to them, defenders must guard it honestly, BY
PRINCIPLE, and that makes for a better defensive team.
c. Collapsing time frames in two ways, (1) by using your
fundamental drills to also build your offense. And (2), you can use the
Read and React as a “shell offense” for your shell defense, which will
give you more time in practice to spend on other things: out of bounds
plays, full-court presses, free-throws, rebounding, scrimmages, etc.
Comments
Comment Guidelines: The SportsTG Network is made up of players, families and passionate sports followers like you who have a strong opinion about sport. That's great - we want you to have your say and share your thoughts with the world. However, we have a few rules that you must follow to keep it fun for all. Please don't be rude, abusive, swear or vilify others. Apart from some pretty serious sport sanctions, we also can ban you and report you if things get out of hand. So play fair and have fun, and thanks for your contribution.