Harvard’s March Madness Win and the NTL Weekend Camps

Though I coached at Harvard for seven years, since then I haven’t always been a fan of the team or rooted for them, after all, by not giving me the head coaching job way-back-when, they essentially fired me. (Thereby waiting much, much longer to get to the NCAAs then the should have!!!) But after they gave Tommy Amaker the job, a guy I knew from when he was an assistant at Duke and I at Harvard, I started to warm up to the program again. His top two assistants have run many NTL clinics in Boston the past few years and do a great work. It’s been fun to reconnect.

So, other than liking Amaker and his assistants what made me excited about Harvard’s great win last night? (You did watch it, didn’t you?) Not their mascot; they don’t have one. Not their pep band; they are more like a chamber music ensemble. Nope, it was the way they played and the way they played is exactly what we preach and teach at the Never Too Late Basketball Camps. They won because of strict adherence to fundamentals, the same fundamentals that can help you play better and enjoy the game longer: excellent floor spacing and ball movement on offense; understanding and executing roles and responsibilities and goals on defense. Plus they’ve worked on sills. Plus they shot well, but a big reason they shot well is they shot in rhythm, never forcing a shot or taking a shot they don’t practice. It was beautiful.

After drills and skills and getting players to pay attention to the small stuff during those practice sessions, we run four sets of “coached scrimmages” at the weekend camps. By the time the Sunday morning scrimmage rolls around, we expect to see some of what we saw from Harvard last night: patience; spacing; a willingness to trust teammates and to move the ball; a belief and understanding of what you are trying collectively to accomplish on defense.

Plus we have a cool NBA style Three-Pont Shooting Contest, the winner of which this year will get the “Laurent Rivard Award”! (That kid can shoot!)

But Maybe Don’t Do 600 Pushups A Day

Someone I know knows Dwight Howard. That someone told me that Dwight Howard does (did) 600 pushups a day. That they’d be in meetings and Howard would get down on the floor during a lull and work on getting his number: 600. I was kind of impressed; in fact, I think I got down and did 20 right then and there.

Dwight Howard has a torn labrum in his shoulder. He’s a pretty big guy and 600 is a pretty big number. Ouch on that shoulder. I’m not a doctor nor a physical therapist, I’m not even a good time manager, but it seems to me 250 or 300 might have served the same purpose, kept him away from the surgeon’s knife and, who knows, helped his free throw shooting. (Those pushups sort of explain that weird short-armed, lack-of-extension thing he had going.)

http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/8905455/dwight-howard-los-angeles-lakers-friday-sore-shoulder

Moving the Ball

You can still make the pass, be ready to make the right pass even if 1. you are wearing a suit 2. you have your arms crossed 3. you are standing out of bounds:

Coaches are always ready and know where the ball is supposed to go:

Rick Majerus’ Heart Did Not Fail

The great basketball coach, Rick Majerus, died yesterday, December 1, 2012; the news reports cited heart failure. Though his intellect and lack of ego were what made him interesting and unique in his profession, it was his passion (driven no doubt by his oversized heart) for helping people: the player overlooked; the mother who needed support; the blue collar worker; the colleague who had come upon tough times in a hard luck profession; that made him a man that will be hugely missed. And does it not seem a contradiction, a hypocrisy, that anyone would think his heart failed him?

Many coaches and players and basketball people knew Rick Majerus better than I did (most of my contact with him came within only one week I spent as his guest when he was at The University of Utah) and the stories from his associations are being told and re-told today. Mine are similar: the “you going to eat those fries?” before I had even sat down with my tray at lunch; the details of teaching the game to players down to the adjustments of inches in footwork. When I flew to Salt Lake City, Majerus asked me how my flight was. I told him I spent the time reading and immensely enjoying a book by the environmental activist and novelist Edward Abbey. By the time I left later that week, Majerus had bought the book, read it and thanked me for the recommendation.

When coaching in the NTL clinics or camps, I quote stuff I heard Majerus say on the basketball court all the time: “get strong in the post; bend at the hips”; “direct correlation between the time spent looking at the rim when making a post move and making the shot”; “pass the cutter from hand-to-hand” (when the cutter goes baseline); “when getting back on defense point, touch, talk”. Whenever his teams played on television, I made sure to watch. It was all about effort and execution. They triple-threated and were ready on every possession. I also rooted for his teams no matter who they played. And when he became an analyst with ESPN, his commentary was not to be missed by anyone who was interested in learning more about the game.

I made the trip out there because I had been let go at Harvard (technically not elevated from top assistant to head coach) and was trying to network with coaches I already had relationships with (Mike Krzyzewski at Duke; Pete Gillen at Xavier; Majerus). I watched their practices and spent time talking basketball and the basketball life with each of them. Majerus, uniquely, invited me to meals (naturally), staff meetings and practices. He made me feel an equal – imagine that? – a coach who had not just been fired but a guy, like him, who cared for the idea of deeply analyzing the game and everything associated with it. He most obviously believed in creating a structure with his teams that forced them to work very hard, to believe in the value of that work, and, perhaps most importantly, to believe in each other. As a player, as a student, as a child with your parent, you do not forget those lessons learned.

Majerus famously lived out of a hotel suite when at Utah. On my visit I stayed in a room down the hall. Upon my leaving, he went through a pile of Utes Basketball t-shirts in his room and handed me a couple, caring, like a brother or father or uncle, that he gave me the right size. When he shook my hand and wished me well, he told me to call him every day to let him know how my efforts to stay in college basketball were going. He repeated “call me every day”. So I, of course, didn’t call him every day, probably talked to him just a few more times. But from that “every day” and from my time that week with him I took the message that he lived with his players, his colleagues, his family: care about the people you meet and care about what you do. And it might sound corny, but care enough to put your heart into it. He sure did.

Kobe, Greg Oden and me

I just turned sixty. Might sound old to you or maybe not. I try not to think about it. Instead I just let my delayed adolescence and post-adolescence continue to guide me. What that means is for the most part, I’m feeling pretty young. Except for the hip. Kobe and Oden have their knees, I have my hip.

Ten years ago I could jump into any Never Too Late Basketball clinic and pretty much dominate (if I wanted to and if the right buttons were pushed). Seven years ago, I trained hard for 9-10 months and snapped off a 5:33 mile in the High Street Mile in Newburyport, MA. Ran the Philly Marathon 20 some minutes faster than Paul Ryan ran his marathon. (Though he’ll tell you he beat me by 45 minutes. Guess he’s not good with numbers.) Four years ago, someone asked me if I was limping. Three and half years ago I had an MRI done and heard the term osteoarthritis applied to me for the first time.

The last thousand days have been spent at chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists specializing in hip problems, and a bevy of the best and most innovative and cutting-edge physical therapists and reading and devoting myself to the mind/body theories of John Sarno, MD. Multiply those thousand days by a few hours a day searching on-line for any and all alternatives to hip replacement and you get a picture of what it means to me to get my hip good again. All of which brings me to tomorrow when I will have blood drawn and a serum created from that blood that will then be injected into my hip (by a presumably very long needle) in five sessions over the course of five days at the Regenokine Clinic in Manhattan. The same procedure that Kobe and A-Rod and Fred Couples had done to great success. Those guys went to the site of the origination of the procedure, Dusseldorf, Germany. Greg Oden and a bunch of other pros have been to the NYC clinic which opened a year ago under the direction of Dr Edward Capla, long-time colleague of the “inventor”, Dr Peter Wehling.

You’ll know if this thing works when you see Oden on the court again and me going sub-40:00 next April in the James Joyce Ramble.

Wish the doctors and the long needles and me good luck.

Sins of the Recreational Basketball Player (3rd in a Series)

When playing pick-up basketball, do not play zone. It is a sin. There. You have been warned. To protect yourself and who you are as a basketball player, you must not play or agree to play zone.

Playing Zone in a Pick-up Game is a bad idea, sinfully bad, because – simply put – players do not know how to play zone, either offensively or defensively. You walk onto an outdoor court somewhere, 7 players, 8, 9 are shooting around. It is getting a little hot out, a couple of the heavier, hairier dudes take their shirts off and fling them against the fence. A guy on a bike with headphones on is pedaling by. Harry, who is friends with the bike guy, shouts once, and then a second time a little louder, and, there you have it, the guy on the bike becomes Mr. #10. You have got a game. FTs are taken, sides are made. 5 drift off together one way, 5 another way. Someone in your group says, “let’s play 2-3″. STOP! You cannot flinch. You cannot waver. You must face the devil head-on. You say, “we are not playing zone”. Shirtless says, “why not”? You know that the reason, the only reason pick-up game basketball players play zone is because they are tired or lazy or they have simply lost their way in life. You could tell the guy that he knows nothing about taking away the lane, the slides, the bumps, the communication, the pressure on the ball and fronting the post. You could tell him about keeping your hands up and staying in a stance and that playing zone is every bit as taxing as man-to-man. Rather you say, “Zone? I mean why not just go play a round of golf instead?”

When playing pick-up and zones are suggested, I’ve always been able to talk everyone out of it. But what if you couldn’t? (You may not possess my power of persuasion.) What if the other 4 wanted to play zone? Well, you could just play man-to-man yourself, chase your guy around while your teammates were zoning their little hearts away. They’d probably never even notice.

Playing zones without knowledge of how to play zones (both offensively and defensively) is like wading around in the shallow end of the pool. The real game of zones, however, is in the deep end. My suggestion: don’t get in over your head. It’s a sin to drown in your own malaise.

Sins of the Recreational Basketball Player (2nd in a series)

Sins, of course, carry different weight, come in many shades, stain the basketball soul, sometimes more, sometimes less, permanently. The first sin we identified was Not Running the Floor; the gravity of that sin cannot be overstated. You might as well excuse yourself for a bathroom break, secretly locate and turn on the sprinkler system and send everyone home. Who are you kidding: you don’t want to be there and are just spoiling the game for everyone anyway.

Our second sin, Not Getting the Ball Inbounds Quickly When the Other Team Scores, is related. It has to do with running; it has to with effort; it has to do with the sublime consciousness of outthinking and outdoing and surprising the opposition. (The opposition is, of course, both the other team and the sedentary you.)

Here’s what happens in recreational basketball games: one team scores and the team that was scored upon walks the ball out of bounds and slowly, mutely, listlessly, defeatedly, looks for someone to throw the ball to. But this dullness turns out to be problematic in itself because the scored upon team, your team, is walking up-court, collective heads down, watching the other team celebrate. This is a sin. This is an affront to the collective basketball soul. This is what is wrong with humanity. Somehow basketball became football in the sense that after a score, it seems to be a virtual time-out. I mean, let’s sub and line the ball up and kickoff and then, but only then, try to bring the ball up-court and score. (I like football but get it off my basketball court!)

Like I said in the first post, I’ve played a lot of pick-up basketball and it has always been for me that when the other team scores, I am in a rage. Enraged. And I cannot wait to avenge what just happened. What to do? Take it out and get it in and up-court as fast as possible, preferably, hopefully, while the other team is still gloating, feeling unjustifiably good about themselves. When the ball drops through the net, it’s like the starter’s gun has gone off and you are up and out of the blocks. Their guard is down, is it not? Wipe that smile off their faces. Is there not great satisfaction in that? What happens when you run the ball out and scream for someone to throw it into and sprint up court is your teammates see what is happening and they join the race that you have begun. They run with you. They sense the passion, the possibility, the transcendent nature of basketball as a fast-paced, non-stop game. They scored on you; okay, that’s not a sin. But not trying to answer right away, that sits heavy on the soul.

Sins of the Recreational Ball Player (1st in a series)

I’ve played a lot of pickup ball. And I’ve watched a lot of recreational level players play in the Never Too Late Basketball clinics and camps over the past twenty years. I like to think of myself as a tolerant person, one who can accept a mistake or an occasional lapse in judgment (though I’m guessing there are those who might disagree). Still, there are certain transgressions that occur on a regular basis on a basketball court during recreational level play that I simply cannot abide. To me they are sins (Definition: an immoral act against the divine laws of basketball). I’m quite certain the basketball gods (don’t ask me to prove the existence of the basketball gods because if you ask me to prove the existence of the basketball gods then you are saying you have not ever played or paid attention to the game) are on my side. Here’s sin number one:

Not Running the Floor
Basketball is a running game. James Naismith said that. And if he didn’t, he should have. If you play the game, please run the floor. It’s one of the things that you must do to keep your basketball soul pure. I mean, why are you out there? Partly, one would assume, to get in better shape (or stay in shape or some shape thing). Then run the floor. Not running the floor doesn’t help you get better wind or build muscle or do anything. Too tired? Sub out.

What does “running the floor” mean? A teammate steals the ball, chased by a defender, you run hard to trail the play. Ever see anyone miss a layup? Pros miss layups. You are not playing with pros. Your teammate misses, you put it back. Teammate is relieved; you can strut. Opponent steals the ball (or gets ahead); you run the floor. Ever see the other team miss a layup? You don’t run and they miss? They rebound and score. They miss? You rebound and turn up court, marking you as someone who knows how to play the game.

Run the floor to turn a 2-on-2 into a 3-on-2 for your team. All you have to do is outrun the defender who is loping along next to you. Usually a matter of 3 or 4 hard sprinting strides. Sprint to turn their 2-on-1 into a 2-on-2. What you’ve done there is a numerical windfall; you’ve busted them up. They’re not scoring now.

And what happens when you run, run hard, to turn a 2-on-2 into a 3-on-2 but the defender next to you sprints, too? Well, too bad, in a way, but good, too, because now you’ve got competition, motivation – a game!. And suddenly, through some simple effort and respect for the game, it becomes a game that’s worth playing. And you, a basketball soul worth saving.

Why LeBron Disappeared in The Finals

This is just head-shaking, hard-to-imagine, just as LeBron James reversing the ball to Mario Chalmers – rookie Mario Chalmers! – twice in the last minute with the game on the line in Game Six of The NBA Finals as if it were plutonium or on fire or just something he wanted absolutely nothing to do with was unfathomable. I saw it on Henry Abbott’s excellent espn blog True Hoop (who saw it on deadspin who got it from Sports Illustrated).

The guy is just used to disappearing.

The article in True Hoops.

Cincinnati versus Xavier brawl; “Disrespect”

Whenever I hear an athlete say the word “disrespect”, as in “he disrespected me”, I think two things: 1) the speaker does not respect himself enough not to care what someone who is obviously a moron is saying about him and 2) whatever the situation is, it probably isn’t going to turn out well for anyone involved. And so it was with yesterdays Cincinnati versus Xavier game-turned-into-brawl.

Of course the media plays a role in inflaming passions, goading players to regretful, violent responses (“This one is truly a backyard brawl.“). But the media would follow the lead of those who administer the games. Schools, athletic departments and conferences, team owners and presidents (in the pros), and coaches can punish, threaten, and suspend players for behavior but isn’t something else required? Some communication, education, mentoring that teaches that responding to the “disrespect” provocation can be and should be beneath one’s dignity? Sport is about competition and achieving potential; the greatest potential in this case, the winner in the contest of respect and disrespect, is the player who separates himself from the taunt and focuses on and plays the game. To respond to the taunt is to betray yourself as maybe believing the taunter. Would Bird, Magic, Jordan have cried about disrespect? No, they’d just drop forty on them and hold a press conference afterward and say he knew his rival didn’t mean it.