A topic
with a special interest and an issue for a lot of arguments among the coaches,
who train young athletes, is the use or not zone defenses. I know that many of
you are against teaching zone defense in
the early years. Many coaches believe that this kind of defense does not help
players improve their defensive skills, because it is usually less aggressive
or without clear responsibilities.
The truth
is that I had the same objections when I started to train girls at the age of
14, 15, 16. I was considering that it is
a “crime” to teach and use this defense, before the age of 16, but I was facing
the problem of having to show offensive plays against zone in my trainings,
because we would play against it. A colleague, who watched my team 8 years ago,
told me after a game his opinion on this issue. He believed that the players
must know how to play some kind of zone defense, before the age of 16 (In
Greece this is the time when players change the level of the championship). He
told me exactly the following:”If I was the coach of the team U18, I would like
the players, who come from the team U16, to know how to play some kinds of zone
defense”. It is late for the players to
learn this kind of defense at the age of 16-17.
Today, I
believe that the zone defense teaching problems are solved with the use of
match-up zone defenses. But the most important thing is to understand that for
playing a good zone defense, the players must know the basic principles of man
to man defense. And these principles should be known in a team from the age of
14-15. A girl U15 plays in the national team U15 in Greece and I can’t believe
that she is elected to be in the best dozen players of her country without any
previous knowledge. So we could often have or create teams under 14-15 that
they are in a satisfactory level of man to man defense and know the basic
principles: weak side, 1on1 defense, pick and roll reaction, box out, closing
out, defensive transition, slides etc.
Then, it is
the time when I start to teach some easy match-up zone defense like AMOEBA.. I
have already shown offensive plays against simple kind of defense (like 2-1-2
or 2-3 or 3-2) in which players are assigned to guard specific areas of the
court, rather than players. Most of the times
we don’t have offensive problems against simple zone defense, so the players understand
the necessity of a zone defense with particular rules and adapt this defense to
the opponents and not only to specific areas of the court.
You can see
below how my team reacted against two zone offensive plays in the final game
women U16 in 2011, using AMOEBA defense. I should clarify that we were training
and playing this defense for nearly one month and a half, but we had only two
days to prepare for this specific game and the opponent’s offensive plays.
The play 1
and our reaction were:
The second
play and our reaction were:
You can
also see the following video which shows highlights from the above plays and
defensive reactions:
I am
looking forward to your views, ideas, objections, considerations via my email: kitsoleris@hotmail.com or at twitter @Gkitsoleris. And since 2014 at Facebook: George
Kitsoleris
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου