Re-Thinking
"The best coaches understand when they need to change, and what they need to do to be effective moving forward." - Hal Nunnally, Randolph-Macon
When I first became a head coach, we had a late game defense we called "3D" where we switched everything. In our regular man to man we never switched, but late in games when we were winning in the final minute and we wanted to take the 3-point line away, we'd switch to our 3D to better guard the line.
One game at home in my 3rd year against Keene State (our big rival), we didn't execute. We gave up an open 3 off of a missed switch with about 20 seconds left, when one of my freshmen reacted too late and left a shooter open. We ended up losing the game in overtime.
After that loss I started to re-think my strategy. We never, ever switched in our regular man to man defense. We did practice our 3D in time and score situations, but it wasn't something we did a lot. Why was I asking my players to do something different defensively, something we rarely did, on the most important possession of the game? As I thought more about it, I didn't feel like I was putting them in the best position to win. I know a lot of teams just switch everything late, and I was probably doing it because that was conventional thinking. You see a lot of teams get caught on bad switches in big spots. As I thought more about it, it didn't make sense. I decided to scrap 3D. We never switched late again.
In the 2010-2011 season at RIC we were really good. We won 21 games, won our league regular season and post-season, and went to the NCAA Tournament. We went to Oswego State for the first two rounds. After winning our first round game against Penn St.-Behrend, we played Oswego to go to the Sweet 16.
Early in the second half we were in a back and forth battle with a small lead, but we couldn't get away from them. They were getting in the paint and scoring on us too easily close to the rim. After about a minute or two in the second half I said to my staff "we may have to do something different. We can't stop them." They were in such a good rhythm on offense and I didn't think we could win the game without finding a way to stop them.
We were the best defensive team in our league that year and we played exclusively man to man. We had played, literally, one possession of zone all season - at Eastern Connecticut, out of a time out with a short shot clock. Other than that, we hadn't changed defenses all year. But we had to do something different at Oswego, so we went to zone. And they stopped scoring. We never came out of it. We played zone the last 17 minutes of the game and won pretty easily, heading to the Sweet 16.
After that 2011 season, and back to back Sweet 16 appearances, we lost a lot of good players, including our starting backcourt. We lost two all-league players who could really go off the dribble and get into the paint. Our best guard coming back, Tahrike Carter, was more of a power combo guard than a pure point guard. He scored in the post, but wasn't as quick off the dribble. Our other two best players were our 4 and 5 man, the best players in our league at their position. They posted up and got to the rim.
We had always run a fast-paced, wide open dribble drive offense. We had guards who could go, and we wanted to spread the floor and get into the paint. We kept it pretty simple. But with our 3 best players now being guys who were better inside and posting up than they were off the dribble, so I had to re-think our approach. Instead of going with the dribble drive, we went with a tight flex offense.
I was never a big fan of the flex - I always preferred a wide open floor where we could attack off the dribble and make plays. But we didn't have the same personnel we usually had at RIC, so we made an adjustment. I had to re-think our entire offensive approach. In 2012-13 we went 26-4 and won our league again with a 13-1 record, playing with a completely different offense.
One of the biggest basketball mistakes I made as the head coach at Maine was heading into my third year. We had recruited very well our first two years, and we were playing as one of the fastest teams in the country. Pressing on defense, playing with an open floor on offense, constantly on attack. We had the most athletic team in our league by far.
After that second year, however, we lost our 5 best athletes - one of them to graduation, and the other four transferred (we ended up losing 9 kids to "up" transfers over 4 years). We replaced them with some recruits in the spring, but we went from being one of the more athletic teams in the country to certainly the least athletic team in our league. And I failed to re-think how we were going to play. We started the year with the same approach to defense, flying around and attacking, yet we didn't have the athletes to be successful playing that way. I realized about halfway through the year that I wasn't putting our guys in the best position to win because I hadn't re-thought my approach.
It's so easy to get stuck in a rut with how you do things as a coach, especially if you've had some success. The default response is we just need to do it better, or work harder, because we know it's not the system - the system works. But how often do you re-think your approach and examine the best way to operate as a program? Our personnel is constantly changing, so it makes sense that we are ready to change to get the most out of it.
Don't be afraid to re-think as a coach, regardless of how much success you have had. It's a process that will continue to make your program better.