Chunking Your Season

The high school basketball season is roughly 4 months long, Part of November, December, January, February, and part of March. It's important for coaches to understand the different chunks the season provides and what goals you want to achieve during each section of the season.

Chunk 1 - Pre-Season and early tournaments.
During this phase of the season you really want to implement your philosophy with your pre-season practices (pre-season meaning before you play your first game).

Some coaches go two-a-day practices at this point to get more repetition and time on the floor so their teams are ready for play.

However you go about this you want to instill your team's offensive and defensive systems, how to deal with transition (offense and defense), and other basic systems that your going to install like BLOBS and SLOBS (Base Line out of Bounds, Side Line out of Bounds).

You also want to set the work rate and intensity rate you want your players to play with. Setting a solid work ethic and being consistent in your high demands are of the utmost importance early in the season. Just like in the classroom, if you fail to set the tone early you cannot go back and redo the first month of the school year or season.

Once you start playing games in and early season tournament you and your team may have set the goal of winning the tournament but as a coach you want to also see how different lineups will fare, how a player playing a different position will do, how a certain play or a defense will work. These early games are your feedback to see what areas you need to address. There may be areas where you thought were strengths but struggled with, etc. Pay close attention to these thing in early games and make the immediate corrections you need to ensure your season's success.

We'll examine the other chunks of the season in future posts.