Coach ,

Great coaches know how to scout. Great scouting reports will help us win games that we were not supposed to win. Great scouting reports will help us beat more talented teams. But once we have the scout, how can we make the best of it? How can we come up with a war-ready game plan? 

Today, we are going to be sharing some insight from Baylor Women’s Basketball Head Coach Nikki Collen about how to scout, how to come up with a game plan and how to lead your players to follow that game plan.

Deciding Who We Are

Before coming up with a game plan for each game, we need to decide who we want to be in that match-up. 

Are we a scout-based or system-based team? 

Do we want to focus on individual players and expose their weaknesses and limit their strength spots?

 Or do we want to approach scouting from a team perspective - focus on the system our opponent is running and eliminate them there?

There is really no right or wrong answer here. This will depend on how much talent we are facing and our ability to guard different systems. Listen to Coach Collen breakdown her strategy:

Deciding Who We Are

How To Communicate Our Defensive Plan

Now that we came up with our defensive plan for the game, we need to clearly demonstrate to our players how we are going to communicate that plan in-game. As simple and obvious as this sounds, this can make or break our scout. If our players don’t communicate properly in game situations in the heat of the moment, our scout is not going to be worth much. We need to know how we are calling screens, what do we say on flare, what is the defense we are running after we score called, etc… 

Watch coach Collen breakdown her communication tactics: 

How To Communicate Our Defensive Plan

Deny at Their Strong Spots

When we are guarding the opponent's best scorer, we don’t necessarily want to be rigid in our defensive tactics - for example, we don’t want to just always deny. W we need to approach each player and each match up individually. 

One thing that Coach Collen emphasizes is to always deny at their strong spots - always deny in positions where they are most efficient at. Even at the cost of risking a backdoor cut. It is important to have a precise scouting report, but a huge chunk of defensive work can be done by denying them to get the ball in their strong position and have the defense be ready to help on the back door. Watch Coach Collen breakdown denying to ball: 

Deny at Their Strong Spots

These are just a few pointers that can help you to plan your game strategy and more importantly, how to execute it. As cliche as it sounds, communication is the most important part of the defense. Hope you got a least 1 idea to make sure players not only know the game plan, but they also know how to communicate when they get beat off their position.

Always keep improving,

Coaches Clinic Community of Coaches Helping Coaches

Thanks to Coach Collen, Baylor Basketball, and Basketball Embassy for sharing such great insight. You can see the Clinic in its entirety here.