Perfecting Situations

The perception of many would be that Grinnell is just helter skelter and total freelance. The reality is that Grinnell is very regimented in what they want to do in specific situations. In practice they are going to set up the following offensive situations-
1. Offense after a steal.
2. Offense after the opponent scores.
3. Offense after a defensive rebound.
4. Offense on dead balls when the ref handles the ball.
5. Offense after an offensive rebound.



On the high school level, we are not to the point where we can develop all of these unique offenses for all of these situations. But like Grinnell, when we practice offensively, we try to each day focus on 2-3 of these situations.

When I looked at films in the past, often you would watch a team on offense and then you could fast forward until the next team got into their half-court offense. In effect in traditional basketball when we played against the "powers" on our schedule, there were a lot of "pauses" in our games. The transition period from offense to defense, from defense to offense, from o-reb to setting up-- often it involved a slight break in the action. What the System is trying to do is eliminate the pauses- it is trying to get kids to react immediately to go from one situation to another situation.

College coaches have indicated to me that they like watching players in the System because-
1- They get to see so many more possessions in a game.
2- They get to see players ability to react to a variety of situations.
3- The speed of the game is more similar to the college game than the 40-36 game.

 Coach Arseneault calls what Grinnell is doing as "robotic but at a fast pace." And that is what you try to accomplish in practice- learning to react quickly to multiple situations.