Paul Westhead Clinic Notes

The following are clinic notes from Paul Westhead in the early '90's---

Billy Packer was talking about time outs. We never call time outs. We don’t have anything to say. Deeper than that, if a team is scoring on us, the worst thing for us to do is to call timeout because we need the clock running to do our thing. Dead time hurts us. So, we never,  never call timeout.

Pre-game? We played UNLV this year, opened the season there. When we went out for the Vegas pre-game show we went out and did two things. We went to the wrong basket and they had to move their stage. And we gave each guy a bag of popcorn. There are a lot of ways to attack problems.

You will find that our way is usually the opposite of most. Let me share one coaching suggestion. Anything in basketball that works, so does the opposite. If you believe in overplay, then underplay will also work.

Packer talked about how long it took great coaches to figure things out each game. Red Aurebach 5 minutes, Al McQuire 3 minutes- It takes me 41 minutes and the game only last 40 minutes.

Our fastbreak is all that we do. You might hear that we do other things, but we don’t. We did lose to UNLV but we got the last basket, and it was a three pointer. In the locker room our guys were very happy because we scored last. Two days before, we played Alabama and won 62-60 and our players were very angry. We didn’t get our average by 62 points. If you run this fast break, your players will be different forever.

Once you do any of this, you can never go back. At Loyola the first year we averaged 86 ppg, then 87ppg the next year. The third year it was 100ppg. The difference, we went to full court pressure. Full court pressure is like pouring gasoline on a fire, it gets away from you. This year we averaged 122ppg.

The more shots we get, the more opportunities we have, the more we think we are going to win. It is a very, very single minded approach to game. I am dead serious about the timeouts. We don’t call time outs. We try to get lost walking from the court to the locker room at the half. We don’t have anything to say. We don’t have pre-game talks. We don’t go back in before the game.

If you follow what I say, you will not be popular. This is a radical change and people don’t like radical change. Administrators won’t trust you. Your fellow coaches will dislike you. Officials will absolutely dislike you, you make them work too hard.

Take so many shots that no one cares about misses. What it does is to release the tension in shots.

We have no zone offense, no press offense, and no delay game. We run our break and that is it. We only do one thing and we work very hard at doing it well. If we are successful it is because of our single mindedness. They have no choice because we have no alternative. The more you add, the less you will break.