Early in my career, the varsity players did not have much basketball training before they got to high school. They had not played in the YMCA, they had not gone to camps when young, and most had not even had JH experience.
I knew I wanted to have my teams play man to man defense, but early I made an horrible mistake. I looked at everything that I thought needed to be taught, and decided that teaching man to man to the first teams would be too much. So I took the easy route. Although we pressed some 1-2-1-1 and some 2-2-1, our primary defense was to sit in a 2-3 zone. It was not a 2-3 “matchup”, it was a straight zone. As a player had never played 2-3, I knew nothing about it, we just sat in a 2-3 zone.
It was an horrible mistake not to teach man to man defense.
1- I had three extremely athletic guards- Amy Crisman, Cookie Rosine, and Lesa Moore. If I had worked to teach man to man, would have become great defensively. Instead I had three athletic guards, stand passively in a 2-3 zone.
2- What I wanted my teams to become, could not become in a 2-3 zone. I wanted them to be aggressive. Yes, we pressed but the 2-3 zone did not allow us to become as intense as we should have.
3- The team went 21-4, but I honestly believe had I locked in and focused on teaching man to man defense, the team would certainly have gone to State and probably was good enough to have won State. In my second year coaching, I had perhaps one of my most talented and athletic teams. They were short-changed.
Man to Man Defense is not just a defense, it is a CULTURE.
I believe that when you play man to man defense, you build an attitude in the individual players and within the team that become central to who the team is.
1- If you emphasize man to man defense, it creates a real sense of TOUGHNESS. The team and the players are not backing down, they learn to be active and get after it.
2- When you play man to man defense, I believe your players are forced to be ACCOUNTABLE. When teams play zone defense, there is a lot more situations where the coach and the players can debate who should have covered what. In man to man, it is a lot more clear cut- “You didn’t do the job on that possession.”
3- Any successful team has to have TOUGHNESS and ACCOUNTABILITY as foundations of their CULTURE. As a result, playing man to man creates an attitude that makes the team tougher in tough situations, and I am not just talking about the defense. That tough attitude makes a team handle close games. It helps them not back down from a really good team. Man to man defense can help built the championship culture.
Examples Of Tough Man to Man Culture
What does a culture look like that has tough man to man defense at its foundation? If you look at girls basketball teams coached by Jay Hatch, and boys basketball teams coached by Mike Reynolds, you will see this tough culture.
Opposing teams hate to play Hatch’s and Reynolds’ teams. Offensively their players cannot execute actions and sets that work in all of their other games.
But it is not just that they play great man to man defense, it is the mindset of the players. Hatch and Reynolds use man to man to teach toughness. Their players are held accountable each possession. As a result, their players and their teams have the ability to compete regardless of their talent level.
Basics Of Man to Man Defense
1- Everything starts with defensive transition. Daily the team must work on defensive transition. My son is in college coaching. He has been with 6 different college head coaches. When I asked him if there was any drill that all the coaches focused on. He said that every coach did some variation of 1-3 defensive transition drills per day.
2- Time must be spent on closing out and guarding the ball. Within this, each coach must decide how they want to guard the ball- straight up, force weak hand, force middle, or force baseline. My belief was that with high school players, too often saying to force the ball a certain way was interpreted by the player to “get beat that way.”
3- Teach how you want to defend ball screens.
4- Create versions of the Shell Drill to use over and over.
5- Make sure you emphasize every possession to wrap up the possession with a rebound.
My Guiding Principles with Man to Man Defense
1- Fouls are errors. Bad defenders get in foul trouble. Any defense that commits lots of fouls is a bad defense.
2- Never teach trying to steal from the other team when they get a defensive rebound, get back. Once you let them go up toward the rebound, it is like giving your dog scraps in the kitchen, you will never get them to give it up.
3- We used some change ups besides our man to man. At one time or another, we did the following: 1-3-1 in the passing lanes, run and jump in half-court, 1-2-1-1 full court, and m2m in the full court. While all of them had some success, the more that we used them and the more time we spent teaching them, it made our man to man defense weaker. The more you try to do defensively, the worse your man to man will become.
4- It is better to work on defending actions such as side ball screen, UCLA cut, cross screens, etc. than it is to work on defending plays. If you focus on defending actions, then your scout report does not have to spend time teaching the opponents plays. You can tell your player,”They will be running slip screens on the side ball screens.” It might be that the slip comes after 5 other things but they have practiced and know how to guard a side slip screen.
5- On lower level, do NOT allow your coaches to play anything besides man to man. Playing man to man defense at the lower levels will athletically help the players learn movement and positioning skills.
I had one lower level coach who said his team played 2-3 zone in a big game because there was no way they could guard the other teams good post in man to man. And a JH coach played a triangle and two vs a team with a really good guard, and they put the two on the good guard. In both games these teams won their “big games.”
Unfortunately, the two coaches taught their players, “In a big game, man to man won’t work.” By the time those players got to the varsity, when we had some tough situations in a game, I had a couple players say, “Do you think we should play 2-3 zone?”
Coaches throughout the program need to understand that man to man defense is not just our defense, it is part of who we are.
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