YBCA

I think they go hand in hand. Last season, I think we won the league because the varsity coach mandates that everyone plays, so everyone played in every half, so every player improved and remained engaged, which improved the quality of practice. When a starter had an off-night, another player was there to step up. In the last game of the year, starting PG misses the game for a test, and another players steps in with no problems. In other games, we wore down teams that only played 6-7 players and depended heavily on 2 players because they were defended by 6 different players in the game. Everyone improved. We beat a team who I felt was more talented at home by 1 in the first round of league and by 13 away on the last game of the season without our PG. I think that is a far estimation of the improvement to get kind of lucky in the first game coming from behind to win to leading the entire game. And the improvement stemmed from working on basic skills every day in practice in a competitive (small-sided games) environment as well as the added motivation of players knowing that they would play every game. I think we had one bad practice all year with high school girls, none of whom has college playing aspirations. FWIW, I used the same approach with boys volleyball, and had nearly the same results. We pounded the top two teams in league in 2 sets in the last two matches of the season. Our focus was small-sided scrimmages, not hitting lines or serving to an open court. 

We are going through the same sort of “problem” right now.  I believe a mistake we have made is to go too much in the direction of drills and we have moved away from our TGfU philosophy.  Too much stoppage in play, and too much talking by the coaching staff as of late has hampered us in practice as well.  As the head coach this is something I am going to have to remedy.  Our recored is good right now but we are not playing well, just scraping by in most of our games even though we have beaten some teams with more “talent” than us.  We believe the problem is with our practices right now and if we remedy that then we can get back to playing competitively in practices and games.

Every situation differs. Last season, I felt it very important to win one of our first games even though we probably played the two toughest teams within our first four games. But, I was asking something totally different of the girls. They were used to a coach telling them what to do, telling them what play to run, etc. and I was asking them to think for themselves and figure out the best play without me. When you make a change like that, often a win is very important to get the players to trust the change. We lost to our rivals by 20 in the 3rd game of the year, but everyone felt good because we played with them and handled their press fairly well; when we had played in an off-season scrimmage after two weeks of optional workouts, we lost by 40. So, by winning the first game in a close game against a team that we probably would have destroyed at the end of the season and playing a pretty competitive game against the best team that we'd see all season, the girls gained confidence. IMO, we lost one game all season against a team that we should have beaten, and it was a road game on a Monday after a tournament, so we had not practiced in a week. We were sluggish and I spent the whole game waiting for them to wake up, make a couple shots and win by 10. We lost by 1. I kind of blamed myself for not lighting a fire. Otherwise, we beat every team that we should have beaten and probably 5-6 games against teams with arguably more talent. But, if the first weekend hadn't gone well, who knows what would have happened and how long it would have taken for the players to believe in the system, but more importantly, to believe in themselves. 

Finishing is probably the main drill that I practiced outside of competition. However, I used defenders in some fashion in almost every finishing drill. I used tag as most of our ball handling drills and 1v1 and the mirror drill for defense. I severely reduced my feedback and focused on the big issues and not the details. It was different than previous coaching experiences, but more fun in a lot of ways, to see the improvement and the fun that the girls had playing the game. 

I also think the competitive nature of practice ultimately led to better game performance, as players were used to end-game situations from playing 3v3 to 5 points or 5v5 to 2 baskets or whatever during every practice.