The Prevalence of the Ball Screen

Years ago, Chuck Daly held a clinic and for 90 minutes the former Detroit Pistons coach explained how to run and defend one of the fundamental plays in college basketball.

In the audience, Northwestern coach Bill Carmody sat and listened.

Daly explained nine ways to defend the pick-and-roll, from sliding under the screen to hedging the screen to different ways to force the ball-handler into a trap or away from the screen.

“After the hour-and-a-half, he said, ‘And you know what? None of them work,’” Carmody recalled

http://www.annarbor.com/sports/um-basketball/the-ball-screen-has-become-a-prevalent-offense-in-college-basketball-including-at-michigan/

It is about that time of year...

"I work 18 hours a day during the football season. I don't own a mountain cabin. I believe that a successful coach must be totally dedicated. I don't even play golf. If I don't give this job 99 percent, I'm a dead coach." - John Madden

Wooden on Competitive Greatness

"For more than half a century I have defined Competitive Greatness as follows: 'A real love for the hard battle, knowing it offers the opportunity to be at your best when your best is required.'"
- John Wooden

Leadership From The Bottom-Up

"I think that there is one really fundamental military truth.  And that's that you can add up the correlation of forces, you can look at the number of tanks, you can look at the number of airplanes, you can look at all these factors of military might and put them together.  But unless the soldier on the ground, or the airman in the air, has the will to win, has the strength of character to go into battle, believes that his cause is just, and has the support of his country...all the rest of that stuff is irrelevant."

-General Norman Schwarzkopf

The Art of Listening

"We are losing our listening. The art of conversation is being replaced by personal broadcasting."

T.E.A.M.

“I don’t like that man, I must get to know him better.”- Abraham Lincoln

Being in the moment- Abby Wambach

I feel like I have to make sure I don't regret a moment. I want to smell what the stadium smells like. I want to breathe in all of this experience, because who knows if I'm going to get another shot in four years? Who knows if I will be healthy? Who knows, who knows?

 

Bob Hurley Interview

"If I can get them out of Jersey City, if I can get them into college, I can make the rest of their lives a lot different." Bob Hurley

Hoop Boost: TY COBB ON CONFIDENCE

Hoop Boost: TY COBB ON CONFIDENCE:


“Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.” -Ty Cobb"

Courtney Vandersloot

One of the best point guards in the 2011 NCAA finals and here is why:

1. Freezes defenders

2. Ability to score

3. Finds the open player

4. Changes her speed

5. Reads her defense and the help defender

6. Uses ball fakes effectively

7. Plays emotionless

8. Communicates effectively

9. Surveys the floor even before she gets the ball

10. Gets the outlet on the move

"Courtney Vandersloot is really good," McGraw said. "I saw her last year in the NCAA Tournament against Texas A&M, and she just engineered the game. She's a great point guard who finds people. Her team moves well without the ball because they know they're going to get the ball when they get open. She really has great command of the team.''

How bad do you want it?

"There is something inside of him that allowed him to compete when he shouldn't have. that was the game where a lot of guys would have bailed on him. He was able to rise above how he felt and do what he had to do, and he did it." Thoughts on Jordan's performance in Game 5 of the 1997 Finals against the Jazz.

G.T.S.T

"The best ones want the hardest coaching."-Buzz Williams

"Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth giving." - Juvenal

"These players and others who are considered the best at their respective positions indeed are blessed with god-given abilities, but they don't rest on these talents. They work to maximize them. While others are sleeping or partying, the great ones are running hills, lifting weights and studying film. They do this not because a coach has instructed them to do so. They do it because they simply desire to be the very best."

"Most people never see the sacrifice these players make to pursue greatness. They only see the finished product on game day. But rest assured that any player on the field whose performance separates him from his peers has made that possible because of the willingness to push himself to his physical and mental limits."

Talent + "Want-To" = Greatness.

1. Physical and mental sacrifice

2. Pursuit of greatness puts the ego aside and forces one to face the limitations of his athletic ability.

Posted: Monday June 21, 2010 12:10AM ; Updated: Monday June 21, 2010 12:24AM

Maurice Jones-Drew

"There's one thing separating the great players from the good in NFL"

"You must be smart enough to be able to practice on your own."-Coach Don Meyer

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1185386/index.htm

May 16, 2011
"Recruiter"
Too Many Phone Calls. Endless Road Trips. No Sleep. The Spectacular Life of a College Basketball
Bruce Schoenfeld

Great article on the ups and odwns of recruiting. the life cycle of the coach and what it wactually takes to land some big time recruits. It's getting to be that time of year...

"It's easy to spot the assistants, even when they aren't sitting in a row. They can't talk to recruits, so their goal is to be noticeable from a distance. This makes them walking billboards, their affiliations plastered across their clothing."



http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1185386/index.htm

Google Reader

Great tool to organize and bring together your favorite websites on one webpage. Check out an example of my Google Reader, browse feeds, explore blogs, etc. Have fun!
http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=wy#overview-page

Mike Singletary's Favorite Part of the Game

"Do you know what my favorite

part of the game is?

The opportunity to play."

-Mike Singletary

Make the change

“Like in a divorce, you know, there’s always two sides. So I don’t think we did as good a job, we’re gonna look in the mirror, too, and say, ‘OK, what do we have to do a better job in coaching this team?’ … That’s what all these companies did, they downsized, they re-evaluated, they looked at it. Good time for re-evaluation for us a little bit, because we’re in pretty good shape, 14 straight (NCAA) appearances, we’ve got some consistency. And we’ll be back. We’ll be back, that’s a promise.”

- Tom Izzo after losing to UCLA in the first round of the 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament.

 

Diigo in the classroom

Diigo is a great tool for classroom professional development. I would have to ask around and see how I could infiltrate it into my everyday curriculum. I think it is easy for teachers to grab ideas off the internet and organize them. It will be a little hard for me to pull myself away from my google reader and familiarize myself with another organizational tool. It will be a lot easier once summer comes around and I can have a chance to reorganize everything for next year.

Sugata Mitra: The Child Driven Education

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

Why is it so hard to let go and let the students drive the learning process?

Technology and the spread of revolutions

• The uprisings had a strong assist from contemporary technology
• What else makes Facebook
• The real Facebook revolution is global, and it's only just getting geared up
• Thoughts?

"Why not call it a Facebook revolution?"
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/24/facebook.revolution/

A place to vent or a place to share ideas?

What is seen as a forum to "vent" has gotten this teacher in some trouble.Thoughts?
"Teacher strikes nerve with 'lazy whiners' blog: My students are out of control,' teacher wrote in one post, drawing a suspension." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41618492/ns/us_news-life/