From: Rob Rangi

We have a 2-man fast break drill which I decided to modify to work more R&R principles into our trainings. It starts as two lines, one under each basket and one at the outlet position at each end of the court. A coach/manager puts the ball up and the first player in line on the baseline steps out to rebound, score, take it out, and hit the outlet. She then follows her pass. The outlet receives the pass and drives to the middle. The inbounder fills the outside lane and runs up court to the wing position.

We began this drill using preset calls to emphasize the specific movements that we wanted to work on. For example, if we wanted to focus on Circle Movement, we would call out, “2-man break with Drive Right to score (wing reacts)”. Two minutes later, we could say, “Great work, now 2-man break drill and hit the Natural Pitch”. Again, two minutes later, we would say, “Lastly, 2-man break drill – Drive Left and hit the Safety Valve”. It appears that nothing would be wrong with this philosophy, but we ran into some problems.

The main problem was how our Players reacted when they got to their wing position. Almost all of them instantaneously made the correct move without reading the ball, and in some cases, before the “readable movement” was even executed.

We asked our players why they had reacted even before the read was executed. We even asked them what would happen if the ball had done something else – like speed dribble or it was passed. Players answered with “Well, you said it was for 2 minutes so I just anticipated the dribbler would do the correct movement anyway”. It turns out that sometimes you can’t fault players for doing what you asked.

The remedy: Next practice, we modified the drill giving the outlets three options they could execute once she reached the point spot – drive left, drive right to score, and natural pitch. The Wing has to react accordingly.

Then, we introduced a “2-man break drill you make up” version with one rule: the next outlet breaking cannot use the same move as the previous outlet.

We run each version of the drill for 4 minutes and the results have been phenomenal. Players love the ability to make up the drill on the fly; our Outlets are now purposely trying to get the wrong reaction from our Wings, who in turn have become extremely attentive to the ball and now react without fault. In fact, we have now increased the list of options the dribbler can perform, recently adding pass-and-cut and the speed dribble.

For us, this has been the single most productive drill for teaching Read and React to date. We are seeing a lot more circle movement in scrimmage, especially from our older more experienced players. Our point guard, who is our most senior player with a high IQ, loves the speed dribble and has set up many easy layups off it. In fact, there have been so many open layups in scrimmages it sometimes makes me think we are failing at coaching our Defence, but I am reassured from my assistants and my peers that this is not the case. The evolution of the framework is really that good.

All I can say is the Beast is growing and I can’t wait for my Players “Light bulb” moments!