CrossFit Athletic Group

For the past two week The Family has been in South Carolina participating in Nike's youth basketball league-type thing. Since I don't travel with the teams I resort to watching the games on film. Last time (2019) I watched our own teams' games, this year I watched the other teams play and provide some scouting of sorts for our coaches. It was a really interesting experience and there are some principles I think are worth sharing.

Watching in layers. I think there are three ways to watch a game:

1. Watch for who wins and who loses (aka, what a fan does)
2. Watch for which players are good and which players are not so good
3. Watch for habits and tendencies.

The further you go in the checklist the more understanding of the actual thing you need, and the more focussed the viewing has to be. This is exactly why I love college football: I watch it purely from a fan's eye view. When I watch basketball I am looking for more than the final score, or which players are good. Tendencies are things players do more often than not (#32 touched the ball 14 times and shot 11 of them) and habits are things players do without even thinking about it (#3 was always looking up in the stands, so when trash talking to him make sure to let him know the scouts saw that).

Mild sauce shows habits and tendencies. There are defenses that are really aggressive (Each 1 Teach 1 16u) and other defenses that just have a cozy picnic while they gently wait their turn to play offense (Drive Nation 15u.) Both of those styles are decently straightforward to gameplan for. But the most difficult one to gameplan for - and play against as a player - is the mild sauce: constant pressure without being over aggressive. In fact, Javier first showed me this over the course of about 3 hours of soccer film breakdown back in the winter, and this recent film frenzy brought it to my attention even more.

Think about the end of a game when you're up 3 and you're certain the other team is going to foul you. They run up on you, flail their arms, and make some threatening verbal remarks about how you don't really want it. "Yeah right!" you say, "I'm going to the line!" So you pick up the ball and wait for them to foul you... only they don't. And 5 seconds later you turned the ball over and revealed you have a habit of not trusting your own ballhandling and tendency of not trusting your team.

From what I observed, steady, constant pressure made the offense stuck between stop and go like yellow lights, and not only proved to be really effective over the course of the game, but also showed me the habits and tendencies we can take advantage of.

Zoom in, not out. There are some general things I can give to a coach about the other team, like they started the game in a 1-2-2 zone, and skip passes seemed to be open a lot. But where I would run into trouble is trying to pull out habits and tendencies as a whole from one sample game; I would probably need 6 or 7 games to be able to really be able to see how the team as a whole acts under different scenarios. So instead of making false/lazy generalizations (they crash the boards hard), I get a feel for which players are making the most impact (good or bad) and zoom in on them. So instead of saying "PSA Cardinals crash the boards hard," I would say something like, "Any time number 25 gets a foul called on him, he waits a few possessions before crashing; he also picked up 2 fouls on pick-and-roll defense. So let's try and involve him in as much pick-and-roll as we can to try and keep him off the glass."

A basketball team is ultimarely made up of 5 individuals at a time. So If I can get a really good feel for what two of the players do, that's 2/5 of the team you're prepared for, which is really helpful in a such a short amount of time.

Everyone is good. Seriously, literally everyone is good. Even the shitty players. I was away from that environment for a year (last season was cancelled) and this was a nice reminder. So gameplanning for "who's the shooter?" doesn't make a lot of sense here; I would be looking for someone who so abnormally good at shooting compared to even the good shooters that we give them the "no catch" treatment. Just to give you an idea, I only gave that label once during these two weeks, and it went to a 6'9 kid.

Rankings. Rankings are not always based on where someone currently is, and that is because we are not the recruiting services' target audiences. College and pro coaches are the primary target audiences of recruiting services, and fans are the secondary target audiences (the ones that pay the bills by clicking on stuff). So rankings are usually based on how they think someone will project.

If I were to scout the Monkey Exhibit session at the Champions Club, you could look at the rankings and see that Lily Cavataio is ranked ahead of everyone in terms of where I think she will be by the time she's 16. So I might be looking out for her and when I see her do a pull-up be like "WOW! Look at that pull-up! She's so good!" But right next to her is Lulu, who might not have as much upside but she is blowing the doors off of everyone. Rashan Gary and Chase Winovich would be a similar football comparison.

Since I'm trying to watch games in the 3rd layer, I don't look up rankings until after the game is over. Not gonna lie, it's fun to say I watched Jonathan Kuminga before he blew up in the NBA, but I'm doing a report for someone to use tomorrow, not 4 years down the line.

[Update - 10:30 pm - the game I'm watching right now has a kid, Braeden Smith, who is the best player I've seen at any level in the entire tournament. I looked him up and he's not even nationally ranked, and it seems his only offer is from Air Force... for football. He's lighting up the number 9 player in the country.]

Development or showcase? A common saying in our organization is that tournaments build our hype and practices build our game. All I know is when you're playing in front of literally every major college coach in the country...

... it is more than okay to be in the showcase mode: You are who you are at that time, so just go and show it. There aren't very many of these opportunities, and taking advantage of one of them could change the course of your life. There is a vulnerability to this, though, and Mrs. Teri helped me see it this spring.

Countless times while sitting on the bench with her during soccer games she would, essentially, mess up the game on purpose so her kids would be put in a position to learn something. Why? Because soccer people are nuts and play more games in one day than a basketball team would play in 3 weeks. The games don't matter, they're glorified practices... at least, Mrs. Teri is smart enough so see them as glorified practices.

In this specific basketball environment, there doesn't seem like as many opportunities for glorified practices. For example, if our 2019 team didn't qualify for the national tournament there was a good chance our Nike contract wouldn't get renewed, which would mean we not only lose the single thing that pays for all the travel and tournaments and fancy stuff, but also lose a major reason why we can handpick most of the talent in Michigan. Three Stripes just doesn't have that credibility in the basketball world. So it's no wonder why winning the game you're playing RIGHT THIS MINUTE is a big deal.

So if the games aren't going to be time for development, then practices have to be. The problem there is a lot of teams fly kids in just for tournaments, or have kids that live so far away from each other that getting everyone to a single practice time is not realistic. I'm proud to brag that our Grand Rapids kids make it to every one of our practices, but it's still hard, man.

So this brings the question to a player, coach, or organization as a whole: are you in this to showcase who you already are, or are you in this to develop for the future? There needs to be both, and right now there is not enough of the development. I don't have an answer for how to make it better, other than the practices need to be top-notch for whoever shows up.

Dog on the bench. Finally, BABC 16u had a dog on the bench. And no, not hanging out at the end of the bench. But on the 2nd seat next to the head coach. I have never in my life seen anything so out of place on a basketball court, and I've seen Jessica shoot a jump shot and Ron Artest dribble with his left hand.