Mid to Late Season Adjustments: 5 women's basketball tournament tips for coaches

This article focuses on 5 areas to help maximize your time and talent to best prepare for a reputable tournament run.

1.      Prioritize Player Health and Recovery.

• Shorten Practices, intentionally. The intensity doesn’t have to necessarily lessen but the load should.

• Add more stretching and mobility pre and post practice.

• Emphasize nutrition and hydration.

• Create a “Player fatigue check-in” system. Ask THEM how they feel. They will always be as tired as they think they are.  This subjective data is necessary alongside objective data.

2.   Scout YOUR team.  Complete a 360-degree assessment of your program with use of film, metrics and player/staff feedback.

• Identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses.  How might opponents be scouting you?  What might they prepare for?

• Create small, attainable mid-late season goals. Foster a culture of adaptability.

• Adjust staff/player roles or name fresh ones.

3.      Tweak your playbook; both sides of the ball.

Offense:

• Work on getting to the 2nd or 3rd options within your established plays.

• Declutter! Get rid of plays that haven’t been used. If they haven’t worked by now, they won’t.

• Evaluate your best players’ scoring options.  Add plays that better fit your current rotation.

• Tweak your offense by making small changes. For example, if you run a ball screen offense, think about switching from a traditional on-ball to a ghost screen.  Instead of that double high ball to get to the rim, incorporate a flair ending for a 3.

Defense:

• Switch how you guard ball screens.

• Evaluate your fouls and assess the reasoning.  HOW are you fouling? At the rim? End of quarter? This will help identity what should change.  Maybe it’s more time dedicated to 1v1 containment in practice or fouling could be the result of fatigue. Subbing rotations (or lack thereof) could be the cause.

• Create a plan to steal 3-5 possessions a game.  Implement a trapping scheme after timeouts. Jump into a zone or press after free-throws. Scheme to combat a 2 for 1 end of quarter situation.

4.     Dedicate time to Skill Development. The best teams continue to develop their individual skills throughout the season.

• Spend close to the same amount of time on skill development and competitive drills as you do fine-tuning your offense and going over scout.

• Keep it fresh! The concepts can be the same, but the methods should always be engaging. There is a place for monotony but players like new challenges.

• Small-sided games and mixed groups can be considered skill development.  Isolate parts of your offense/defense and maximize players’ skillsets.

5.     Streamline your scout. Take out the fluff. Get to the “Need to Know”.

• Take off your teams’ season goals.  By now, your team should know them. It takes up unnecessary space on the scout.

• Take out cliches or “coach talk”. Players want to know the “why” and the “how”. Scout should be their guidebook.

• **Coaches, THIS might blow your mind, so I’ll ease into it* CONSIDER making scouts 1 page. Your players may actually read it.

Every team desires a strong finish.  Utilizing these women's basketball tournament tips could guarantee a reputable end of season run!  Here’s to continuing to get better until the last horn sounds.