Essential Components for a Successful Offense: Cutting, Spacing and Fakes

Iconic Vanderbilt Women's Head Coach Melanie Balcomb demonstrates why she has been so successful on the offensive end of the court. In her 12 years at Vanderbilt, her teams have averaged 23.5 wins per year (2003-14). In this on-court demonstration, Coach Balcomb goes deeper than the traditional set play, devoting an hour to teaching the finer points of an offensive attack. Coach Balcomb believes in teaching offensive concepts rather than memorized set plays. She trains her teams to play conceptually on the offensive end rather than just focusing on strict motion offenses with little quick hitters. Players are more effective when they're taught to read and react to a defense for multiple scoring opportunities rather than executing for a specific shot.

Coach Balcomb discusses the top four things offenses can do to control any defense:

• proper spacing
• timing
• reading defenses,
• moving without the basketball

From there she talks about the development of off-the-ball actions. Coach Balcomb dives into ball fakes and shot fakes that slow down the defense so you can read or make a play for someone else. Cutting is also a major emphasis within her conceptual offense as well as adding details to the offense in order to counteract defensive adjustments within the game. Your players will understand that when the defense takes away an option, another one will open, leaving your opponent vulnerable to any counter action you throw their way.

Through the use of a Vanderbilt main set play, you'll learn five scoring options that create confusion and include all elements and players within your offense. In her "5-v-0 Putting It All Together drill," players learn to maximize the "little things" that an offense must do to be an efficient scoring machine.

Coach Balcomb shares the finer points of offensive concepts that every successful team must master. She teaches players how to play and coaches how to instruct their players in movements and actions, not patterns. With the Finer Points of Offense, you'll develop players who attack more freely, more effectively and as a team.

Produced at the Spring 2014 WBCA Convention in Nashville (TN).

54 minutes. 2014.

This video was shot at the WBCA Convention an Nashville, TN in the Spring of 2014. Unfortunately, technical difficulties have resulted in a slight degradation in audio quality. We have done our best to correct the issue in order to bring you great coaching information.