"Positionless" Motion Offense

with Steve Bergman,
Iowa City West (IA) High School Head Boys Basketball Coach from 1990 to 2025;
2017 Iowa High School Class 4A State Champions;
6x Iowa Class 4A State Champions, including back-to-back-to-back titles from 2012-14;
Over 600 career wins;
12x MVC Coach of the Year

Steve Bergman has achieved record-breaking levels of success in the state of Iowa, winning six state championships, including three in a row from 2012 to 2014! Year after year, his teams are a threat to make a deep run in the playoffs. In this video, you will see how his motion offensive system has enabled Coach Bergman to have consistent success despite a constantly revolving lineup of players with their own unique skill sets and abilities.

By playing through five primary motion concepts, Coach Bergman has created a highly adaptable offense that can be tailored to the personnel of any team. These options are simple to teach, but generate a huge variety of scoring opportunities through cuts, back screens, post play, and more.

Through whiteboard lecture, Coach Bergman shows you the five critical elements to building his motion offense. Additionally, you'll gain five key rules that influence execution to every phase of the offense. These rules will help your team maintain spacing while getting players to cut hard, set great screens, and communicate with one another.

Moving to the court, Bergman takes players who have never run the offense through a series of drills to develop players' understanding of basic principles, cuts and positioning. By using players who are new to the offense, Bergman demonstrates how to set up and run a motion offense almost immediately and how to spot and correct problems in the offense's execution.

By building layer upon layer, Bergman shows how to position and react to a player who has a penetration advantage on either a middle or baseline drive. You'll also see how to incorporate post play and how to add pick & roll elements for an intricate and effective offense that will put pressure on any man-to-man defense.

Cutting

Create constant ball and player movement in your offense with strategies for cutting and filling. Coach Bergman shows how to maintain spacing for alignments with four or five perimeter players. You'll learn the teaching points that are essential to train players to make the proper cut by reading the defense, improve timing by watching the cutter, and how to work through mistakes that players might make in the course of a possession.

The use of back screens is also demonstrated to help correct spacing issues and to incorporate an additional element that will create a variety of easy scoring opportunities for your players.

Dribble Penetration

Teach your players to space off dribble penetration to create an open shot. Players will react differently depending on whether the drive is directed toward the middle or the baseline. These strategies stress the ability for your opponents to help on drives while also maximizing the number of passing options available for the dribbler.

Using two breakdown drills, Bergman demonstrates how players in the paint, such as cutters or post players, should react to open up the driving lane.

Post Play

Raise the pressure you place on the defense after post feeds with four scoring options for your perimeter players. All of these concepts create additional movement to occupy help defenders while the ball is in the post.

In addition to breakdown drills to teach these different cuts, Bergman shows an example of how this motion offense could accommodate teams wanting to utilize two talented post players.

Pressure Release

When teams increase their pressure and begin to challenge passing lanes, you need to have a strategy to maintain your ball and player movement. Coach Bergman presents his strategy for spacing defenders out and beating them with backdoor cuts and dribble hand-offs. You will see how to quickly install this concept through several progressions of a breakdown drill.

High Post

While this offense can take on a number of formations to suit the talents of your players, you'll see how Bergman has used the high post within this offense to win multiple state championships. The high post serves as the "Air Traffic Controller" to direct the flow of your offense. By mixing up the actions used by this player, you can generate a multitude of exciting new options for your offense such as ball screens and lob passes.

You will also see the "build up" drill used to assemble all of these individual concepts into one complete offensive package. Coach Bergman includes two variations to this drill to emphasize ball movement, hard cuts and back screens.

This motion offense gives you a complete system that can run through your entire program. Filled with insights from over 25 years of teaching the offense, Coach Bergman's methodical and fundamental approach will improve the teaching and retention of the offense at any level.

80 minutes. 2017.