Pat Colliton's Fundementals of Coaching Defense

This is Patrick Colliton from 6528 Heather Brook Ct., McLean, in Fairfax VA and I am back with more coaching tips that I have picked up over the past seventeen years of coaching in Fairfax, VA. Today I want to talk about defense and the best way to coach defense to younger, developing kids and while I have the most experience in coaching basketball, the fundamentals of defense can be applied to soccer, lacrosse and actually, most sports.

What most kids and a lot of coaches don’t realize is that defense is played with your feet. The basic principle of defense is to stay between your man and the goal and in order to be successful, you need to position yourself properly.

There are several important factors involved with having the proper position;

1) You need to stay on your toes (hence the expression “Don’t get caught flatfooted.”)

2) You need to keep your butt down and always have good balance.

3) Your movement should always be step and slide, step and slide. You need to avoid crossing over your feet as there is no balance during crossovers.

4) Probably the most important factor to address is to make sure your kids overplay to the strong side.

By forcing a young player to his/her weak side or off-hand, you basically take away his/her strength. By positioning your defensive player one half or even one full step toward the right hand (in most cases) allows even the most modest athlete to have success defensively. I always tell my kids that you need talent to score but you need heart and smarts to play defense. Therefore, everyone can play defense.

As long as you can teach or explain these fundamentals of defense, you really don’t need to spend a lot of practice time on defensive drills.

My next blog will talk about how you can make defensive drills both fun and productive at the same time. This is Pat Colliton signing off from Fairfax, Virginia.