Lennie Acuff, Alabama-Huntsville Space + Pace Offensive System There are two types of coaches 1. Those that are humble 2. Those that are about to be **Just about the time you think you got it figured out, it goes south on you. In 2000, after her UT team lost to a Xavier team that ran the Princeton Offense, Pat Summit reached out to Acuff to learn more about how the offense and how to stop it. The next year in the Elite 8, Summit s team faced another Princeton team in Vanderbilt and blew the doors off them. Rick Carlisle: Stress is being unprepared for something you care deeply about. Pressure is being excited/nervous about something you care deeply about. Embrace pressure. Prior to the 2011 NBA Finals, Carlisle told his Mavericks team, We got this. We re prepared. We re going to feel pressure, but make pressure your friend. We re ready. If your players feel prepared, there s a great sense of security and freedom. You ve got to earn the right to play in games. Within the coaching fraternity, we need to do a better job looking out for each other. It s a tough business, have a compassion for the guy down the sideline from you. Understand where you are and who you are. Some young coaches struggle because they try to mimic their boss. You have to be you. Confidence is contagious so is a lack of confidence. I want my players to be confident. I want them to be free I m not a yeller, screamer. It s not who I am. As I ve had children, I think I ve become a better coach. Ask yourself, Would I want my son/daughter to play for me? When looking at a job, it s hard to coach somewhere you don t want to live. We didn t go there to leave.
Don Meyer: There s two kinds of jobs (1) Stepping Stones (2) Kidney Stones Make this job your next job. When taking over Alabama Huntsville, Acuff had 3 points of emphasis: 1. Make it important (do anything to raise attendance) 2. Make it positive (because they had been bad for so long, there was so much negativity) 3. Make it a vehicle for improvement (when those kids came to us, they got better. We felt that could be our niche: kids that love to work at their game). Have short-term goals with a long-term vision. What can we get done to get us to where we ultimately want to go? When we arrived at Huntsville, I asked What is our niche going to be? We can t line up and do what everyone else is doing (we can t get the transfers everyone else is getting). We have to be throwing curveballs in a fastball league. We need to be different, we need to be thinking outside-the-box. Hardest thing to do is coach kids you don t like. We re not going to shortcut character. I want kids that we want to be around. From Chick-fil-a executive Our best franchises are two things: 1. Highly professional 2. Highly personal Those franchises do an great job of pursuing excellence while developing relationships. Why do I coach? I want to create memories for the kids that play for me. At any level, if you have two players that can play a level above you, you can be really good. If you have three, you can win championships. Recruiting: get guys that fit. Don t try to put a square peg in a round hole. Recruit offense, teach defense. We want guys that can score. We redshirt a lot of our players. The Huntsville culture doesn t support transfers so we need to find a way to make our roster older (and better). We want to be a program of development. We want kids to come here and want to get better.
It s a hard game when you can t score. You have to know what you hang your hat on. It s offense for us. It s hard to be complex on both ends of the floor. We have complexity on offense, simplicity on defense. We will change defenses a lot. Very rarely will we come out of a timeout in the same defense as we were in before the timeout. We don t want to let you get in a rhythm. Even if you trap just a little bit, the opponent worries about it a lot. Ed Murphy (Ole Miss/West Georgia): It s not how good you are. It s how good you play. Be careful of guys who look good and play bad. There s a big difference in how you re playing and how you re shooting. Don t let a bad (or good) shooting night fool you into thinking you played terribly (or great). On the night of the game, a coach has but one job: make sure his team has more good shots than the other team. There are 3 nights a year where everything is going your way and there s going to be 3 games a year when it s just not your night. Your job is to figure out how to win those other 25. Ran Princeton for 14 years. Got away from it because he felt it was too susceptible to scouting in the second round of league play. The majority of teams in our league had transitioned to Packline-style and it felt like we were working against a loaded defense at all times. We transitioned to running on everything (makes/misses). Biggest thing I took from spending time with John Beilein: language in our system. Everything we do has a conceptual name. It has really helped our guys be able to coach each other. We re playing conceptual. Going from one concept to another. John Beilein spent more time talking about shooting and getting shot-ready than on their 2-guard offense. The magic is in the teaching and the fundamentals. Only the fools think it s in the strategy. Highly recommends the website coachdougnovak.com for player development drills. Doug Novak is the head coach at Bethel College in Minnesota (D3). Watched a lot of Davidson and studied their break.
With catching, we make a big deal of showing one, catch with two. Show one hand to your teammate, but catch everything with two hands. Teaches Block/Tuck on catches (see photo on the right). Shooting footwork: get your work done early. The shot always favors the one with his feet set ready to shoot. Breakfast Passing 4 players (1ball) in a diamond formation passing with all 4 players stepping to pass (permanent pivot so always right foot with right-handed players) and all 4 players showing one and catching with two (block/tuck). Will do 3-4x a week. Passing to the right (stepping with right for a righty passing with right hand) Passing to the left (cross-stepping with right for a righty passing with left) Waffle (reverse pivot pass with left // pivot and then pass make a full pivot) Donut (cross as if to pass to left, another front pivot to come back and pass to right) We recruit a point guard in every class. We like to play two point guards at one time. This past season we started three players that played point guard for their high school teams. We want our guards to be able to pass off the dribble. Huntsville will do a similar drill to Breakfast Passing but with two balls. The players will take two dribbles before snapping a pass to the next guy (balls start opposite of each other). Pound, pound, push (don t wind up). We shoot layups every single day in practice. We call it Finishing School. We make a big deal of going full-speed. Stride Stops (on right side): right foot goes down, left foot comes across to set screen on defender. Body On, Ball Away Make layups with eyes Put chin on rim Shoot with outside hand and with inside 4 stages (Outside hand on right side, inside hand on right, outside hand on left, inside hand on left). Another option: come back to a hook in front of the rim We want to play from the outer-third to the middle-third with our head and shoulders out in front of our feet. Get middle with leverage.
In our offense, when we don t score on our initial break or our drive gets flattened out, we are looking to lift the ball (bring it higher up the court). Spray Shooting Simulate a player lifting the ball and then driving it downhill as his teammate circles behind into the window for a crackback. The 5 things we re looking for in a possession: 1. Layup 2. Room & rhythm 3 (with the right guy) 3. Free throws 4. Deep post catch 5. Straight line drive We used to be caught up in how we look, but nah, I m not worried about artistic impression. I m worried about Are we getting what we want? I analyze each possession of ours and see if we got one of those five. Talked about using body to screen off your defender with your pivots. If our point guard doesn t pitch the ball ahead before halfcourt, he keeps it. Wings are running all the way to the corner (thinking about having the first player regardless of position run the middle third). Good offense penalizes good defense. We don t love 3 s in transition when we haven t touched the paint. Encourages his point guards to ride the wave.
Anytime our 5-man gets a defensive rebound, we are running into a drag ball screen with the rim open (spread pick & roll). Really trying to get under the ball-hander so you can screen his defender s bottom-half. To the screener: when you roll, you re getting the team a shot. When you pop, you re getting yourself a shot. Terminology/Rules: 3 = Tech (he is looping as soon as the ball-handler gets into the paint 4 = Stretch (player stretching the court in front of ball-handler) 2 = Crackback (perimeter player behind the ball-handler) Screener = rolling to rim on ball-side (where screen was set) We don t want any first-side post-ups unless he s double-buried (2 feet in paint). To posts: Catch with two feet outside the paint: play slow Catch with two feet inside the paint: play quick If 1 goes Tech (to 3), 1 becomes the Crackback, 2 becomes the Stretch, 4 becomes the Lift while 5 goes oppo. If we had a big 5-man that could post, we d run him to the front of the rim to post him and dare the ref to call 3-seconds on us. With our 5-man, we run him to run the rim and then have him get behind the basket and play Hide & Seek. If 1 is ahead of the 4 trailer, 1 tries to accelerate with his dribble and cross Main Street (see Ride the Wave on bottom of page 5). On this drive, 5 is to duck-in on his man. 1 tries to turn the corner to score a layup. Penetration Rules: On this drive, we d lift the 2 from the Stretch to the Lift and we d want the weakside wing to move from the Stretch to the Split (splitting the wing and the corner). 4 would fill to the top of the key.
This past season Huntsville had a 4 that could really post so on the crackback to him, they would look to go Early Kick, Early Post with him. If the 4 is the trailer and he is ahead of 1, he goes right to the top of the key and puts his hands up. 1 tries to dribble it right off his back. 5 will duck-in, 2 will stretch to a lift and 3 will go Split. On a throwback to 4, he will look to reverse it to 3 and ball screen. Versus teams that are switching ball screens: we will roll the screener into the post and have the ball-handler bounce out with his dribble (back to a 45-degree angle) and try to enter into the post. We love to refuse ball screens. Teaching: eyes and hips to the screen, foot and ball away. On reject ( Bingo ): everyone gets on a different plane. They can prepare for what you do. They can t prepare for the pace you do it. We re at our best when the ball talks and we re not calling plays. The ball is telling us what to do. We don t care who runs right/left in our break (2/3). They just go.