Intro to the Pack Line

Here is a rough copy of the Pack Line handout I plan to distribute to my player's this season.

WH has an article on PACK Drills. Anybody interested? I can pass them along ... I will send directly.

CoachMc:
I'm interested in hearing how you teach your team to help the on-the-ball defender stop dribble penetration. Obviously, the on-the-ball defender must use his/her feet to stop the straight line drives to the hoop, but do you have a teaching cue for your players to tell them when they must commit to assisting the on-the-ball defender in stopping dribble penetration?

Thanks Mac.

I will take any handouts on the pack that any would like to share! Coach Mc, looks good!

This might sound a little arbitrary but what Communication skillz do you use in when running the pack?

When I discuss communication with my teams, both offensively and defensively, we focus on the big three: communicate early, often, and loud. Meaning that we should always be communicating [ex: "I have help middle, wall, ball], we communicate early [ex: we call screens as soon as we recognize they are developing, this allows our on-ball defender to get into a 'bull dog' position to potentially ice the screen, it also allows the player defending the screener to recognize that she must perform her appropriate action be it to hedge, show, trap, blitz, jam], we also communicate loudly which means our teammates must be able to hear our communication for it to be effective.

On a side note, we do not call ball, ball, ball, ball, ball, ball, ball non-stop, nor do we call dead, dead, dead, dead, dead non-stop - part of our communication is to call everything 3 times.

As for call for when a defender gets beat and requires additional support to stop penetration, we simply yell "help, help, help", now the idea with the pack is that the help defenders are already in a position to help, so very rarely should we be out of a help position. As you can see in the diagrams provided we really stack the ball side and crowd the paint. Our defensive philosophy is to keep everything out of the kill zones and the box. With a 24 second shot clock we try and force long contested 2 pt shots, and then our goal is to keep the other team out of the box which is where the majority of defensive rebounds are secured.

Thanks Mac.

I like the 3 call communication. I have had a few players that liked to just say "ball" all night....

Wayne - I would greatly appreciate any and all pack defense drills you could send my way. Thanks!

Hello Wayne, I would like to see those pack line drills also if you still have them.