January 14th, 2012 | Uncategorized
Hi USNI friends,
It’s been a short bit since my last post. I was in Montreal for a couple of weeks for the holidays enjoying my time with my fellow Canadians during the Christmas break. I first want to wish everyone here a happy new year and I hope the last couple of weeks have been spent enjoying time with family and friends. Although it was a great little vacation, it’s now time to put the shoes back on, pick up the clipboard and get back to work!
It’s been great seeing the kids again. I had two sessions at a National school earlier this week where I coached some 5th grade and 6th grade groups. The girls remembered their basic knowledge of basketball, but I thought I should refresh their memory. We spent the majority of the time working on the proper passing techniques and eventually got into some competitive passing drills.
About thirty minutes into one of the sessions, a girl named ‘Justine’ came up to me and told me she was afraid of the basketball. I told her that there was no reason to be afraid of the basketball and that I’d be there to show her how to get more comfortable catching and passing it. After several back and forth chest and bounce passes and some confidence boosting talk, ‘Justine’ felt as if she could join the others in the passing drills. The final drill consisted of recording the number of passes made without dropping the ball in a limited amount of time. ‘Justine’ and her partner recorded a total of 62 consecutive passes, good for 3rd in the class! After the session ended, she came up to me and said she couldn’t wait until next week’s session!
Saturday’s academy was as good as ever. It was clearly noticeable that the little Titans worked very hard over break, even though they started off a bit rusty in the early drills. We worked on our ball handling skills and then got into some 5 on 5. Looking forward to seeing the development in the year 2012!
Other than that, we have our first National League game of 2012 tomorrow. The team practiced hard this week to get back into primetime domination mode! The guys all seem real pumped about the second half of the season and I don’t see why it should be any different.
Until next time, all the best!
Will
