Hurry Up And Wait

This is a really neat article found on Grantland about a Division 2 basketball coach and program who has found success speeding up the game, not over-coaching, and letting their players 'play' and have some say in the decision making process.

Jim Crutchfield took over the West Liberty University Men's Basketball program in 2004 following a 4-23 season, and they haven't looked back since.  

The article is as much about the narrative of the decline in popularity of college basketball, in large part to the tempo of the game, as it is about Coach Crutchfield's basketball program.  They speak in-depth with several coaches, including former Sooner and TCU coach, Billy Tubbs about the slow down in pace of the game.

The article is a very interesting read in general about college basketball, and it has several good 'nuggets' of information.  I have highlighted some notes from the article below.  You can read it in its entirety here.

Being Able To Rationalize Why You Are Doing It

“You ask a coach, ‘Why are they doing that?'” he says. “And they say, ‘That’s what I do.’ There are a lot of other places I’d rather take the ball out of bounds than in front of my bench. If I were going to call timeout, I’d tell a guy to do it in a different place.”

Sometimes he’ll call a full timeout just so he can burn through the media break at an opportune time, and the referees will credit him with a 30-second timeout in order to save his full timeouts, and he’ll insist to the official that he doesn't want to do it that way, that he’d prefer to save his 30's for later in the game so he doesn't disrupt the flow. Which means he occasionally finds himself in the uncomfortable position of arguing with a referee who thinks he’s done him a favor.

“I've never read a basketball book in my life,” he says. “Maybe I should, but whatever we do is homegrown here. I used to teach a coaching class, and I’d always say, ‘Don’t do it unless you can rationalize why you’re doing it.'”

Coach Crutchfield’s Background
Crutchfield was born in Clarksburg and majored in math and chemical engineering at WVU. He coached a high school golf team and planned to go to law school before he got the job at Cameron High, in a small town near the Pennsylvania border; he became the winningest coach in the school’s history before moving on to West Liberty. “I was pretty aggressive,” he says. “I remember the last high school game I coached, we won 104-101. In a 32-minute game.”

Rick Pitino’s Influence | Pressure From Random Angles
The only direct influence he mentioned to me came when he watched a Providence game in the 1980s, and he noted that Rick Pitino’s pressure came from random angles and sped up the game in ways the diamond-and-one press he’d been playing couldn’t do. When he took over the West Liberty program, he played mostly matchup zone; in his first season, he went 21-10 and averaged 90.8 points per game (he also took Marshall to the wire in a 2005 exhibition, and has had trouble getting contests against D-I programs ever since). Incrementally, as his players adjusted to the system, he began to ratchet up the man-to-man pressure against teams with inferior talent (in one game, they forced 19 turnovers in the first half), and through each of the past four seasons his team has averaged over 100.

Creating Opportunities and Flow

This is not the all-out freneticism of Grinnell; it is more about creating opportunities and flow and breeding trust among teammates. It is, Crutchfield says, about calculating risk versus reward, and in his mind, the rewards of an up-tempo system can effectively mitigate the risk if you employ it smartly: Because Charleston has one of the best point guards in West Liberty’s conference, they backed off the pressure when it didn’t work in the first half the other night.

Looking To Score In Transition

“I don’t think teams seriously look to score in transition enough,” he says. “You get 20 seconds of, ‘We’re kind of looking to score, we’re passing the ball but really not doing anything.’ And then, ‘OK, here we go, 12 seconds on the shot clock, here comes the high ball screen.’ That’s when I change the channel and look for a different game.”

Type of Kids He Recruits | Being Able To React Quickly

When Crutchfield recruits, he looks for kids who react quickly — “You can make up for a lot of quickness and speed if you react mentally,” he says — and play with high intensity: If they get beat on defense and they don’t D up even harder the next time down the floor, he starts to wonder if they might not fit into his system.  He redshirts most of his freshmen so they can acquaint themselves with his demands (one of the luxuries of Division II, I suppose). Hausfeld, his starting point guard, is 5-foot-7 and looks like Ollie from Hoosiers, if Ollie had conquered all of his insecurities: I saw him go 1-on-3 in the backcourt and break pressure without even thinking of burning a timeout, and I learned that he regularly shoots 3-pointers from 30 feet to extend the defense — with his coach’s blessing, because he made 45 percent from beyond the arc last season.

Empowering His Players

Sometimes in practice, Crutchfield will solicit suggestions for drills to run; even though he already knows what he’s going to do, it gives his players the impression that their opinion matters, and helps them realize that once they do get on the floor, the game is essentially in their hands.

“I’ve never had a coach who gives his players so much freedom,” says Chris Morrow, who at 6-6 is the team’s tallest starter. “There’s a bunch of risk in giving a lot of college guys freedom to make decisions. But as players, we completely buy into it. We don’t let people get away with slacking off.”

Coach Billy Tubbs
Tubbs brought up the shadow of “political correctness” with me several times, which seems like a bit of an oblique connection, but I think what he was trying to say is that the coaches who should be willing to gamble — coaches, like Tubbs, who are blessed with superior talent — simply don’t think it’s worth the risk anymore. And so they take command of everything that’s happening on the floor. They slow the game down to call offensive sets, and they play it safe on defense rather than risk giving up easy layups in transition. And the very notion of running wild like Tubbs’s teams did, or of throwing caution to the wind like Paul Westhead’s Loyola-Marymount teams did, or of raising hell like Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas teams did, becomes a concept too fraught with potential danger to even consider implementing. The favorites now play at the underdog’s pace. And this, one coach told me, is how a team like Kansas loses to an obvious inferior like TCU.

Coach Tubbs On Playing To Score
“When you’re watching games now, just watch how they catch the ball in scoring positions and don’t even think about shooting it because they’re trying to get it to another option,” Tubbs says. “When I coached, you put five players on the floor who could score, and you never played them out of position. Wayman Tisdale never caught the ball more than 15 feet from the basket.

Coaches Being Control Freaks | ‘Joystick Coaches’
“Coaches are a lot more control freaks than they’ve ever been,” says Baucom, which is not a complaint you hear very often from a coach at a school that claims to foster “punctuality, order, discipline, courtesy, and respect for authority.”

“I call ’em joystick coaches,” Baucom tells me. “They try to orchestrate every movement instead of letting ’em play. It becomes kind of like a wrestling match. There’s teams in our league that run 20 seconds of false motion to get the shot clock down, and then run a set. I watch some teams play and it looks like the kids are in jail.”