Buzz Williams on Ball Screen Coverage and Toughness

Buzz Williams, the head men's basketball coach at Virginia Tech, talks about icing the ball screen.  At the end of the video, around the 5:30 mark, he talks about how important it is to teach and coach toughness and playing hard everyday for basketball and for life.

- Any time a rotation is forced you are at a disadvantage.  So, they use ice so they don’t have to have an extra defender to rotate over.  You have the handler and the screeners man to contain the ball so that the other 3 guys can stay on their other 3 guys. 

- The more simple and precise you can make anything, the better.  You get slippage any time you make stuff personnel specific, so having a set system or plan helps with consistency and limits mistakes and game slippage.

- Make sure you spend time on other coverages that are different than what you do.  The % of icing the ball screen, even in college, is still low.  So he has to work on the other coverages.  The number 1 method of covering ball screens in the ACC is the hedge and over and 2 is switching the ball screen.

- Everything is a trickle down from the pros, to the colleges, to the high schools. 

-On high pick and roll, the 3 ‘others’ have to stay at home and connected on the sides because the ball is in the middle of the court and can go either way.  Its easier to help on side ball screens, but in the middle, you have to decide where the help is coming from.  They send the ball to the right so that everybody knows the rotations.

- We coach toughness and playing hard more than we coach anything else.  Its for basketball and for life, and our responsibility as coaches is to help grow our kids to be the best that they can be in all facets of life, and to be the best, you have to go really hard and you have to be really tough.