Customer Reviews

Coaching Fast Break Basketball (The Art & Science of Coaching Series)

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All the situations for developing an effective Fast Break are explained. Cliff ELLIS illustrated these situations with Fast Break continuities he had already used. All the choice made inside the Fast Break continuities are explained. It means that you will have to read very carefully all the explanation if you don't want to miss relevant informations. However, we expect to find other types of drills. All the drills are known and well known. This part of the book is really poor.

Coach Ellis did a very good job of showing how to fast break out of several different situations -- made baskets, free throws, rebounds, fast breaking out of zones, fast breaking off a press. In this respect, his book is very thorough. If you can implement this, and get your team to run & fast break in each of these situations, you'll be a tough team to beat.

However, something I've observed in coaching: it doesn't matter how good your system is, if you can't teach it, it's useless. In fact, I would argue that teaching a lousy system impeccably well will result in more success than teaching an impeccable system lousy.

Unfortunately Coach Ellis didn't have any suggestions on how to teach your team to fast break out of each of these situations. He only had a short chapter at the end of the book that had drills for teaching fast break in general, but as far as teaching tips, that was it.
As a college coach, Coach Ellis has the option to recruit only kids that a) already know how to execute in a running game b) are exceptionally fast learners. For High School coaches like myself, who are dealt a hand and must play it, this book was almost useless. How about some breakdown drills for teaching the fast break out of each of these situations? How about some drills for teaching the fundamental skills involved? The High School kids I've worked with won't really learn a system well just by drawing the diagrams on the board, walking through it, and then going at it over and over. For whatever reason, that's not how teaching and learning work.

The one part of the book that I found interesting was how to fast break out of a zone press. Only because he made some interesting, practical points when talking about the zone press. It got me excited about the defense he was describing, not the transition offense.

I'm glad I bought this book used, rather than new. I would only recommend this book to a coach that is a brilliantly gifted teacher (and can therefore easily see how to teach everything here) but is an unimaginative dolt at devising a strategy. I don't personally know anybody like that.

This book is great for any coach. Todays basketball calls on the use of the fast break to score points. Everybody now is more athletic than ever before and the fastbreak is the only way to put their athletisim to use. A great book that teaches everything about a fast break and how it works.after getting a rebound, this book tells you what to do to get into a fast break. Definitly worth buying. thank you