“Finish that Mike!” I said to myself and probably out loud as I saw the ball roll off the rim for the 3rd or 4th time in the last 30 minutes. I was playing pickup with my brother and the Marshfield high school team in my hometown. It was the first time I’ve played 5 on 5 in nearly 5 years. For a lot of reasons, but mainly I had so many friends right out of college, because of not training their bodies the same, tear up their knee or Achilles.
Knee injury = no job for me.
For whatever reason this past Sunday I had an urge to play. I worked out the high school team for about 40 minutes and decided to stick around and get some runs in.
Over the past 5 years I’ve done tons of drills, played a little one on one, a lot of defense and demonstrated a ton at our camps and workouts. But I was quickly reminded that no matter how hard you try you cannot completely recreate game situations. And, I think we do a ridiculously good job of that.
You need drills to build rock solid foundations. That is the practice.
You need 1 on 1 and breakdown drills to develop creativity, flow and the ability to improvise. This is where you get rewarded for developing the foundations.
We spend so much time playing games when we are being evaluated either by college coaches or our high school coach that we don’t have an environment to try new things. To play completely free and develop confidence through finishing plays. It’s really difficult to translate 1 on 0 to 5 on 5. So this summer, if you’re spending 45 minutes on your skills be sure to spend 45 minutes playing 1 on 1 or 2 on 2. It’s where the true game carryover happens.