The best GAA coaches realise they can learn from basketball
“What’s with the basketball coaches in Gaelic football?” he asked. “What makes them relevant to our game?”
My nostrils were filled with the whiff of indignation steaming out of his loaded question.
The same man wanted no part of a reasoned explanation, whatever direction I went down, I knew we were inevitably going to wind up at the same point. ‘They should have nothing to do with football’ was the road he was looking to travel.
Like any coach or team manager, winning can’t be the only yardstick we use to judge their performance. It’s fool’s gold thinking that good coaches in any code are only the ones working with teams that are winning titles.
Of course, it’s about trying to get the very most out of the group of players at your disposal, but how to do that is the constant challenge. That may be why the influx of basketball principles have started to infiltrate our game.
Coaches looking for new ways to do it better.
The best of sports coaches I’ve encountered are the ones who never stop learning. That’s their common thread.
Age doesn’t determine you’ve passed your sell-by date, instead it’s your appetite and willingness to keep reading, listening, watching, and asking questions to keep adding to your repertoire.
The problem with many GAA coaches is that they achieve some success, think that they have it all figured out and become closed off to learning and working at their craft. They stop improving and get stuck repeating the same drills, games and tired lines over and over again for years on end.
It’s what is so fascinating with the way GAA coaching is developing at the moment.
There’s a lot of talk about the relatively recent influence of basketball coaches on inter-county teams practice since Kerry have added Seamus Weldon to their coaching ticket this season.
Going back a few years, former manager Pat O’Shea had plenty of hardwood tactics in his locker also. Dublin brought in Mark Ingle, and they have an ever-present in Jason Sherlock who is well versed in the intricacies of the court game. You can see that Liam MacHale is using plenty of his basketball nous to help make Roscommon a relevant force again with the way they set-up and play the game.
At least a couple of times every season, I used get a call from different scribes looking to do a piece on the transferability of the skills from the basketball court to the football pitch. It’s been a long established link. Both are invasion games based on attacking and defending that take place in very dynamic contexts.
But what is it specifically that Gaelic football coaching is borrowing from its hardwood compatriot?
The most obvious and most misunderstood has been the implementation of zone defensive systems.
In basketball, a zone defence is used for any number of different reasons.
Primarily its function is to protect the area closet the basket, inside the key is where teams make the highest percentage of their shots. The zone tries to force the opposition into taking lower percentage shots from further away from the basket.
The crucial part of any zone defence is that players have designated roles and cover specific areas of the court as opposed to marking man for man and allow themselves to get pulled out of position.
To be effective, it requires huge communication to both put pressure on the ball out top, as well as clog the lane to take away the easy shot right at the basket.
Some GAA coaches are still using a fairly blunt interpretation and you saw Galway’s version exposed, particularly in the first half by Roscommon last Sunday. Like a lot of club sides who are just trying to get bodies back inside their 45, if those players don’t have clarity about their specific roles, it can lead to a complete absence of personal responsibility from defenders and we get a situation like we did in the first half of the Connacht final, where nobody was marking anybody.
Galway weren’t picking up key individuals. It seemed like just a sea of bodies aimlessly rambling around but with nobody taking command for putting heat on the ball or
getting the proper structure to protect the scoring zone around the D.
When Roscommon’s wing forward Ciaran Murtagh received the ball in the 22nd minute, he quickly recognised he had a mismatch against Barry McHugh — the Galway centre forward. He put his head down and burned him for pace along the end-line before finishing to the net untouched with hardly another Galway defender in the frame.
A sure sign of a system malfunction. You may as well just play man for man at the back with proper match-ups and take your chances if that’s the level of concentration you bring to it. In any defensive scheme, a team tuned in and really understands their roles never lets that goal happen.
The basketball coaching principles would encourage players at all times to adjust their position in relation to where the ball is on the pitch. As in, if your man is 70 yards from the play at the far side of the pitch, there is no need for a defender to be hugging him out by the sideline. You tuck in 10-20 yards, so that even if the ball is reversed back towards your man, you are still close enough to get out and put pressure on him.
You get your head on a swivel and are able to see the ball and the man constantly. You do that so if a situation like Murtagh against McHugh develops in the right corner, you are in a better position to be able spot the danger quickly enough to leave your man and get over to give help.
Nothing overly flashy or complicated about it, but sound defensive principles help players do a better job of ‘reading the game’ and become more unselfish team defenders.
Those would never have been things coached in Gaelic football in years past, certainly not by coaches or managers I’ve come across. But instead of dying on the defensive side of it, the really exciting part is properly exploring how to break it down.
Basketball coaches have been finding ways to attack the zone since the game began. The easiest way will always be in transition, before the zone has had the time to get properly organised off a kick-out or turnover in the middle of the field for example. Once it’s set, they know the value of playing with width, of being patient with the ball, of getting cutters through from one side to the other, of moving the ball into the middle of it, which forces the defence to collapse and allows you to get it back out quickly to shooters.
It only makes sense to embrace that knowledge, take the good parts that are most relevant to Gaelic football, learn from them, add them to your coaching and move on.
Whether it’s from basketball, or any other game in the world, you either have to keep learning or stop coaching.
