Area basketball coaches utilize film breakdown for success on the court

You watch a high school basketball game, and you think the coaches of both teams are deciding their offensive and defensive strategies based upon what they see happening in front of them on the court.

Think again.

More than likely, their game plans were put into place days before the opening tipoff.

Both Marian’s boys coach John Patton and Northwestern girls coach Chris Deutsch agree that breaking down videos of their own teams, and of their opponents, is an essential tool to gaining an edge to a winning record.

“We have every game and every opponent on video,” said Patton. “My staff and I will spend nearly 25 hours a week evaluating our strengths and weaknesses, and the offensive and defensive tendencies of our opponents.”

“We use video a lot,” said Deutsch. “We can analyze our opponents’ shooting zones, whether they press on defense or play man or zone, or both, and if they play up-tempo or half court.”

Huddle is the website where teams upload their game videos, with the agreement that coaches will trade films before their teams meet on their schedules.

There is a process with video breakdown that requires time and effort of the head coach’s staff. First, an entire game is filmed. Then coaches extract certain video clips of their team’s play and they also produce clips of their opponents’ tendencies.

“After our staff breaks down the film, we share the clips with our players,” said Patton. “If the film shows our opponent presses on defense, we will plan how to break it. We will study their half-court defense to determine how to attack it. We’ll look at how they score. Do they like to shoot threes or get the ball into the paint?”

While Patton and Deutsch conduct regular video sessions with their teams, Deutsch also gives each of his players the option of watching the videos on their own.

“Our players all have accounts with Huddle, too, so they can watch the games on their own time if they choose,” said Deutsch. “Some of the girls are into video and some are not, so that’s why it’s only an option.”

While Patton does not game-plan against an individual player from an opponent because “the rest of their team can still beat us,” Deutsch believes video is a valuable asset to defending the go-to girl from the teams they play.

“We can see how they set up to get the ball to her with an inbounds pass. We can see if she likes to dribble right more than left so we can get her to change direction,” he explained. “These are the little things that can make a big difference in the game.”

Of course, game-planning from video breakdown is not always reliable, and Patton said that happens five or six times a year.

“We recently played a game where the opponent played a triangle-and-two on defense, something we didn’t see in the video, so we had to make adjustments on the fly,” said Patton.

‘We play some teams twice on our schedule, and the team we scouted for a December game can do things much differently in February,” said Deutsch.

Patton also has a volunteer video man who lives in Florida during the winter.

“Mark Keip gets our videos online and begins the breakdown process for us,” said Patton. “He’s also a great stat-keeper and will tell you if someone on our team ... has broken a school record.”

Along with videos, coaches have access to high-tech statistics that include percentages of shots made by individual players from different spots on the court.

Patton recalled the days before the convenience of Internet video availability.

“We’d have to send a coach with a video camera, a tripod, and a VCR tape to scout an opponent,” said Patton. “Sometimes he’d have to drive an hour each way and film the whole game and then bring it in to be reviewed. Now we have four coaches who help break down video, and the only time they might have to scout is if there’s no video available on a team, or it’s a playoff game against an unknown opponent.”

After a game, Deutsch prepares himself for a long night that sometimes will keep him awake until 2 a.m. He gets home and immediately downloads the video of his game just played.

“If I’m watching a game where we lost by one or two points, I’m too emotionally involved to review our game plan. We miss a shot here, a layup there, and it’s like someone is sticking a hot knife through my heart. I have to watch the video two or three times before I’m calm enough to evaluate the gameplan we used. That might take a few hours before I move onto the film of our next opponent.”

Patton added that the winter weather has had his team playing three games in four nights, so film review cannot always be done with his players who have limited practice opportunities.

“With so many games to make up, my staff and I will watch our next opponent’s film at 10 p.m. after a game we just played so we can put together a quick plan.”

Technology has certainly revolutionized game preparation for high school basketball coaches, but both Patton and Deutsch said that no matter how much video helps to get their teams ready to play, winning on paper doesn’t always translate into victory on the court.

Both coaches agreed that their players still have to go out and execute the game plan.

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GLASSMASTER ... In last Tuesday’s playoff-clinching win over Jim Thorpe, Tamaqua’s Kirstin Jones dominated the glass, pulling down 23 rebounds. She added 15 points to record a double-double.

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TORCHING THE NET ... In Panther Valley’s victory to win the Schuylkill League’s D-3 title last Friday, Rene Figueroa scored an astounding 23 of his team’s 26 first-quarter points. The junior scored 44 points for the second time in his career. Also in the contest, PV finished with 90 points. It became the first school to score at least 90 points against Marian since Mahanoy Area had 103 on Feb. 15, 1991.

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KOVAC SCORES CRUTCH BASKET ... In a recent game between Jim Thorpe and North Schuylkill, both coaches agreed to allow JT’s Kayley Kovac, who had suffered a season-ending knee injury several weeks ago, to score an uncontested basket on Olympian Senior Night. There’s little doubt that Jim Thorpe’s all-time leading scorer will ever forget scoring her final two points.