Saturday, October 3, 2015

Horns: Some Versatile Horns Sets

"It's not about running plays, it's about making plays." - Mike Krzyzewski

Coaching middle school girls, I teach principles but can also illustrate them via sets. Generally, when we are tracking points per possession, we were generally scoring less than 50 points per 100 possessions. That reflects the problem of turnovers, inability to finish, and our big need area - passing.

We don't spend a lot of time running sets, but when we did, in one game we scored over 1.2 points per possession (actually 140 points per 100 possessions) when running horns sets. Okay, it was a small sample size, but encouraging. I grew up in a 1-4 high offense, and maybe that's an influence.

Horns formalizes spacing and encouraged cutting, screening, and passing leading to 'easier' shots.  If we can implement those with twelve and thirteen-year-old girls, you can do better. Obviously plays can be run from both sides, and you can direct more shots to scorers. Simple is better.

Certainly, there are far more options, e.g. cross screens for the bigs, back screens for the point guard, and so forth. But off we go