Women's Defense

[usfldan]

Does anyone know why we are giving up driving lanes to the outside? Whenever an opponent has the ball at about the line marking the edge of the coaches box, our defender will start in front of the person with the ball (which I would expect them to do) and then they will take two steps around the ball handler to the middle of the court, leaving an open lane for the opponent to drive along the sideline.

Does anyone understand this strategy? I suppose the idea is to keep the ball from getting to the middle of the court, but we seem to overplay it so much as if we want them to drive down the sideline.

I've noticed it mostly by Wanninger, but others do it too, so it's clearly something they are coached to do. It looks to me like they are inviting a drive and taking themselves out of the play, but I'm not a coach, so I was hoping someone would have some insight into why we do this.

[Bigbluebrotha]

Dan - Noticing the technique as well. I can only project that Xavier is trying to force opponents to their less-dominant side by overplaying their dominant side. That's all well and good and fairly smart when you think about it, however, the fact that the opponents are getting easy inside drives means that the players responsible for help are either too slow or not recognizing where they need to be on the floor. I understand it to a point with the new players, but there's no excuse for upper class players to be out of position. This team has had two long layoffs between games, it would seem the execution of the schemes should be progressing better.

[WCWIII]

This is a question I had as well. Seems like this strategy emphasizes a well executed help defense. In the Austin Peay game, it seemed to work well enough even though I was surprised at how wide open it seemed for some of the outside lanes.