Playing As the Underdog

Playing As the Underdog

By: Jeremy Ruffin

Assistant Men's Basketball Coach - Pensacola Christian College

Some coaches might look at playing as an Underdog a challenge. Some coaches might look at playing as an Underdog as disrespectful. We, here at Pensacola Christian College in Pensacola, FL, have taken on the Underdog role in several games. At our school, we look at playing as an Underdog an opportunity to act on the Fundamentals, Conditioning, Discipline, and Goal-oriented system that we have been long attaining.

What some coaches do not realize is that playing as an Underdog actually takes some of the pressure off of your team. This allows you to fully focus on the goals that you as a team have set. John Wooden once said, “Winning takes talent; to repeat takes character.” Before you can truly compete night in and night out at a high level as an underdog, there are some ideas that you can have in place.

First, there must be a High Priority for Conditioning. My father, who was a high school coach for several years, always said this, “If you can’t run, you can’t play.” Those athletes who cannot get themselves in shape will not be able to compete at a high level for the maximum amount of time. Teams that are facing opponents that have better athletes do not have room for error. If you are not in good shape, you will lose your mental focus and will not be able to contest at the game’s peak moments. All fundamentals are lost when guys are not in great conditioning shape. As the underdog, you are already fighting an uphill battle. It would be wise to not make the battle even more difficult by not being in playing shape.

Drills, such as running and training in the sand, will help in the Fourth Quarter or 2nd half of ball games. This is one of the drills our players like the least, but they say it helps them tremendously in games. We really work at getting our players to be able to change directions well. You can set up cones at the different basketball goals in your gym or outside gym, and make up your own combination of back pedals, carioca, defensive slides, and sprint to closeouts. This will allow your players to understand the importance of sinking your hips, staying low, building a solid core, and being able to play with your feet under you.

Not only do Underdogs need to put a high priority on Conditioning, but they should also put Precedence for teaching Fundamentals. One of the greatest teachers of fundamentals was Coach John Wooden who was meticulous concerning playing basketball fundamentally sound. Teams who are Underdogs must make sure they work extremely hard on their fundamentals.

This goes from being able to dribble with either hand effectively. We do a lot of two-ball ball-handling drills with goggles with our wings and guards. Sometimes we will have our athletic “4” players also join in because they are able to help bring the ball up-court against tough pressure.

Other basic fundamentals include calling for the ball and showing your passer where you want to catch the ball. It takes two people to make a good pass. In our practices we set up six lines. We split the half court in half. The first lines are adjacent to each other at the top of the key. One line CHEST passes the ball to the right wing, while the other line CHEST passes the ball to the left wing. The passer follows his pass. The player on the wing who received the pass with his OUTSIDE HAND then throws a BOUNCE PASS into the post. This happens on both sides of the half court. The final pass is an OVER THE HEAD PASS to the opposite line at the top of the key. This is a great warm-up drill. We call this drill “Three Kinds of Passes.” It is very basic and simple, but it makes our guys focus on throwing a chest pass to the outside hand from the top of the key to the wing; throwing a bounce pass into the post; and finally throwing an over the head pass from the post to an outlet guard. You can use different managers in this drill to make the catches more difficult for the players.

Another fundamental that can be taught is how to play PROPER DEFENSE. Many guys now like to reach instead of “containing” the ball handler. Fouls neglect ball presser. These are basic fundamentals that as an Underdog, you MUST instill in your players. Without these philosophies in place, it makes playing against higher competition much more difficult.

Thirdly, we here at Pensacola Christian College teach DISCIPLINE. Now with discipline, there are many areas we teach. After every Friday night practice, our head coach, Coach Goetsch, will always instruct our guys to make sure that they have discipline to do what’s right on the weekends. Due to their lack of discipline, so many guys get themselves into trouble on the weekends. We also instruct our men to have discipline to eat the right things. Discipline on the court as an Underdog means several things.

One main discipline is defense. As an underdog team, we do not possess the 1-1 skill to guard players on opposing teams. However, if we play a good 5 man, TEAM DEFENSE, we run a greater chance at getting stops. We work on 1-1 closeouts a lot in our practices and 1-1 back-side rebounding against opponents. If you do not have the discipline to finish out a defensive possession by getting a defensive rebound, we are allowing teams more opportunities to score.

Another discipline is on the offensive end. We MUST take the BEST shot. We tell our players, “Sometimes you have to give up a good shot for the best shot.” We cannot have guys taking non-anticipated shots without rebounders in position to get tips. We do not like taking undisciplined shots. Anyone can shoot the ball at any time; however, it takes a DISCIPLINED player to take a good shot at a good time. So we have seen how conditioning, fundamentals, and discipline lead to helping an Underdog team succeed.

Lastly, let’s look at how a Goal-Oriented System can help Underdogs succeed. We have a few goals that we try to reach within games. Our head coach brakes down the entire game into five minutes segments. We are trying to hold our opponents under double digits for those five minute segments and trying to see how many double digit segments we can have. With this breakdown, we can see how many times we are giving up big points and when our tendency to give up these points is.

Another Goal-oriented scheme that we use is trying to make more free throws than our opponent attempts. If we are able to make 15 free throws and our opponent only attempts 10, than that means we played great defense, and we have given ourselves a chance to earn free points.

We here at PCC run a timing offense. We have a certain system that works for us. We know that as Underdogs, we must be at the right place at the right time. This comes from repetition and timing. We know that this works best FOR US. This might necessarily work best for all. WE do not possess to give one player the ball and let him score 20-30 each night. We do not want that type of system. We want 6-8 guys scoring 10-12 points a game.

I trust this article was a help to someone. We try to give ideas that will better help other coaches. Yes we do play quite often as the Underdog, but it is good that we have Fundamentals, Conditioning, Discipline, and Goal-oriented systems that help us achieve our goals. As a coach, you must find works best for you. If you find yourself as the Underdog, you might be able to use some of these ideas to better help your program succeed.