Saint Monica’s versus Saint Paul’s

I saw my first high school basketball game in probably eight years on Friday. I went with my fiance down to the local high school, Saint Monica’s, at the end of our block for their league game. These are small schools, but I was extremely disappointed in what I saw.

Saint Monica’s had much better talent than Saint Paul’s, that was clear from the start. Saint Monica’s has two quick forwards who drive left every time they touched the ball and scored on about half of those possessions. They also have a taller (taller for this size school is maybe 6′3″) center who blocked a lot of shots and had a few nice inside turnaround jumpers.

However, Saint Monica’s had zero coaching.  They ran a 2-3 zone that they never came out of even when they were down by 10 and St. Paul’s drained four three-pointers in a row.  They rarely boxed out.

However, their offense was the worst.  They had one offensive play, a forward running off a double screen, although that was as far as they ever got with it.  There were only a handful of possessions where more than one or two passes were made and that was only to get out of a triple-team.  They must have turned the ball over 20 times in the second half due to just careless passes or being too selfish dribbling the ball.  It was very disappointing to watch.

St. Paul’s won and while they were not incredibly skilled or even that well coached, they deserved to win for playing semi-correctly.  They did have a tough kid who battled for rebounds and loose balls and a guard who nailed three three-pointers in a row (I am fairly sure he was more lucky than good considering the third shot banked in). 

Seeing these sort of teams and players just encourages me even more to get the full Basketball.org site up and running.  The more we can educate players and coaches on how to play correctly, the better hope there is for more talented players and teams to develop.  Basketball.org will not be an end-all solution to getting better, but hopefully it will act as one more tool for those who are interested in taking their game to the next level.