BYU Basketball: The Day After a Loss

You don’t really sleep well the night of a loss. You just lie awake and think about all the plays that could’ve changed the game. You think about how behind you are in classes, and how brutal film room and practice will be the next day. You wake up, your body is sore, and it’s usually freezing outside, but you go to class.

Film room is at 2 PM sharp. This is no fun after a loss. The plays you thought about the night before are shown in front of the team.

People who are late on screens and don’t keep the player they’re guarding out of the middle of the floor and out of the paint are hammered. Players who don’t cut hard on offense or take bad shots are also shown. Players who don’t run the play correctly are exposed. There’s nowhere to hide in film room.

After the New Mexico game Saturday, the guys will have lots of clips to look at of poor defense and just lackluster offense. We took forever to get into our offense for some reason.

After film, we hit the floor and hit it hard. We usually start with defensive drills like guarding screens, close-out drills, 4-on-4 shell drill, etc.

4-on-4 shell drill is intense. We split into three teams of four, and the way to win the game is for a team to get seven stops. This drill is usually very physical; the point is just to compete like crazy and guard your guy. If we are not competing hard, everyone gets on the baseline and we run.

After each drill, the losers run, so you definitely are motivated to win every drill, and it encourages toughness and competitiveness.

During practice after a loss, it’s not unusual for tempers to flare and for scuffles to break out, for balls to get kicked to the rafters by coaches, for a box out drill to turn into somewhat of a tackle drill. You better come ready to play on these days.

This could be the reason we’ve never lost two regular season games in a row under this regime, because of the bounce-back competitive spirit that comes from the coaching staff and the team follows suit.

I guarantee the effort will be great against UNLV Wednesday; I hope I didn’t jinx them with that stat there about never losing two in a row...