Hey Shock Fans. Welcome to my newly acquired corner of the World Wide Web. Here in the Coach’s Corner, we’re going to try and give you a little insight into what we do as a staff to scout the opposition and prepare the Shock to be the best they can be each and every night.

Of course we can’t give away all of our trade secrets…don’t want to help out the opposition too much!

Hopefully we’ll get to talk to each other in this forum about once a week. If you have any questions you’d like to send my way, shoot an e-mail to the Shock Exchange.

So first off, let’s talk a little scouting. What do we look for when we’re getting ready to play a particular opponent? There are three components of scouting that we focus on. First we look at the players as individuals - what are their strengths, weaknesses and tendencies? We are very big on paying attention to a player’s tendencies - whether it’s a guard who likes to attack with her left hand or a post player who likes to turn over a specific shoulder. So, we identify individual tendencies and communicate that information to players.

To give you examples of player tendencies, I will use a couple of players who are no longer in the league.

First we’ll use Dawn Staley. Staley was a player whose strength was setting the tempo of the game for the Charlotte Sting – everything ran through her. When you played against Dawn, the biggest thing was to be extremely physical with her – get up in her space. When I scouted Dawn during my tenure with the Cleveland Rockers, I instructed our point guards, namely Helen Darling, to step up the ball pressure on Dawn. We wanted to get to her in the full court and try to make her speed up the action, thus taking the Sting’s offense out of its flow. Even better was to deny the ball from Dawn and force the Sting to run their offense through other players like Feaster or Stinson.

If they were able to get into their play calls, we then focused on being physical with Staley off the ball – we didn’t want to let her cut freely to complete the action they were after. Once she received it back, later in the clock, then it was time to force her into putting the ball on the floor to make a play under duress. That was really the overall individual scout theme for the Charlotte Sting at the time – make them put the ball on the floor and have to make athletic plays under pressure.

Of course, the obvious exception to that rule was Andrea Stinson. She was a player who possessed the athleticism to make a play off the dribble. So, the scouting report on her was to give her a step and invite the long-range shot. And we never ever wanted Stinson to get in the open court – that’s where Miss Jordan did her thang!

Okay, once we break down individual tendencies, we look at the team as a whole - what are the team’s tendencies? That would include basically charting every play that they run and when they run it. The playbook on a team that is provided for the coaches is a complete playbook. It includes anything we ever saw on video that a team ran. When we create the scouting report for players, however, we chop that down to include only the high frequency plays. We pick the plays that we think are going to be utilized most often against us in that game for that particular opponent.

We then prepare for those plays at practice, going over various schemes we may use to defend the action. For example, if a team utilizes the wing pick and roll, our defensive schemes would include a minimum of two ways to play the action based on the personnel in the pick and roll. So, we prepare for the various offensive sets a team may throw at us at practice and we will revisit again at the shoot around on game day via video and on the floor.

The third part of what we do is akin to scouting ourselves. Based on what we do and the opposition’s strengths on the defensive side of the ball, how do we think our opponent is going to defend our offensive sets? Based on the answers to those questions, we put together our offensive playbook for that particular game.

For example, if we identify that a team’s pick and roll defense is suspect, we will incorporate more pick and rolls into our offensive schemes for that game. If the opponent has displayed a weakness in closing out to shooters, we will add some flare screens to exploit their guard’s ability to close out to our shooters. Additionally, we identify match ups that will favor us. We then would utilize play calls that would exploit the favored match up. So those are the three aspects to scouting that we use, and a little real world application of them. Next week I’ll try and take you inside our time out huddle to show you all the things we try to accomplish in the 120 second it takes you to go from the couch to the refrigerator and back. Thanks for checking in!