Game Planning

I have never put too much stock in getting scouting reports from other people and planning too much about one particular opponent or a group of opponents heading into a tournament. For one thing, the majority of the tournament experience has more to do with getting your team better than trying to adjust your game plan to stop what someone else is doing. Not to say that through the early and middle parts of a season you are going to be playing in a vacuum paying no attention to the other team, but I'm not going to use up valuable practice time based on the playing style of a single opponent.

As the season moves forward into the UPA Series, game planning for particular opponents can have you looking past other opponents and that is a big negative. Preparing for a tournament like Regionals certainly leads to some discussion about the teams we might play, but the double elimination format and the fact that New England has a supreme amount of parity means that we don't end up playing the teams we thought we might going into the tournament...so again, why waste too much practice time?

Last year at Nationals we really knew nothing about the three teams in our pool (UBC, Carleton, Oregon) as we had never been to a tournament with any of them and we had never played any of them. In fact, we didn't play a team we had even been at a tournament with until our 6th and final game of the tournament when we played and beat Maryland (who we had lost two twice, the second time being a 15-4 drubbing) 15-3. So, again, heading into Nationals 2008 I focused on just doing what the team could to put forth our best effort. We went in with no perceived notions about how teams played and did our best to adjust as the tournament went along. We won no pool play games but did go 2-1 on Saturday to finish in 9th.

Heading into Nationals this year we have been at tournaments with three of the teams in our pool (Michigan, UCLA, St. Louis) and have even played UCLA thanks to being able to get to Presidents Day and Centex. In talking with other people we know and having watched some games and other video I've been able to piece together things about each of the four teams (Washington being the other) we know we will play. I shared my thoughts on my initial game plan with the team and we have been working on skills specific to the teams we know we will match up with in the past couple weeks. Having the players thinking about each match up will hopefully have them more mentally prepared to start games and also have them looking to make adjustments or observations independently of coaches as the games and tournament progress. I have never taken such an aggressive approach to preparing for a tournament and am interested to see if knowing and talking about things prior to the tournament will help us in anyway.

We are the 18 seed out of 20 as we get ready to head to Columbus. Teams will be looking past us and rightly so. I'm just looking to put forth the best effort we can and see how we stack up with the best of the best.

We'll see how this works out...