#1 OLE MISSs HEAD COACH USES LESSONS LEARNED FROM COACHING GIRLS HIGHSCHOOL BASKETBALL An Unlikely Blueprint new york times feature two days ago nytimes/2014/10/22/sports/ncaafootball/hugh-freeze-coach-at-ole-miss-follows-an-unlikely-blueprint.html?_r=0 ha! (Ole Miss hands down has the best defense in college football so far this year) excerpts “I didn’t really know anything about the game of basketball. So I had to get out there and learn the X’s and O’s. But you still have to find ways to motivate and teach.” The basketball gym became a laboratory for Freeze. He experimented with strategies. He was drawn to the unconventional. In the early years, when the team lacked depth, Freeze would often swap his lineup every two minutes — five players in, five players out — so he could apply a relentless full-court press. Although the wholesale substitutions might have looked strange, they wore other teams out. By creating chaos on defense, Briarcrest was able to produce better shots in transition — in some ways, the basketball equivalent of a no-huddle offense. “I didn’t know much, but I knew how to teach them to play hard defense,” said Freeze, now in his third season as Mississippi’s coach. “That’s what we built the whole thing on. And we tried to control tempo. At memphis Briarcrest High, he said, he had the good fortune to coach many excellent players who went on to play in college. But he also needed to get the most out of his reserves. “In high school you’re going to be depending on kids who may not be the most talented but need to play with an enormous amount of heart and passion,” he said. “Sometimes I think college coaches who have always coached blue-chip level talent don’t quite have that experience.” The job came as something of a surprise to Freeze, who was in his first year at the school as a teacher and assistant football coach when he was asked to take over the program. The team had seven players. And while Freeze had played basketball as a three-sport athlete in high school, he was essentially starting from scratch as a basketball coach. “Ground zero, man,” he said. Freeze conducted some research. One of his first calls was to Kevin McMillan, who was then the coach at Millington High School, a top team in the Memphis area. McMillan, who is now the coach at Tennessee-Martin, said he was surprised to hear from Freeze, since they barely knew each other. But Freeze had questions. “He basically said, ‘What do I need to do to win championships?’ ” McMillan recalled. When McMillan and Freeze got together, McMillan cracked open his playbook, sharing his 2-2-1 full-court press, his substitution patterns and his offensive sets. Freeze wanted to know if he ought to treat the girls any differently than he treated the boys on his football team. Absolutely not, McMillan told him. “They’re athletes,” McMillan said. “Don’t even act like they’re different.”
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 11:41:32 +0000
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