I am the coach of a D- base prestige school and recruiting can be tough. I am currently running a press but the lack of player talent makes my teams foul prone. Can you be successful running a zone at the D1 level? Thank you for any input.

YES!

NO!

maybe?

it depends.

Posted by texrangers19 on 9/12/2014 9:15:00 PM (view original):
I am the coach of a D- base prestige school and recruiting can be tough. I am currently running a press but the lack of player talent makes my teams foul prone. Can you be successful running a zone at the D1 level? Thank you for any input.

yeah, for sure. i think zone is WAY underutilized in d1. it has applications all across d1, but especially in low to mid d1 (i just won my first zone title a couple seasons ago, at high d1, but i think its slightly better at low to mid d1 still).

the thing that is great about zone is you can run a much smaller rotation. if you are running a normal tempo zone without fastbreak, an 8 man rotation is plenty (assuming you structure it right, 3 guards, 3 bigs, 2 sfs, or similar - the 3 backups could be guys who play pg/sg sf/pf and c, or whatever, just needs to be an even rotation). this allows you to take one of two strategies. in the first case, you take multiple walkons per season intentionally, which gives you a way bigger budget. for example, you can have 5 openings and need to sign 1-3 players. that is a heck of a lot easier than needing to go 5/5 for press - instead of 15k per player, if you sign say 2 on 5, you have 37.5k per player, assuming no bonus money. this should presumably let you search for and go after significantly better players.

the other way you can play it is to try to fill your spots, or to come close. then, you can really lean heavily on your upperclassmen. often in low and mid d1, the players don't start very good at all, they are not at all competitive - but if you do well in recruiting, your juniors and seniors can compete with players on big 6 teams (not the top bcs teams with ridiculous amounts of talent, but still). with zone, you can lean really hard on your upperclassmen, have your starters playing 30mpg in close games, which means 75% of your time is coming from your top 5 players - which is pretty damn good! that means you can probably lean on some juniors and sophmores for the other 25%, and not play freshman at all - which makes it easier to be competitive and make the NT.

IMO, zone very well could be the best defense for low to mid d1. 

gillispie1 offers a lot of good insight.......I appreciate your time and effort with helping others learn the game.

I love zone at D1

Posted by thewizard17 on 9/13/2014 12:27:00 AM (view original):
gillispie1 offers a lot of good insight.......I appreciate your time and effort with helping others learn the game.

thanks!

Thank you very much for the advice gillispie.

Posted by gillispie1 on 9/13/2014 12:03:00 AM (view original):

Posted by texrangers19 on 9/12/2014 9:15:00 PM (view original):
I am the coach of a D- base prestige school and recruiting can be tough. I am currently running a press but the lack of player talent makes my teams foul prone. Can you be successful running a zone at the D1 level? Thank you for any input.

yeah, for sure. i think zone is WAY underutilized in d1. it has applications all across d1, but especially in low to mid d1 (i just won my first zone title a couple seasons ago, at high d1, but i think its slightly better at low to mid d1 still).

the thing that is great about zone is you can run a much smaller rotation. if you are running a normal tempo zone without fastbreak, an 8 man rotation is plenty (assuming you structure it right, 3 guards, 3 bigs, 2 sfs, or similar - the 3 backups could be guys who play pg/sg sf/pf and c, or whatever, just needs to be an even rotation). this allows you to take one of two strategies. in the first case, you take multiple walkons per season intentionally, which gives you a way bigger budget. for example, you can have 5 openings and need to sign 1-3 players. that is a heck of a lot easier than needing to go 5/5 for press - instead of 15k per player, if you sign say 2 on 5, you have 37.5k per player, assuming no bonus money. this should presumably let you search for and go after significantly better players.

the other way you can play it is to try to fill your spots, or to come close. then, you can really lean heavily on your upperclassmen. often in low and mid d1, the players don't start very good at all, they are not at all competitive - but if you do well in recruiting, your juniors and seniors can compete with players on big 6 teams (not the top bcs teams with ridiculous amounts of talent, but still). with zone, you can lean really hard on your upperclassmen, have your starters playing 30mpg in close games, which means 75% of your time is coming from your top 5 players - which is pretty damn good! that means you can probably lean on some juniors and sophmores for the other 25%, and not play freshman at all - which makes it easier to be competitive and make the NT.

IMO, zone very well could be the best defense for low to mid d1. 

Just saying....couldn't the playing time thing apply to all three levels? Freshmen generally aren't that good at ANY of the levels, so the PT thing wouldn't necessarily be confined to low D1, you could lean on your upperclassmen at all three levels using this logic. Or am I missing something about D2 and D3?

sure, you could apply the same logic anywhere. the question was about d1, so thats what i was speaking to, but in general, i think zone gets a bad rap across the board. i do think the best application is low/mid d1 where even if you try to fill up, you can have a bad round and end up with 2-3 open spots fairly easily. zone will absorb that well. in d2/d3 its easier to count on filling all your spots, or at least just taking 1 walkon, it seems to me. been a while since i played there but i think that is still true. 

I think the zone at D2 and D3 is less effective, in the way coach billy g is talking about, because the talent disparity is not as bad in those divisions.  but it's been awhile since I have seen a school employ it by really maximizing upperclassmen and limiting freshmen.

Posted by gillispie1 on 9/13/2014 3:15:00 PM (view original):
sure, you could apply the same logic anywhere. the question was about d1, so thats what i was speaking to, but in general, i think zone gets a bad rap across the board. i do think the best application is low/mid d1 where even if you try to fill up, you can have a bad round and end up with 2-3 open spots fairly easily. zone will absorb that well. in d2/d3 its easier to count on filling all your spots, or at least just taking 1 walkon, it seems to me. been a while since i played there but i think that is still true. 

Fair enough.