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.