I’ve always wanted to grab my alma mater in a world and coach it for the long term. The opportunity and timing finally enabled me to do so, so here I am in Iba.  I doubt most will find anything of interest or value in here, but if it helps new coaches (either as instruction of what to do, or what NOT to do...) then so be it! Everyone else is welcome to ignore it at their leisure :)

First day on the job, first step — assessing the roster. There’s six open scholarships that need filled, so I’ll be able to put my stamp on things quickly. Unfortunately, that also means that cutting obvious weak links from the roster is not an option. Thus, I’m stuck for at least one year running a press defense with a couple folks who sport defense ratings in the teens. Ouch! Somehow, I don’t see this going very well.

We’re thin at experience at the guard positions, so that was an obvious focus for recruiting. I decided to grab three guards, including one JUCO that I could plug in immediately, a small forward and two post-type players.

From this effort came the following recruiting class:
— William Roberts (509, jr.) is my JUCO grab who will start immediately at SG. The speed isn’t quite where I’d like, but with an ATH that’ll hit mid-60s, a DEF that’ll go into the 70s and high potential on the PER, this is certainly a functional two-year plug-and-play grab.
— Kurt Jackson (438, Fr) might morph into a mirror image of Roberts but has better upside as the ATH-SPD ratings could be 75-60 or better by graduation. He’s got some rebounding ability. The DEF won’t go quite as high as Roberts, but he’ll be salty by his senior year as a press defender.
— Russell Beck (454, Fr) will start as a SF and will probably stay there with poor BH and PASS numbers. The LP and PER are both high-high, so if the speed really spikes he will be a formidable scorer by graduation. I won’t rule out some spot time at SG in his career.
—Thomas Hall (405, Fr.) is an odd player that I took a flyer on. Listed as an SF, he has REB and PER numbers that are both low potential and an LP rating that’s high, but starts at 10, so it won’t grow very fast. So why did I grab him? Well, his BH and PASS numbers, both of which begin at average/above-average for D3 ball, are both high-high potential. He’s also high in ATH and SPD, so I’m talking a likely 55-65 ratio there by graduation at minimum. Hall could make an intriguing “point forward” as that all spikes. It was just too intriguing to leave on the board. He could redshirt to give it time to grow.
— Anthony Townsend (445, Fr.) has significant gains to make in ATH and LP and could push 70 on DEF by graduation. I wish he’d had average rather than low SPD potential, but he’ll still make a solid PF for the system I run.
— Steven Nelson (408, Fr.) will probably redshirt this season as I try to avoid a future where half my scholarships are open the same year. He’s a high-potential REB, DEF, SB, LP and PER (and high FT potential too). I’ve got enough depth at the post that Nelson can afford to use the year to focus on rebounding, footwork and LP while boosting his Off/Def IQ.

Good luck rednu!  As a member of your conference, I will get a first hand view of your trials and tribulations.  Based on the detail in your post, I am sure you will be competing for the conference title in no time.  Glad to have you.

The above recruiting class was No. 13 in the rankings released today. Obviously that was helped by grabbing Roberts as a JUCO player, but it's still my best-ever recruiting class in terms of the rankings. Now the goal is to get them all to realize their potential over the next four years. 

Steven Nelson will be redshirting this year. He's probably the stud of the recruiting class as far as the freshmen go, so it only makes sense to allow him some extra time to develop so that he'll be of greater use as both a junior and a senior. I'm a huge fan of redshirting the star player of each recruiting class unless there's a pressing reason not to. Here, it actually helps me by assisting me in distributing players evenly through all four class years better. I'll pour as much as I can into conditioning, rebounding, footwork and LP to bump those numbers up and dream of the future. 

The biggest challenge with this team will be integrating the freshmen and figuring out how to minimize the impact of three Sim recruits that sport sub-20 defenses in a press. The latter concerns me as it's a situation I've never experienced and I'm not sure how negatively that's going to affect the performance of the press and/or the number of fouls those players will commit. Hopefully the exhibition games will provide me with a good estimate on both those fronts so I can adjust accordingly in the regular season. 

As for an analysis of the conference, Wooster looks to be a mid-table team. Wittenburg (preseason #2) is clearly the class of the league. On paper, I'd call Wabash and Grove City both slightly better, but not so much that clipping them in at least one of the two meetings this season is out of the question. Cross-division, I see four teams that I feel like I'm at a disadvantage against right now.

TEAM GOAL: Finish above .500 overall and in NCAC play. Hold onto C prestige for recruiting. 

Posted by kow555555 on 10/15/2011 12:03:00 AM (view original):
Good luck rednu!  As a member of your conference, I will get a first hand view of your trials and tribulations.  Based on the detail in your post, I am sure you will be competing for the conference title in no time.  Glad to have you.

Hey, you snared the No. 20 class kow -- might be a good thing you're in the opposite division and I'll only be hitting you once per regular season!

First non-con season out of the way. We head to NCAC play at 7-3, which is a game or two better than I expected at the break. It takes a little of the pressure off as I can now fill my goal of 14-12 by simply going 7-9 in conference play.

At the risk of jinxing myself, I've been pretty surprised at how well a team with three sub-20 defenders has been able to run a Press defense. Through 10 games, we're averaging 9.6 steals per game. I expected the low teen players to be a problem throughout the year and that simply hasn't manifested itself. Daugherty, Bush and Hill average 60.4 of the 200 minutes played each game by the team, a smidge over 30 percent. They pick up 32.7 percent of the fouls whistled...hardly significant and well below the level I expected since its an average of fewer than 2.4 fouls per player per game. They get 38.2 percent of the blocked shot production, so actually higher than their share. The pair is getting just 22.8 percent of the steals we generate, but I'll be honest, if the tradeoff to having a defense rating in the teens is a less than 10 percent increase in foul ratio and the loss of one steal or so per game, hey, that might be worth it.  Admittedly, its a small sample size, but interesting that the numbers aren't nearly as out of whack as I anticipated.

That said, I will never, ever recruit a player that has a max defense potential in the teens.

Update this!

Posted by caesari on 11/13/2011 5:00:00 PM (view original):
Update this!

We're playing our last regular-season game tonight, so I'll update following that.

We finished the regular season with a 19-7 mark after going 12-4 in conference play. We'll be a 2 seed in the conference tournament and with an RPI ranking of 77 and an SOS of 149, I'm in a danger zone for qualifying for the PIT (let's be real, I've got no feasible game plan to hang hope on against a top-10 Wittenberg program, so national tournament talk is unrealistic...). Regardless of whether we make the PIT or not, the first season here has exceeded expectations.

The difference between prediction and reality has largely been the seeming lack of influence that my trio of sub-20 defenders had on the overall team performance. Daugherty, Hill and Bush finish the regular season with defense ratings/IQ's of 15/A-, 15/A+ and 20/A, respectively. For frame of reference, my 12-man roster averages to a defense rating of 40. The defensively-challenged trio played an average of 61.1 minutes per game, or 30.55 percent of the minutes available. Hill started every game and averaged just shy of 22 minutes. He fouled out twice. Daugherty started 24 of 26 games, played just shy of 23 minutes per game on average, never played fewer than 15 minutes and fouled out of six of 26 games. Bush was largely a first-off-the-bench sub as a PF/C and averaged 16+ minutes per game, never fouling out. Overall, they produced 32.54 percent of the fouls recorded by the team this season, only slightly above their portion of the minutes played. They accounted for 22.1 percent of the steals, a ratio off from their play but possibly explained by the fact that two of the three are bigs rather than their defensive ratings. Conversely, the three recorded exactly half of the blocked shots registered by the team. Opponents are shooting 42 percent from the floor against us.

[Edit: To further mystify the situation, Daugherty is tied for fourth in the conference in steals per game...with a 15 defense??!?]

Simply put, I don't see anything in any of the numbers that I can remotely describe as a significant negative effect from having such woeful defensive numbers in a press setup, despite the fact that two -- Daugherty and Hill -- are on the floor, often together, for half the game. In fact, it's hard for me to really ascribe ANY negative effect directly to the presence of three god-awful defenders, and that's a little difficult to assimilate with the narrative I've come to believe regarding the importance of defensive rating in a press defense.

To be clear, I wouldn't want an entire TEAM of low-rated defenders, even with high IQs. This season does have me wondering though about the feasiblity of "hiding" a poor defender (or two) in a press without experiencing ill effects to the team's overall defensive performance. Should I stumble across a player in scouting with an exceptional offensive skill set (above average starting numbers plus high or high-high potential), given what I've seen this year, it would seem that's a player that's worth going after. Any offensive up-side would appear to more than compensate for the negative effect generated by the teen defense rating. Whether I'll be able to set aside seasons of preconceived notions and pull the trigger during recruiting remains to be seen...

Keep in mind, I  still consider this to be a small sample size to be drawing any solid generalizations from, but there's my observations as I wait to see who I draw in the first round of the conference tournament.

Wooster wraps up Season 1 of my reign with a 21-9 record, advancing to the second round of the PIT. This should bounce the school's prestige from C to a C+, which is always nice for recruiting purposes. Now it's time to get down to work for next season, and that begins the same way this year did, by assessing the roster:

We lose two seniors -- Walter Hill (7.3 ppg, 8.1 rpg) started every game this season at center and proved that if you have a 98 rebounding rating, it really doesn't matter if you only have a 12 athleticism. While I'll miss the rebounding, the bottom line is David Bush should fill much of that role after averaging 5.8 ppg, 5.0 rpg this season. The positive news is Hill also graduates one of my three uber-low defensive ratings, which gets me closer to my dream of no weak defensive links. The harder player to graduate is NCAC defensive player of the year, Eugene Bolds (11.3 ppg, 5.8 rpg). His 636 rating will be missed, as will the quality 26 mpg he provided.

Obviously, with those graduation losses, one Wooster scholarship for next year has been earmarked for a post presence.

On the returning front, Lester Daugherty will be back to run the point (7.3 ppg, 3.1 apg). I really hadn't planned on wanting him back due to the low defense rating, but since he fouled out in less than 1/4 of our games this season, I'll keep him around for his senior year to benefit from his IQ. Also back will be team scoring leader Charles Knopinski (11.5 ppg, 2.4 apg, 2.1 rpg) who spent the year mostly at SF due to a start promise to JUCO transfer William Roberts (6.0 ppg, 2.2 apg), who simply didn't put points on the board as well as I'd hoped when promising the start. Still, Roberts fulfilled his role this season as a functional plug-and-play transfer and will either start or see major SG/SF swing minutes as a first-off-the-bench reserve.

The player that needs to get his transfer papers in order is Truman St. John (11 GS, 5.3 ppg, 2.0 rpg). St. John started about one-third of my games this season because I needed his experience early on and was panicked about the sub-20 defenders. The bottom line though is his 13 work ethic makes him a liability. At a 471 rating, he's 10th out of 12 people on my roster. The only two guys behind him are the player I redshirted and the freshman who only saw 10.1 mpg of court time. With their off-season gains and St. John's inevitable rating plunge as he sits around eating potato chips and playing WhatIf Sports all summer, he could be close to the lowest rated returning player on the roster. As a SF with a low 30s defense and no real standout strength category, St. John offers little more than his B/B+ Off/Def IQs. Quite frankly, I can probably find a JUCO transfer with close to that IQ package and 75 more points of rating power as a Jr, or I can just go the freshman route and start someone who will be a bona fide contributor in that roster slot on his journey to stardom. The other reason I'll likely drop kick St. John to the curb is my desperate need to get some better 3-pt. shooters on the floor. I hate having a one-dimensional team and after hitting just 25.3% from behind the arc this year, we NEED a sharpshooter.

So, the recruiting season looks like 1 center, 1 high-perimeter SG/SF type and, hopefully, one "best available player" 'ship if the recruiting budget and available recruit base allows for St. John's release.

Improvement tracker

(numbers are start of season - end of season - rating after season rollover)

Daugherty     523     566     566
Roberts          509     574     583
Bush               555     595     610
Knopinski      494     521     523
St. John          452     471     471
Townsend     445     489     496
Hall                405     443     445
Jackson         438     496     510
Beck               454     522     530
Nelson          408     441     439

The off-season report has a few eye-openers. Most notably, someone must have warned St. John that his future on campus was under review. Despite a 13 WE, he didn't lose rating points in the off-season. Which is more than I can say for 40 WE redshirt freshman Nelson, who slid back two points. The redshirt was thus worth a 31-point gain and an IQ advancement to B- in off and def. The 15-point off-season gain by Bush was nice, but not many of those points found their way into athleticism, so he's still going to be limited. Jackson's 14-point gain is fairly significant to see between the freshman and sophomore years.

very informative. What were your total ppg for/against, and how did you shoot from the field?

Posted by caesari on 11/30/2011 11:10:00 PM (view original):
very informative. What were your total ppg for/against, and how did you shoot from the field?

This might sound odd, but I honestly didn't pay that much attention to it since the team was a mashup of Sim-recruited players and incoming freshmen that I was playing with lower IQs than I'd like. We averaged 69.1 ppg...probably gave up about 64-65. Our shooting from the floor was probably in the low-46 percent range. Spent most of last year just trying to focus on the effects of the defense ratings on things.

They're signed. They're sealed. And best of all, they committed to campus with nearly 30 percent of my recruiting budget remaining. It's the Season 54 scouting class. Let's meet them: 

-- Derrick Reiner (424, Fr) was, in our opinion, the No. 2 big man in the state of Ohio that we realistically could have gone after. Since No. 1 was scooped pre-recruiting by a Division II Sim and the post was a big need area for me, I moved in a hurry to get him considering, hoping that if I got my name on him, nobody would try fighting me for someone 70 miles from campus. He's not perfect -- his defense starts low and will only end up in the upper 30s or low 40s, which isn't as high as I'd like. He compensates for it with a rebounding total that could rise into the 90s with his high-high potential and shot blocking ability in the 80s (also high-high). LP, Passing, Stamina and FT are also high potential, but unknown if high-high or "just" high areas. If the LP potential is high-high, Reiner could be a stud.

-- David Montero (432, Fr) came to my attention while investigating a D2 point guard that had dropped down. I didn't like the potentials on the point guard after FSSing Georgia, but Montero was one of two SF's from the state that jumped out. A high-prestige D3 moved on the other SF the cycle after I messaged both, but Montero grades out at a B- or C+ in the press and fits my program better, so it was win-win hopefully. If nothing else, it saved me from splitting hairs and deciding which one I wanted more. Montero is a 5-high category recruit with big upside in Ath, Def, Per, BH and Passing. If the Per rating flares, he'll be wonderful...if it's "just" high, I have an athletic, quick SF whose rebounding will be low 30s with a defense in the 50s at graduation and at worst a 60/60 BH/Pass split. 

-- Raymond Moore (437, Fr) caught my attention early and dropped midway through. There was some drama in recruiting him as he told me I was his No. 1 choice in a scholarship message but for whatever reason never appeared as considering me. I finally had to kick him a promise for 10 min/game to get him to actually show me as a school choice, so he's not a redshirt option. Although Moore lists as a SG and I'd actually been thinking of his as a possible SF candidate when investigating, his future with the Fighting Scots became clear after FSS. He's a PG. He'll never be a scoring threat, but he's high or high-high in Ath, Spd, Def, BH and Passing. So by graduation he should look like: 70/70 Ath/Spd, 60+ Def and a 60/70 BH-Pass minimum split. I like. 

Provided the head coach doesn't come along and screw things up royally, all three should easily top 600 in overall rating by graduation. I was able to cut Truman St. John from the roster, as hinted at earlier. Having a solid keeper in my backyard really helped make that roster move possible, and it will be a beneficial one in the long run. By season's end, Montero (if he doesn't redshirt) will be almost the same, if not higher, than what St. John's rating would have been. 

Those who read my assessment a few posts up will note I did not land the exceptional sharpshooter I had said was a priority. After looking at things again, it was an even bigger priority to address the impending graduation of my good BH-Pass combo players. Moore and Montero were both signed to provide some solid numbers in those categories so that I'm not as desperate to recruit one or more PG's at the end of this season. The sharpshooter will have to wait and I'll simply hope I improve over last year's dismal behind-the-arc number. 

Looking over the conference for the new season, we had an influx of two human coaches, so we're now at 7 human, 5 Sim in the NCAC, which is nice. It does, however, mean I have to evaluate 3 more games for human tactics vs. the Sim default strategy. I'm clearly still chasing a nationally-ranked Wittenberg program in my division and I won't have nearly the growth on my sophomores as I'll need to try and chase the big dog off the porch in my division. We'll make our goal finishing at No. 2.

The non-conference schedule has some tough human teams as well as an array of winnable Sim games. Had I known we'd go two deep in the PIT last year, I'd have scheduled harder, but since I didn't, we're stuck with what we have. The added human coaches will make conference more challenging. I'll call "par" for the year 15-11 or 16-10...hopefully that's enough to hold onto a C+ and maybe slip back into the PIT. Then again, maybe I radically underestimated things and we'll hit 20 wins again :)

[Edit: David Montero has happily accepted a redshirt for the upcoming season, which was fine since I'd been having trouble getting him minutes in the exhibition season. I'll set most of his practice minutes to levels that will simply maintain categories at their current level and look to build his defense and perimeter as much as possible while also doing my standard 15 minutes of conditioning with him. We'll run an 11-man rotation and hopefully the redshirt means Montero will be A+ in the press for most of his senior season.]

End of the non-conference season and Wooster has put together an 8-2 record with a 34 RPI. I once again lowballed my expectation, evidently, as I'd expected to be in the 6-4 neighborhood here. We're not winning anything very flashy (avg. score 74.4-66.0), but we're putting W's on the scoreboard and that's what they pay me the big bucks to accomplish. The team defense has been good thus far, holding opponents to 41.3 percent from the floor, under 28 percent from the arc and producing 11.3 steals/19.2 turnovers per game.

Offensively, one of the keys to the season was getting David Bush to pick up the slack of my departed post players from a year ago. Thus far, he's filled that role, averaging 12.2 ppg and 7.9 rpg. Anthony Townsend is complementing him with 8.1 ppg and 5.5 rpg as PF, so my starting post slots are scoring better and producing just half a rebound less than we were last year. That's the good news. The bad news is we have no depth as neither of the freshmen playing behind have shown much of a desire to put points on the board yet.

Out front, I've slid Charles Knopinski back into a starting PG role. His scoring line has dropped to 7.5 ppg, but he's complementing that with 3.6 assists and 2.3 steals per night. More important, the shift has allowed me to keep Lester Daughtry's horrific defensive number on the bench for 4-5 minutes more than it otherwise would be (although at 1.5 steals per game, I'm wondering if the teen rating is really that bad...). The change has been made possible by the scoring outburst of Kurt Jackson (9.6 ppg) who has proven to be an accomplished performer in the SF position so far. We're still unsettled at SG and I'm sure the early conference season will contain some continued experimentation as I look for the most efficient pairing of players.

I expect a tougher conference campaign with more human coaches, but with a 34 RPI, our focus will definitely be on trying to earn some sort of postseason tournament appearance, either the NT or the PIT (probably the latter...but we'll try hard for the former). Overall, so far, so good in Year 2.