GoDuke Weekly l www.GoDuke.com/gdw
Fiv

e Things Y

ou Should Kno

w ...
13
Five things you should know... about
full court pressing
with Jasmine Thomas, Women’s Basketball
1. We stress energy.
The first thing that we always stress is energy. You have to be
active and ready to play full court and constantly trap, and without
energy you can’t do any of that.
2. Communicating together.
Playing off of each other is important. The press has a lot to do
with scrambling. You can only scramble and matchup on the
press if you are playing off your teammates and covering for
each other. Tons of communication is involved. That is probably
the most important thing because you see your teammates do-
ing one thing and you need to feed off of them intuitively, but
you also have to hear them say where they are going so you
know where to go.
3. Pressure.
Something we always talk about is pressure. We want all-out
pressure on the ball. We want active hands and really just try
to disturb them. What goes along with that is getting in passing
lanes.
4. We run more than one press.
We do mix it up a lot. We have two main zone presses and we do
them full and half court. We have a 2-2-1 full court, a 1-2-1-1 full
court, we can run both of those as a half court set as well. Then
we do a full court man with a post on the ball and a full court man
with a post off the ball. Whenever we get a steal or a fastbreak
layup we go to a full court and basically deny all over.
5. Matchups are crucial
You can disturb people with your press, but sometimes they still
get through it, and you have to find a way to matchup with the
opposing players right away out of it because we don’t always go
back into a zone. Sometimes we will go back into man defense,
which makes it difficult to find who you are guarding, but match-
ing up is the biggest thing at the end of a press.

Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14