High school coaches get four seasons with an athlete. This may seem like plenty of time, but in this time an athlete must learn and practice the fundamentals and style of play before he or she can execute these skills at the Varsity level. For this reason, feeder programs are imperative in the world of high school sports to developing a stronger program.
Nearly every sport at LZHS has a feeder program of some degree. However, the basketball program has increased its involvement with their feeder program, LZ Hoops, since the arrival of Varsity coach Billy Pitcher three years ago.
The LZ Hoops program is a four year program for fifth through eighth graders. As it is the official feeder program to the high school, the majority of the players at the high school come from the Hoops program.
Over the past three years, the high school and Hoops program have become more involved with each other. Pitcher has worked to make changes that enhance the relationship so that the transition from middle school to high school basketball is smoother.
“I let them have their own tryouts and pick their own teams. We do have a clinic before each season where their coaches meet with our coaches and we talk about our own ideas and strategies as well as things we would like to see them doing,” Pitcher said. “We talk about different plays, drills and go over tips for them, and then during the season, per IHSA rules, we are unable to have any contact with them so I can’t do a clinic or anything, so what we do is hold a clinic for the kids before our own season starts.”
These clinics further assist the transition because the Hoops coaches know what the high school coaches are looking for as far as fundamentals.
“We mostly just talk about fundamentals because what we do in high school is change our offensive play style based on personnel, so we don’t want them getting fixed on any certain style,” Pitcher said. “What we expect out of them coming into high school is being able to dribble left, dribble right, and being able to make layups with both hands and then defensively what we expect out of them.”
Dan Marshalla, freshman, was a member of the LZ Hoops program since sixth grade prior to playing on the freshmen basketball team this winter. Marshalla feels that the Hoops program prepared him for high school ball.
“I feel like the focus of eighth grade hoops wasn’t to win as much as get kids ready for high school ball. We learned the basic format of the high school offense and defense so when we got to the high school we didn’t have to learn anything new because we had already had experience with the way the high school coaches were looking for us to play,” Marshalla said. “We also practiced in a similar format to the high school teams’ so that took away a lot of the confusion because most of us [former LZ hoops players] already knew what was going on for the most part.”
On top of working on fundamentals and style, Pitcher works with the Hoops program to enhance the comradery of Lake Zurich Basketball as a whole through program building events and outings.
“We have an ‘LZ Hoops’ night where we have the Hoops guys come out to one of the Varsity games and they all get in for free, and usually we will have the seventh grade teams play a scrimmage during the sophomore half time and then the eighth graders will play during the Varsity half time. It’s just a really good experience for them to be there,” Pitcher said. “Another thing we do is bring them up to the Bradley Center in Milwaukee. They will play during our half times as well and then we all go out to dinner as a program and after that we all go back and sit together to watch the NBA game, sixth graders through Varsity. It’s really is a good thing both for the program and Lake Zurich basketball as a whole.”