They shoot, they score
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| The Princeton Tiger basketball team and cheerleaders pose along side a pair of mustangs at Browning Ford for preseason team posters distributed by Central Bank to promote the upcoming season's schedule. The kids voted on the theme and logo, including the mustangs, letterman's jackets and the theme of “One Team, One Dream.” The picture was taken by Mike Vaughn. |
PRINCETON — The 2007-08 season just got over with and Princeton Tiger coach Jesse Brandt was already looking ahead to the next season.
He would be returning eight juniors plus two sophomores from an 8-17 varsity squad to go with a mix of an incoming junior class that fashioned a 22-0 record at the sophomore level. There would be a lot of bodies to fill just 15 slots and a lot of talent to fill 32 minutes each night.
How would he find the time for everyone?
He can thank his new bride, Kellie, in part for the answer.
With so much talent up and down his roster, Brandt decided to implement a rotation system, shuffling players in and out of the game five at a time in groups of five every two minutes, ala hockey style.
Now the joke can be, "I went to a basketball game and a hockey game broke out."
It’s a system similar to the one his wife played in at Olivet-Nazarene and an off-shoot to the one David Arseneault made famous for the men’s team at Grinnell College.
“We were at Wise Guys talking about how many guys who could play and give us good time,” Brandt said. “We did it all summer long and it proved pretty effective and run with it from there.”
The Tiger coach believed the system would work well with this year’s Tiger squad because he doesn’t believe there’s much drop off in talent from top to bottom as there has been in previous years.
“If there is any drop-off, it is significantly less than any group I have had,” he said.
The best thing about the system, Brandt says, it keeps everyone on the team interested and makes practices very competitive.
“Everybody’s going hard all the time. They know they’re vying for time,” he said. “You’re usually set at this time of season what your rotations are, and you really don’t have all 15 guys staying with it.”
Brant’s line changes has raised an eyebrow or two from the many coaches in the stands. Brandt believes having as much success early in the season as the Tigers had, made it an easier sell, but admits it would have been a tough sell had they struggled.
When they won the Kewanee 2A Holiday Tournament over Christmas, PHS junior Scott Roseberg, who had been on two varsity teams with 8-17 and 8-19 records, said he liked the system, because they won more games by then than his first two teams had in the whole season.
Early in the season the PHS platoon seemed to wear opponents down and force a lot of turnovers. By this time of the season, Brandt notes most teams are handling the ball better and they’re not getting turnovers.
Streator coach Brandon Creason, whose Bulldogs played the Tigers to a 54-51 loss earlier this month, was asked if the line changes wore his team down. He said, “how tired can a get a 16- and 17-year-old really get?”
The founding father of the platoon system, Grinnell’s Arseneault, produced an instructional video in 2004, “Running to Win,” explaining his unique substitution style, which emphasizes shooting the ball every 12 seconds and incorporating as many as 16 players per outing.
Grinnell takes the substitutions to an extreme, subbing every 40-50 seconds and shooting constant threes and presses fullcourt the whole game.
The Olivet Nazarene women's team tweaked Arseneault's system to run what they call their “run and gun.”
Brandt really doesn’t have a name for his system, but says calling it a hockey style is probably the best thing for it. The only difference is you have to wait for dead balls to sub in and out, whereas in hockey you can sub on the fly.
It has produced a unique quality in that not one player is averaging more than 8 points per game, but there are nine Tigers scoring between 4.5 and 7.7 points. Opposing teams don’t really know who to try to stop because they’re busy trying to figure who’s in the game.
Everyone has their opinion on the success of the line change, whether it’s been beneficial to the success of the Tigers, or held them back, keeping some players from reaching their full potential.
Even the coach’s wife has told him he needs to start to shorten the rotation some.
Brandt has been a little more selective to his rotation of late. He has started out with the three rotations to get everyone in the game, but has not continued the full rotation like he did earlier in the season.
The time and score of the game matters more than the rotation.
The coach says he’s not sure how he will implement the line changes this week during regionals.
“At least 10 guys will play, for sure, a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if all 15 play,” he said.
In any case, Jim Smith should keep his pencil sharpener handy at the scorer’s table.
As far as the future, who knows? Brandt has not looked that far ahead to next season, but knows he will face similar circumstances. He will be inheriting another talented Kittens squad that posted a 27-2 record this year, the most by any sophomores in school history. He said he will see how the sophomores progress, and who’s all coming out.
For now, he’s taking it one step at a time, or in this case, perhaps five steps at a time.
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