• Casey is in his sixth season at St. John's, and in his
fourth season as an assistant coach after serving as St. John's
Director of Basketball Operations for two years. He is responsible
for recruiting, opponent scouting, player development, on-court
instruction and practice and game preparation.
• Prior to arriving at St. John's, Casey spent three
seasons as the Central Connecticut State University Blue
Devils' top assistant coach and recruiting coordinator. He was also
responsible for game preparation, player development and
on-the-floor coaching at CCSU.
• A 1986 graduate of Western Connecticut State University
with a B.S. in business administration, Casey also earned his
master's in education administration from Central Connecticut State
in 1993. He played basketball for four seasons at Western and
was a two-time team captain
NCDS: Chris Casey, Asst. Coach - St. John's ("Adjustments in Practice Structure")
By: Chris Casey, Asst. Coach - St. John's
Every team is different year to year and even within a season.
We went in to our conference schedule in early January feeling
pretty good about our defense. Our pressure was forcing turnovers
and getting us offense off of our defense, teams were shooting a
low percentage against us from the floor and from three-point
range, and we were outrebounding opponents. We had stressed these
areas since our Canada trip in August.
At the start of the conference schedule, our defense became
sporadic. We were stopping teams - but not consistently over
the course of a 40 minute game. It got us off to an up-and-down
conference start and then resulted in a losing streak. We
decided to make some changes in our practice structure. Since most
of our defensive struggles appeared in the second half of games (we
had five games with first half leads and lost), we put our
defensive and rebounding drills at the end of practice. We made
them all competitive with some type of score being kept. We
also lengthened the period of time we used for defense. Any
loss in a competitive drill resulted in some type of running.
Suddenly, our defense re-appeared. We've held teams to low shooting
percentages and are on a two-game win streak. Hopefully the
adjustment will continue to pay dividends. As a coach, it's
important to understand why your team is not playing well and
structure practice accordingly.
On a side note, about two weeks ago at one of our home games, the
microphone went out on our national anthem singer at the very
beginning of the anthem. The entire crowd joined in and sang the
anthem. It was a great moment - talk about great defense, our
entire crowd had the singer covered!
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