December 8, 2011

Diary Series: Matt O'Brien, Asst. Coach - Vermont

Early in the Season: What are you learning about your team?

As a program, we really value the first few months of the season.  Now that we are in the full swing with games twice a week, you begin to learn a lot about your team.  Many aspects of the game that you stress in practice are tested. 

Game slippage, a common problem when your team is not truly translating situations from practice to the game, can creep into these early season games.  It is critical that as a coach you limit the amount of game slippage that your team has.  We use a lot of game film to show our players the mistakes that are made during competition and they are usually surprised that they did something so uncharacteristic. 

While trying to reduce the amount of game slippage we try to challenge ourselves as much as possible in our non-conference schedule.  The America East is a one-bid league with the winner of the conference tournament going to the NCAA tournament (the league is continuing to get better and hopefully at some point in the future that can change).  Being that we are a one-bid league, being prepared for the league is extremely important.  This is another year where we have a difficult schedule with a number of regional powers.  While we may have some difficult tests, this formula has proven to get us ready for league play.  A challenging early season schedule has been a staple of the Vermont program.

It is very important that your team is learning from the early season wins and losses.  We are constantly stressing what we can take away from each game we play.  We had a difficult loss against a very good Long Island University team and they exposed some defensive lapses.  We were able to correct them and get a great win over Old Dominion University just before Thanksgiving (the turkey tasted good the next day). 

We opened the regular season against University of South Florida and lost a very close game at the buzzer.  It was a game that could have created a hangover effect on our team in our next game.  We had to play on the road a couple of days later against a talented but young Dartmouth team.  They jumped on us from the start but we were able to respond due to the test that USF gave us in the previous game.

As much as you love to dominate a team and come away with a win, you probably do not learn much about your team.  We want to test ourselves, limit our game slippage, and develop to the point where we are hitting our stride at the right time. 

As a team we have learned from the wins and the losses with the goal of becoming the best team we can be throughout league play and into the conference tournament. 

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