Lacrosse Defense Coaching Tutorial

Casey Bass: Today, we're lucky enough to have in front of the show Mike Butkus back, and he's going to talk with us about some defensive strategies and some checking principles, some basic techniques for younger players, who're learning how to play the game, and coaches who may know nothing about lacrosse, but are kind of thrust into coaching their kids' team. So stay tuned to ClubHouse Gas. Today, I want to talk to you about defense. Everything is score, score, score, score, score, but any coach knows, where you went is on defense. Let's talk a little about your philosophy of defense on lacrosse field. Mike Butkus: First thing we actually do is teach people about footwork in position, we don't talk about checks. There are various college programs that actually play almost a no check defense, because once they try to throw a check, the possibility of taking your body, sort of, out of position. So what we want to teach kids, especially middle school kids is, you play defense with your feet and your body and your hands not so much a stick and a check. Casey Bass: Like basketball. Mike Butkus: Like basketball, exactly. We don't have them, because we don't have that much money. You take sticks and you actually get all the handles that are broken, and you cut them off and you just put, a -- we call it a stub, and you teach people how to put a defense by just using the stub and playing defense with their hands and their body and their feet, getting to a position to stop the player as opposed to being aggressive and throwing a check and throwing yourself out of position. So that's really kind of key terms on a couple of checks and we'll show them in a second, but checks that we teach kids are basic. They are the poke check, slap check, and the lift check. I did write down a list of other checks you're going to -- this will be humorous. These are the checks that we don't teach. We don't teach the wrap check, the overhead check, the pencil check, the ice-pick check, the chop check, the ding-dong check, the tick-tock check, the kayak check, or the pedal check. Casey Bass: Kayak. Is that one like this? Mike Butkus: Well, it's kind of like bang-bang, using both ends of the stick, especially if you've got a long defensive pole like this young man here. We teach them not to do that. Casey Bass: Not to do that, that one is a pedal, I used to teach kids how to pedal, so I can do that one. That's the one thing I know about lacrosse. Mike Butkus: We do a lot of drills and transition, and what that means is anytime you have more offensive players than you have defensive players. We start versus one, versus one, defender going against one offensive player. We progress from that. We go two offensive players against one defender, so he has to learn how to bate and slide and switch and drop off. Then we go to three versus two, four versus three, five versus four, and six versus five, we go all the way up the line to meet those of the best drills to teach the concept of team defense. Defense in lacrosse, people look at lacrosse to say, this is a very strange sport. To me it's not strange at all, I've played basketball all my life. I started playing lacrosse when I was a sophomore in high school. I adapted to it very quickly, because it's just like basketball. You play team defense, you play ball side, you play help side, you slide. If somebody gets beat, you have to slide to the open land. So, we can show you a couple of the checks if you guys are ready. Casey Bass: Yeah, bring in a couple of guys, I want to look out how many get out of your way and let you have and show some of your different checks. Mike Butkus: Yeah, I need a ball. This is Ryan Brennick Meyer (ph) who is one of our top players on our middle school team. He's been playing for how many years? Ryan Brennick Meyer: 4. Mike Butkus: Turn to the side a little bit. The checks that we teach are basically the poke check. First of all, in lacrosse you're in an athletic position with your bat, it's just like playing shortstop, playing guard, playing linebacker, no difference. What you don't want to do is lose your balance or commit -- so you're using your poke check here, you're using a slap check here, and you're using a lift check here. We're just trying to lift the arm. Checks that we don't teach are the wrap checks, the over-the-head checks, the kayak checks, and a number of other ones that we don't -- Casey Bass: And you don't teach those because -- Mike Butkus: They throw you out of position. Casey Bass: To commit it. Mike Butkus: Well, yeah, we want to teach basics of defense. We work hard with Ryan, because Ryan likes to throw a lot of these exotic checks. He likes to get his hand off the stick. Things that you cannot do on lacrosse, and this is important, you can check the stick, you can check the hands as part of the stick. If I check here and I make incidental contact, even if I make incidental contact in the helmet, they won't call that, but if I check like that, that's a slash. If I check like that, that's a slash. If I check like that, that's a slash. So a lot of the things that appear to be dangerous are illegal in lacrosse. You can only check the stick or the hands as part of the stick. If there is incidental contact, they won't call it. If you wind up, especially in the middle school, and swing, referees are told to call it. Casey Bass: Keep the kids safe. Mike Butkus: That's exactly right. Casey Bass: That's what we talked about. Well, thank you so much Brennick, we appreciate it, have a good practice so they don't work too hard. Coach, thank you once again, ask him to do it for us today. We'll see you right back here tomorrow for another great edition of ClubHouse Gas.