A Better Basketball Playbook – Linked to Your Game Video!
If you watch a lot of basketball game video like we do, you always see things you’d like to remember or share. It could be your team executing one of your inbounds plays really well, an opponent doing something you’d like to steal, or maybe even a YouTube video, Twitter post, or a FastDraw play diagram. Being able to capture, organize, retrieve and share plays, sets and actions with your coaching staff and players will make your team(s) and overall program that much better.
Hoopsalytics includes an integrated playbook organizer that can do the following for you:
- Add plays, including text descriptions, diagrams or other images, and videos from just about anywhere.
- Link to real-life examples of these plays from your game videos (via Clips & Comments)
- Categorize playbook entries as Plays, Actions, Drills, Moves and “other” categories
- Add attributes for different entries (like Man, Zone, “Need a 2” etc.)
- Assign entries to specific teams. (For example, a JV and Varsity team can share the same BLOB plays, but the varsity may have more of them.)
- Starring entries to feature them for a team (like things to learn before a practice).
The image at the top of this article shows a portion of my personal playbook. And below is a playbook entry with text, a diagram, and a video link to two live game examples.
Keep reading to learn more…
Adding to your Playbook
Once logged into your account, click Playbook at the top of any page. Then click Add to Playbook to start your first entry. You’ll see a screen like this:
You’ll want to complete the following sections to make things easier to find:
- Title: This is the name of the play/action/move/drill. It’s required. Make sure to do your best to summarize this entry.
- Coach Permissions: If you’re an Admin, you can enable or disable the ability for other coaches (non0-admins) to edit this play.
- Type (Offense/Defense). You can pick one or both. Some entries may fall under both offense and defense (especially drills).
- Category: This is where you specify whether this is a play/set, action, drill, move or something else.
- Tags: Check one or more of these to classify the entry. Note that the tags change depending upon the category. You can check one or more tags. For example, a BLOB play can be used against man-to-man, zone, or sometimes against both.
- Which Teams: You can assign a play to one or more teams. When your players log in and view the Playbook, they will only see plays assigned to their team(s). Note that you don’t have to assign a play to any team – these can be things you want to remember for future reference as a part of your personal playbook “library”. This also applies to coaches, such that they can filter on just their teams, and not others.
- Content: Here’s where you enter text describing the play, images diagramming the play, and videos illustrating the play. You can copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop image and video files into the content area, or use the Video or Image icons to upload Videos and Images.
Adding Related Videos from Clips and Comments
If you’ve created clips and comments, you can add these entries into your playbook, either as a new entry, or to append to an existing entry.
- When Viewing Clips and Comments, click Edit Comment:
- When the Edit Comment pop-up appears, click Add to Playbook, then choose an existing playbook entry, or “(New Playbook Entry)”:
This clip will appear in the playbook as a “related video”, at the end of the entry.
For new Playbook entries, you can go into the Playbook and add categories and tags as described next.
Editing Playbook Entries and Assigning Teams
As an admin, you can edit the playbook and assign teams to your plays. This is done when viewing a play:
Coaches can edit plays they have permissions to edit, and can also assign plays to their teams. Assigning plays looks like this:
Bonus: If you have multiple accounts (programs) associated with your login, you can copy plays from one program to another from here.
Filtering and Finding Playbook Entries
From the main Playbook page, you can make the list smaller by choosing tags, offense/defense, categories, teams and more. You can filter on multiple options. For example, here’s how I would filter offensive BLOB plays for my Varsity team:
You can also click on any heading to sort on that heading. For example, to sort by title, click on “Title”.
“Starring” Plays
You may have specific entries that you’d like to emphasize, The left hand column in the Playbook has a star icon for each entry. Clicking on the star will make that entry appear at the top of the list for everyone who views the Playbook.
You can also “unstar” a Playbook entry by clicking on the star icon again.
Summary
Every coach has a way to write down plays, drills and other actions they want to remember. We’ve seen some coaches use a hand-written notebook, others just write things in a Google Doc, and some use expensive, hard-to-use software to catalog their plays and sets. We’ve always thought there was a better way through technology, and leveraging Hoopsalytics’ Clips and Comments to integrate into your own custom Playbook makes for a complete, integrated and easy-to-use system.