Thinking about using Run and Jump pressure this year with my 8th grade girls. Has anyone ever used this before? I have a few manuals and clinic notes on it, so I understand the basic premises. I'm looking for anyone who has coached it and used it live, if you have any recommendations or tidbits based on your experiences.

I've had this group of girls since they were in 4th grade. We've played almost exclusively m2m the entire way, halfcourt and fullcourt. The only change ups have been to use a diamond press and 131 zone occasionally the past two years. About 4-6 of these players are going to be vying for possible varsity minutes next year when they get to high school. They are a very unselfish team, high basketball IQ and very strong all around skills.

I think they would have fun and enjoy amping the pressure up and playing this run and jump style, but I've never coached it before. I'm starting to really get into the studying and planning so if anyone has some real life knowledge they can share I'd appreciate it.

It has been quite a few years but the Run and Jump we ran was full court man to man... then in certain situations (ex: speed dribble or sideline dribble) you'd run at the player and switch.

Sound about right?

If so, have you ever run full court man to man? Our challenge is getting into it quickly and getting matched up. So we borrowed an idea from the Keith Haske system...

I assigned 2 guards at minimum and possibly and 1 on ball defender. So my guards always know to run to the elbows. And if we have an on ball defender (we don't always pressure the ball), then that person runs to the ball.

We basically start out in a zone formation and match up into man to man from there.

Otherwise it's difficult to find the player you are supposed to be guarding.

This has worked very well for us. it's starts out looking like a zone but is actually full court man to man where will will trap and rotate situationally. So if the ball is one the sideline or a good trapping spot, we'll double and rotate. Or we might just pressure full court man straight up. Looks different each time down.

Keith Haske takes it a step farther and they do run/jump, double, have wrinkles, and force more pressure. We are a little simpler and basically play full court man to man that allows players to double team if they want to. We don't really spend much time on it.

This year we'll add a 2-2-1 press so our kids learn some of the zone concepts. We won't use it much but it will look just like our man to man because we start at the elbows with both defenses. So it should really confuse the opponents... they won't know what we are running.

You might want to consider checking out the Haske system. We took several pieces and ideas from that and put it into our system. If you have questions, let me know.

We have run tons of m2m fullcourt.

I'm looking at trapping sideline dribbles and possibly jump switching middle dribbles. I think my overall goal would be to get our defenders good at leveling off a middle dribble and getting the dribbler to the sideline so we can trap it.

We will probably target our trap areas around halfcourt.

I like the idea of assigning specific players to be the front guards. We have some defenders that are better than others at leveling off dribblers, so this would allow us to put them up front and utilize that skill. And then we have others who are pretty good at anticipating the pass. I'll just have to make sure they understand it's still m2m even though you have an "assigned starting spot".