Defensive Philosophy

3rd post of the day, no way I keep this up. 

My first thought about defense this year was that we should ignore it for the most part.  The offense is still too raw to spend time on defense.  Good defense is only going to frustrate our players who are trying to learn the offense.  But, I don't want the players to develop bad defensive habits, and it will probably also be frustrating on the offense if they show up to tournaments and the O suddenly doesn't work because the opponent is actually playing defense.

My second thought was to work on switching defense.  I think it makes the defense much better if our players are able to switch easily and effectively.  Also, learning to switch on D will do wonders for increasing our players' field awareness.

My third (and so far final) though is that switching is not the kind of thing we want to really focus on.  I'm ok with allowing switching, maybe talking about it a little, but it isn't the kind of fundamental defensive skill we want the players to learn.  Instead, I suggest we focus on two things:  force flick on the mark and play behind on the open side downfield.  This is a sound defensive philosophy, particularly on the college level where I think teams will struggle to complete lots of short passes.  This defense will encourage teams to trap themselves on the sideline.  Later, we can talk about how to defend the trap dump.  Also, this defensive philosophy is very simple, and is built around the concept of dictating where the offensive player can go.  I think that is a tough concept to teach, but in this situation, we don't really have to talk about it directly, they can just learn by doing.

I still don't want to spend a ton of time talking about defense, but this simple philosophy should improve our team defense.  We'll work mostly on marking, then just reinforce the downfield positioning in scrimmages.  We can also encourage switching in scrimmages, but I don't want to make it a point of emphasis.