When You Are Not as Talented as Your Opponent on a Nightly Basis...

Sometimes as coaches we are not going to be blessed with all the race horses. Sometimes we are going to get some pigs, and some years we may even end up with all donkeys. It's the way life goes. But I think you can still be relatively successful with less talent if you can control the tempo.

I personally feel a good way to have success is to control the tempo one of two ways: speed it to crazy or slow it to a crawl. Either way you have to do something to get the other team out of their comfort zone. Grinnell College in Iowa is a prime example of this. They play so fast and out of their minds that the other team doesn't know how to react to the tempo and it often results in the opponent being thrown off. Loyola Marymount back in the 80s was another good example. On the other hand some teams take the opponent out of their game by slowing the game down. I always thought that Coach Vix from Rushford did a nice job of slowing the tempo down when it needed to be. This is how his teams often beat oppoents with more talent then they had.

This will not always work, but I think from time to time can catch someone off guard.