How Does Your DOFT Match Up With What You Want?

The "DOFT" is something I thought of randomly today and decided to share. DOFT is just acronym for the things you work on in practice every day. The letters DOFT stand for:

Defense 

Offense

Fundamentals

Transition (both offense and defense)

These are the basic categories anything you do in practice can be put into. The amount of minutes you do for each one is the "score" of that letter. For instance if I spent 50 minutes in practice on fundamentals, my "F-Score" would be a 50. To look at my "F-Score" for a week I would simply add up all the "F-Scores" for the week. I don't have conditioning on there because for me conditioning happens all through practice, I don't condition without a ball. 

I think it is important to look at your DOFT numbers for a given day, week, month, and/or season to see if the number align up with your philosophy. If you are a "defensive coach" yet your O-Scores are much higher than your D-Scores there is probably a gap between your philosophy and execution of that philosophy. 

I also think they are numbers that can be helpful if you are struggling in a given area. Let's say for the last couple of games your offense has not been executing like it should. You go back and look at your O-Scores over the last two weeks and notice that you really haven't been spending much time on team offense the last few weeks and that is the problem. At the same time,  if you may go over the O-Scores, see they are where they should be that gives you two different avenues to explore: 1. your guys just are not executing and you need to may more attention to detail in practice or 2. you are not focusing on the right things in practice. 

You can also use DOFT scores to see what individual teams need. Going back to offense again, maybe mid-season you notice that your teams perform best on offense when their O-Scores are at or above a certain point - and you need to spend that amount of time on offense. It can help you adjust year to year to account for the different personalities of individual teams from year to year. 

Also, when you get your scores over a period of time, you can divide them by total practice time and get the DOFT Ratios. Then you can see what percentage of your time is spend in practice in each area, on average. It again allows you to better align philosophies with your practice execution and planning. 

As with anything on this blog, none of this is going to blow you away and make you say "WOW AMAZING IDEA, CAN'T BELIEVE I EVER COACHED WITHOUT THIS"! That's not what this blog is about. But at the same time, it's something a little different. It's an easy tool you can use to analyze what you are doing in your daily practices and what effect it is having on the court.