Basketball Drills:

Offense and Defense

A Bibliography Plan

Vincent Lee

LIS 601, Fall 2005

Dr. Diane Nahl

Table of Contents

Introduction. PAGEREF _Toc120358804 \h 3

Topic and Scope. PAGEREF _Toc120358805 \h 3

Audience. PAGEREF _Toc120358806 \h 3

Style and Organization. PAGEREF _Toc120358807 \h 4

Search Strategy. PAGEREF _Toc120358808 \h 4

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) PAGEREF _Toc120358809 \h 4

UH Hawaii Voyager Library Catalog. PAGEREF _Toc120358810 \h 4

Hawaii State Public Library System Catalog. PAGEREF _Toc120358811 \h 5

ERIC.. PAGEREF _Toc120358812 \h 5

MasterFILE Premier PAGEREF _Toc120358813 \h 6

Ingenta. PAGEREF _Toc120358814 \h 7

JSTOR.. PAGEREF _Toc120358815 \h 7

Physical Education Index. PAGEREF _Toc120358816 \h 7

World Book Online. PAGEREF _Toc120358817 \h 8

LexisNexis Academic. PAGEREF _Toc120358818 \h 8

Journal of Physical Education. PAGEREF _Toc120358819 \h 8

Academic Search Premier PAGEREF _Toc120358820 \h 8

Google.com.. PAGEREF _Toc120358821 \h 9

Conclusion. PAGEREF _Toc120358822 \h 9

Source and Subject Heading Relevancy Ratings. PAGEREF _Toc120358823 \h 10

Sample Annotations. PAGEREF _Toc120358824 \h 12

General Improvement PAGEREF _Toc120358825 \h 12

Specific Areas of Improvement PAGEREF _Toc120358826 \h 13

Introduction

Topic and Scope

Basketball, invented by Dr. James Naismith in 1981, was created for the purpose of keeping young men busy during the long New England winters.  Naismith, associated with the YMCA, wanted a sport that the men could play in a walled-in gymnasium.  With a peach basket nailed on to the wall and a soccer ball to shoot through it, the game was born.  The first official game was on January 20, 1892, but with the help of the YMCAs across America, many more games were being played around the country as it quickly became the most popular indoor sport.[1]

The sport evolved throughout the 1900s, including the creation of the actual basketball that we see today, the increase of the size of the basketball court, and the improvements of the original rules and regulations written by Naismith, and it continues to evolve today.  Amateur organizations were established for students of all levels from elementary to college in the United States.  The best male players could even play in the professional league known as the National Basketball Association, or more commonly known as the NBA.[2]  Today, the best females can compete in their own professional league, the Women’s National Basketball Association, or the WNBA.  Also, with international players becoming more reputable as their level of play increases noticeably in the Olympic games and with the fairly recent boom of international players being signed on to NBA teams, the sport is becoming even more popular throughout the world.

Because basketball has become more popular over the years and because of my own personal interest in the sport, I wanted to focus this bibliography plan around a topic that would be helpful to those who want to become better at the sport.  I wanted to find sources which contained information pertinent to techniques, drills, and strategies for improving the skills necessary for success as a basketball player.

Audience

As a fan of the sport, I put together this bibliography plan for those individuals with similar interests who want to improve their skills but are unsure how to.  Also, it is for those who would like to share that information with other people, as a coach would with his players on an amateur or professional organization.  While my original intentions were for the techniques, drills, and strategies in these sources to be geared towards the male, United States basketball player, I felt that the female and international versions of the game were similar enough that I could include books relating to those topics as well.  Also, female and international players would be able to find these sources for improving their own game.

Style and Organization

All cited sources are formatted using Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.[3]  The plan includes a description of the strategy used for each resource and a chart displaying relevancy of search terms.  Following that are samples of annotations of different sources I found to be useful to the topic.

Search Strategy

My basic strategy in performing the searches was to look for the controlled vocabulary (CV) specific to that resource.  If no CV was to be found, I relied on the subject headings that I found in the book of Library of Congress Subject Headings[4] or I used natural language (NL) that I thought would be relevant to the search.  The order that these resources appear are in the order that I had done the searches.

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)

The subject headings and call numbers I found in the Library of Congress Subject Headings that I thought would be useful to help me get started on my search were:

BASKETBALL was too broad a term to be helpful to my searches so I only used this term when the other terms listed were not helpful, and most of the time it was in combination with an NL term.

UH Hawaii Voyager Library Catalog[5]

The CV terms for this resource were the ones listed in the LCSH, so there was no need to search for any type of thesaurus.

Performing a search for “BASKETBALL COACHING” yielded 51 resources, many of which were relevant to the topic.  The currency of the books I found helped me to decide which ones I thought would be the most useful.  These included Ken Atkins’ Basketball Offenses and Plays[6],

Chip Sigmon’s 52-Week Basketball Training[7], and Morgan Wootten’s Coaching Basketball Successfully.[8]  All three sources were published within the last five years.

I performed searches using “BASKETBALL DEFENSE”, “BASKETBALL OFFENSE”, and “BASKETBALL TRAINING” but many of the results were also listed under “BASKETBALL COACHING” which is not surprising.  There were a few that were not listed such as Ralph Pim’s Winning Basketball: Techniques and Drills for Playing Better Basketball.[9]  This one actually surprised me because I felt that this source should have been listed under “BASKETBALL COACHING.”  I did additional searches for “BASKETBALL REBOUND” and “BASKETBALL SHOOTING” but those provided no sources, and a search for “BASKETBALL RULES” did not yield any relevant sources. 

I tried to see what other subject headings would be useful that I may have missed from the LCSH book by looking at the different results from the “BASKETBALL COACHING” search.  Pete Carril’s The Smart Take From the Strong: The Basketball Philosophy of Pete Carril[10] was also listed under “BASKETBALL PHILOSOPHY”, and I thought that it might be useful, but that was the only source listed in the Hawaii Voyager Library Catalog.

Hawaii State Public Library System Catalog[11]

I performed a quick subject browse in the HSPLS Catalog to find relevant terms.  The terms for this catalog were similar to those found in the LCSH although a few were missing. 

With that in mind, my assumption was that with a search using “BASKETBALL COACHING” as a subject I would have the best results.  I definitely had the most results with 57 and many of them were relevant, including Jan Lahodny’s Competitive Drills for Winning Basketball[12] and A. L. Walker and Jack Donohue’s The New Option Offense for Winning Basketball.[13]

As in the searches using the Hawaii Voyager Catalog, when I did a search for “BASKETBALL OFFENSE” and “BASKETBALL DEFENSE,” I did not find many differences in the set of results.  However a search for “BASKETBALL TRAINING” did give me additional books that were not found when doing the first search.

I decided to try “BASKETBALL RULES” but it was irrelevant.  I decided to throw that term away from future searches.  The other terms I had found in LCSH earlier were not in this resource’s CV so I avoided those too.  There was a new term that I thought about using but it did not have many sources affiliated with it and that was “BASKETBALL TECHNIQUE.”

ERIC[14]

I did a quick search in the thesaurus to see if I could find any CV terms relevant to my topic.  “BASKETBALL” was the only relevant term.

I attempted to search with the term “BASKETBALL” as a SU descriptor just out of curiosity.  The results were as I expected seeing as how I thought my search term was too broad to be of much use.  There were a lot of irrelevant sources.  In fact, none of the results on the first page were relevant.  I needed to find appropriate terms to use with “BASKETBALL” so quickly browsed through a few of the results to find any relevant terms.

One result seemed very promising because it was the book I found using the Hawaii State Public Library Catalog as mentioned earlier in this plan.  A. L. Walker and Jack Donohue’s The New Option Offense for Winning Basketball was listed under “BASKETBALL” but also “TRAINING OBJECTIVES.”

I revised my search to include the new term and the results were somewhat relevant to my search, although they were not very current.  Maryalyce Jeremiah’s Coaching Basketball; Ten Winning Concepts[15] yielded another promising search term, “TRAINING METHODS.”

With another revised search, this time using “BASKETBALL” and “TRAIN*” as SU descriptors, I was able to find a few sources that were relevant to the topic, including a paper written by Elizabeth Erffmeyer entitled Increasing Free Throw Accuracy Through Behavior Modeling and Goal Setting.[16]

This source was actually better than I had thought it would be.  I didn’t think there’d be as much relevant articles as I had found.

MasterFILE Premier[17]

I tried to find the CV for this database and I believe that they were all located under the Subjects link.  Most of the CV terms were similar or the same to those found in the LCSH books.  The subjects, or thesaurus as I will refer to it, already lists the references related to the subject heading that you want.

For example, I looked for “BASKETBALL COACHING” and it listed academic journal references, newspaper references, etc.  Most of these references were not relevant.  The one I found to be the most relevant were the periodical references.  Of the 170 periodical references listed under “BASKETBALL COACHING,” I was able to find a few that were relevant to the topic, including Keith Cooper’s A Complete Package to Beat the Zone.[18]  The thing I liked about this database was that most of the articles were available in full text.

Searching “BASKETBALL DEFENSE” and “BASKETBALL OFFENSE” as SU subject terms yielded several relevant results, many of which were not listed under “BASKETBALL COACHING.”  Surprisingly this time the terms “BASKETBALL REBOUND” and “BASKETBALL SHOOTING” were successful in providing me articles relevant to my searches.

The important thing to watch out for with this though is to make sure you look at periodical references and not newspaper references.  Newspaper references were not helpful at all to my searches because they referred to specific basketball games that occurred in the NBA or the NCAA, but not to any strategies.  Although there were several periodical references that were similar to those newspaper references, I was at least able to find a few that talked about strategies, techniques, and drills in general.

Ingenta[19]

Ingenta has no CV, so I had to use NL terms to see if I could find any relevant material.  Out of curiosity, I did a quick search for “basketball” to see how many articles were relevant.  The result was 194 so I wanted to narrow that down so began to think of relevant terms.  The most obvious term being the truncated “coach*” as well as “offense” or “defense.”  Basically the CV terms I had pulled from LCSH.  I was able to narrow the results to 25 by using “basketball” and (“coach*” or “offense” or “defense”) but found no relevant articles.  I also attempted “basketball” and (“technique” or “drill”) but did not do any better.  I went back to the beginning and started to browse through some of the 194 articles to see if I could find some terms that would help me.  After viewing four pages of results and not finding a single article relevant, I determined that this database is not a very good source for articles relevant to the topic.

JSTOR[20]

There was no CV in JSTOR so once again I had to find NL terms relevant to the topic.  I used the same terms that I had tried on Ingenta.  JSTOR did not allow me to truncate my terms.  I did a quick search for “basketball” to see how many sources mentioned basketball and there were 1569 results.  I used the following terms in addition to “basketball” to help reduce the results: “coaching,” “offense,” “defense,” “drills,” and “techniques.”  None of the combinations helped me find any relevant sources.  Most of the sources related to basketball and academics.  I do not think this database is a very good source for my topic.

Physical Education Index[21]

Using the thesaurus found in this database, I was able to find several terms that showed promise.  Most of the CV were similar to those found in LCSH.  However, there were a few additional that I thought I could use as well.  “BASKETBALL (DRIBBLING),” “BASKETBALL (DRILLS),” “BASKETBALL (FREE THROWS),” and “BASKETBALL (PASSING)” all seemed relevant. 

Using the descriptors “BASKETBALL” and “COACHING” did not seem very helpful.  I browsed through some of the articles and did not find much relevance.  I decided to use the more specific terms that I had found in the thesaurus.  Most of the more specific terms, such as “BASKETBALL (OFFENSE),” “BASKETBALL (DEFENSE),” etc. were somewhat relevant but there was still much irrelevancy.  The best search results I was able to find were those found when I used “BASKETBALL (DRILLS).”  Many articles listed were relevant, including D. Moss’ Strength: Bull-in-the-Ring Medicine Ball Drill.[22]

This database is a relatively good source for articles related to the topic, but there are also a lot of sources that were only somewhat relevant or not relevant at all.

World Book Online

By doing a search for “basketball,” I was only able to find one entry relevant to the topic.  Most of the articles were of specific basketball players important to the history of the game.  However, in that one useful entry, there’s a very basic overview of the game.  Additionally, there are basic offensive and defensive strategies mentioned such as dribbling and trap defense.  You get a general idea of how to perform these activities, but you’re not told how to improve your skills.

LexisNexis Academic[23]

I wasn’t able to find much in this database.  There was no CV and many of the NL terms I attempted to use provided articles on specific teams, but not much on how the teams develop their skills.  Some NL phrases I used were “basketball coaching,” “basketball offense,” “basketball defense,” and “basketball drills.”

Journal of Physical Education[24]

I was not able to find a thesaurus for this database, and began by doing an advanced keyword search for “basketball” and “coaching.”  I was able to locate an article that was useful, Chen Shuhua and Xu Yonggang’s An Analysis of the Teaching and Training of Offensive Techniques for Non-Ball Players of Basketball.[25]

Browsing through some other somewhat relevant articles I found some keywords that I thought might help in the search.  Some terms I tried in combination with “basketball” were “technique,” “drill,” “offense,” and “defense.”  I was successful with “technique,” not very successful with “drill,” and somewhat successful with both “offense” and “defense.”

This database seems to be a decent source for information on this topic.  You might need to overcome the broken English that many of the citations are written in (due to bad translation), but once you get over it, you will be able to find many sources on ways to improve your basketball playing skills.

Academic Search Premier[26]

The CV listed under subject terms are very similar to those found in LCSH.  After performing searches for “BASKETBALL COACHING,” “BASKETBALL OFFENSE,” and “BASKETBALL DEFENSE” as SU Subject terms, I was able to find a few relevant articles among those that talked of specific games, including John Kimble’s An Out-of-Bounds Continuity from the Baseline.[27]

“BASKETBALL REBOUND” and “BASKETBALL SHOOTING” did not provide as much information but those terms were still somewhat useful.

The information retrieved from this source is similar to that found in MasterFILE Premier and I believe a few of the articles coincided with those in Physical Education Index.  I think this is a good source of information.

Google.com[28]

Not surprisingly, with the popularity of basketball, there are so many resources available on the web that provides tips on how to improve your game.

Google does not have any CV so I used the same NL terms as I had been using the entire time: “basketball coaching,” “basketball offense,” “basketball defense,” “basketball rebound,” and “basketball shooting.”

For every aspect of basketball, there is a website that’s suitable.  A very general website that has been around for a few years is Powerbasketball.com.[29]  It focuses on different aspects of the game whether you’re looking offense or defense improvements.

Conclusion

At  first glance, it was unbelievable how many sources there were with information on improving skills as a basketball player.  Of course, once I really thought about it, it wasn’t all that surprising since the sport has become so popular, with many people watching and playing it everyday. 

What I take away with me from this assignment though is the idea that it is a very important skill to know how to dig through all these somewhat relevant sources to get to the really good ones.  It is important to know about controlled vocabulary and natural language because it makes it that much easier to find what it is you want to find.  It is also important to plan a search strategy rather than to dive right in like I did at the beginning.  I found myself confused at times when doing this.  I also think I should have taken better notes because I had to recreate some of what I did and it made it harder to write out the plan.

I’m not very satisfied with the way some of the articles were classified in some of these databases.  I often wondered why a certain article was put under a particular subject heading.  For example, the articles on specific basketball games that were so irrelevant should not have appeared so frequently with some of my searches.  I feel that it creates more of the “trash” articles that further impede a searcher from finding what it is he wants.

There is much that I found about offensive and defensive basketball strategies that I haven’t used before.  The information I discovered to be the most useful were ways to improve my muscle strength, speed, etc.  I am going to be examining a few of the resources I discovered more thoroughly so I can find out more on improving my body and my game.  

I find that I am lacking in some areas of searching, but I know that I can only improve if I keep sticking to what I learned regarding this process and using it.  It’s very much like playing basketball.  It does no good to only read about ways to improve your skills; you need to keep practicing it until it becomes second nature.

Source and Subject Heading Relevancy Ratings

The terms listed below are in the order that the searches were performed.  When possible, I tried to use strictly controlled vocabulary.  However if controlled vocabulary was nonexistent or not helpful, I used a few natural language search terms.

Sample Annotations

General Improvement

Lahodny, Jan. Competitive Drills for Winning Basketball. West Nyack, NY: Parker Pub. Co.,

1986. [796.323 L]

Introduces the idea of competitive drills, which are drills used in practice sessions that are in the form of a game or challenge, used to motivate players to enjoy practice.  In the first few chapters, Lahodny explains how to successfully incorporate the philosophy of competitive drills into a normal practice routine.  The rest consists of suggested drills along with diagrams.

Sigmon, Chip. 52-Week Basketball Training. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2003. [GV885.35.S54 2003]

A week-by-week guide on exercises that will help to train your energy systems so you perform well in basketball.  It continues into more detail on how to do each exercise.  There are weekly schedules as well as pictures and illustrations that will help to make you a better basketball player.

Wootten, Morgan. Coaching Basketball Successfully. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2003.

[GV885.3.W67 2003]

Authored by one of basketball’s finest coaches, this text targets basketball coaches.  Covers topics such as developing a philosophy, motivating players, offensive and defensive plays, and evaluating players and programs.  Includes helpful diagrams and figures.

Specific Areas of Improvement

Atkins, Ken. Basketball Offenses and Plays. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2004.

 [GV889.A84 2004]

Focuses on offensive basketball plays, ranging from man-to-man offenses to inbound plays.  Included are diagrams demonstrating how to perform each play, many that have been used by winning teams.  Coaches and players will find this resource useful in improving their offensive game.

Walker, A. L. “Lee” and Jack Donohue. The New Option Offense for Winning Basketball.

Champaign, IL: Leisure Press, 1988. [796.323 W]

Reintroduces the option offense, originally thought of in the 1950s, but adapted to rules of the 1980s.  Goes into the details of the three series that make up the new option offense.  Included are diagrams that illustrate how to practice the offense as well as a glossary.