Coach‘s Corner appears throughout the season at Outside the Huddle. The author Bob Lapadot coached for 28 years. He spent the last 12 years of his coaching career as the girls basketball head coach at Garrett, where he went 193-91 and won three Sectional titles and one Regional title.
Conference games are usually the most important games on your schedule because there is always a trophy on the line when you play them. The boys teams are in the heart of their conference schedules right now and the girls teams are ready to clinch conference championships.
The fact you play these games to win a trophy and hang a banner, automatically makes them special and therefore garners a lot of your focus and attention.
When you play in a huge conference, like the NECC with 12 teams, where you play over 50% of your entire schedule against conference teams, each game holds considerable weight. Our number 1 goal every year was to win the conference championship. If that’s your goal, then your main focus will alway be your conference schedule, but your non-conference games can greatly enhance your chances of winning those conference battles.
What is the goal of the non-conference schedule? Your non-conference schedule can really be whatever you want to make of it. Sometimes you try to schedule winnable games, or 50/50 games, maybe county rivals, and other times you will go out and try to schedule the best teams you can find to make your team tournament tough at the end of the year.
Not only is who you play in the non-conference taken into consideration, but also the timing of those games are important. Coaches may try to schedule Friday/Saturday back to back games to mimic a sectional semi final/ final format. Others may try to get into a one day tournament that mirrors the semi state, two games in one day, format. The goals for your non-conference schedule can definitely depend on the make up of your team. I certainly tried to do a little bit of all of those things with our schedules over the years. In 21-22 we scheduled at Noblesville, at Warsaw, at Bellmont, Kokomo, and Norwell because we knew we were very talented and we wanted as many tough tests as we could get.
12 of our 22 games each year were going to be conference games, so we tried to make the most of those other 10. We always wanted to win every game we played, but non-conference games always gave us a chance to work on our team and work on things we needed to do to compete for championships through conference play and in the post season. Last season’s sectional championship had a lot to do with the games we played in the non-conference part of our schedule. Things we learned, even in defeat, against teams like Norwell, Bellmont, and Northridge we used to win the sectional.
Conference games are always very difficult, and our conference has been really, really good the last few years. Nobody has a better scout on you than a conference team. We played some conference teams 3 times a year with the regular season, conference tournament, and sectional.
At one point, we played Angola 6 times in 2 years. Seeing a team that many times definitely has its advantages and disadvantages. In conference games, you know the coaches better, you know more about the players, and the atmosphere in the gym is always great. A lot of times your biggest rivals are conference opponents and that makes the games more special. Because of how well you know your conference opponents it can be easier to prepare a scouting report on them. But, you’re also aware that they know everything about you.
We would change what we called our OOB plays against conference teams because we knew they would know them all. Sometimes we had to change the plays altogether because of how well teams knew us. We never did this in non-conference games.
Everyone has different goals for their schedule and changing the schedule can be very difficult due to multi year contracts with teams. How you put your schedule together each season will help define your approach, especially to non-conference games. I think every coach wants to win every game, but winning those games that can earn you a trophy mean a little more.
I truly believe that your non-conference schedule can have a big impact on those trophy games that come during your conference schedule and in the state tournament.
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