A small world … PointGuard College

Last summer I crossed paths with a lot of coaches while I was travelling through Europe visiting U19-World Championship for men and women. One of those is Sefu Bernard, a coach from Canada who was working with the National Teams. We had lots of interesting conversations and have kept contact through e-mail since then. He has a great blog, The LLaBB, with thoughtful articles and interesting links. Anyway, he told me about this camp, PointGuard College (PGC), they have in the states during the summer. Here in Sweden a young athelete asked me about this camp, and that she was thinking about going there. About the same time when I was taking with Sefu about it he told me a Swedish girl, Maria, wanted to come to the camp. This made me really happy, that two basketball people I knew about crossed paths, especially as basketball is one of the biggest sports in the world. I spoke to Maria some before the camp and also heard her speak so highly about it afterwards I asked here to write a report from the camp from her point of view. I’m very happy to be able to post her report on my blog.

Thank you Maria and good luck with your basketball!

My PGC experience

Name: Maria Gultekin
Born: 1990
Club: Eos Lund, Sweden

Besides practicing basketball I found my summer-schedule pretty empty so I started to search for different basketball camps on the net. My ex coach, Arvid Hemberg, told me about a camp called PointGuard College and when I was checking out the site I realized that this camp was the right one for me.

Do you want to develop as a human? Do you want to develop as a PG? Then PGC (Think the game) is the right camp for you to attend. Now let me share a brief summary of my experiences at the college.

PGC is a camp where you learn how to read the game of basketball. To make the days you have to be more mentally prepared than phsyically. We had 1 1/2 hours lecture before every gym session and coach Sefu Bernard & Lyndsey Medders did a great job teaching the game throughout the days. When it comes to the leadership part I got reminded and learned about a lot of things that every PG should know and found the following most obvious for a leader.

• Reminders: as a pointguard you shouldn’t have the luxery of only caring about yourself.
• Positive comments: a PG should always encourage teammates.
• Control of the game.

When it comes to the individual part I would like to line up a few things that every PG should add to their game if they already haven’t.

• PEEK: you have to keep your eyes up and see the whole court + the basket everytime you get the ball in your hands. My coach, Fredrik Joulamo, used to remind me of scanning the court and players before I get the ball which is very effective.

• Hunt the paint: PG’s should eagerly hunt the paint which means to have the ability to penetrade to score or find the pass.

• 2 feet finish: A dynamic jumpstop means control, it eliminates your turnovers, increases your passing options since you can rotate and if you put an arrum to it you willz even be able to get your defender in the air and finish with contact. One feet finish makes it easyer for the defender to time in the block and once you are in the air you’re out of control.

• E2: Engage 2 defenders and find the open player. As a great penetrater you have to have the ability to beat your own defender, engage one more and find the open player for the shot.

Knowing the game is not enough for beeing a coach. To have the ability to TEACH the game is an important quality for every coach.

I recommend every athlet to attend PGC.

/Maria

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