Hello!
My name is Dave Johnson.I attached this to give you more background information so you can make a more educated decision on what you are looking for in a summer basketball program.
A little bit about me. I used to be the Head Coach at De Pere from 2001-2009 and then again from 2013-2015. My strengths are developing players and creating an overall program from 3rd grade to varsity. My overall record at De Pere was 181-34. This had everything to do with the quality of players we had in our program and little to do with my X’s and O’s. I realized early in my career that even if I did a great job of game planning for teams, we had a hard time beating anyone with better players than we had… Because of this, I knew early that I need to develop players if we were going to be successful year in and year out.
I took this same philosophy with me when I created Legends. Our main focus is to make girls better players. We don’t focus on “winning games” in the summer. Our focus is providing workouts and practices that are developed around individual development and not team development. Being a head coach, I strongly feel that girls need to work on their individual games in the spring, summer, and fall. In the winter (during the season) is when you develop team skills.
We have a Varsity Coach at nearly every level in our program. Our practices are VERY GOOD because of this. Our staff has completely bought in to the “player development” philosophy. Thus, our practices are 80-85% individual work on offensive and defensive skills that they can use anytime they step onto the floor. Throughout the summer, we teach 1-on-1 footwork, reading their defender and cutting accordingly, reading their defender when receiving a screen, man-to-man pressure defense, playing “fast” with the basketball in transition,…all things that they can take back to their school teams and be successful.
We also do workouts year-round with our kids. Our staff does workouts in the spring and fall with girls in our program. These workouts are completely designed to make girls better offensive players.
The biggest difference between Legends and other programs is the philosophy of “individual vs. team”.Most programs spend almost all of their practice time preparing to win games in the summer. They practice multiple zone defenses, set plays, patterned offenses,…We just believe it is more important to focus on individual development, which is what most varsity coaches would wish for their players in the summer.
The last step in our philosophy is to make sure we attend tournaments and showcases that allow girls in our area to get exposure to college coaches. We try to provide an opportunity at a low cost for girls to achieve their goal of playing at the next level. We play in 5 tournaments in the summer with an option of 7 total tournaments. All of these tournaments are well attended by college coaches.
To show you our programs success, here are the numbers from the past two years:
This year: we had 1 team and 6 out of the 10 players are going to playing college basketball
Last year: we had 1 team and 8 out of the 10are currently playing college basketball this year
I know this is a lot of information, but just wanted to show you the difference between what we do and what you might get from another program. If you have any questions, feel free to give me a call (606-8521) or email me back.
Thanks!!!
Dave Johnson