EASTBAY BULLDOGS BASKETBALL

We have always prided ourselves on being what we call "a teaching program".   Well going forward, we are taking that a step further.

When players come to play with us, we will ask each parent and player, "What are your goals?  How good do you want to be?".  To me, the possible answers are:

• Hope to play in College
• Hope to play in HS
• Hope to make a CYO A team
• Hope to play MS Basketball
• Want to learn & play and get a little better while having fun
• Just want to have fun

Now understand, there is no wrong answer.  Whether you want to play in college or just want to play and just have fun, it is OK.  But based on your answer, we can tailor your child's program accordingly.  Don't get me wrong.  We will never promise a player, "do this and you will play in HS or College".  If someone tells you that, they are lying to you.  To me, college basketball is about 80% body and natural athleticism and 20% work/skill level.  HS is about 50/50.  (By the way, I think the NBA is about 98% body and athleticism and 2% skill.  There are a lot of highly skilled guys out there that just don't have the body for the NBA.)  So to get to those levels, you have to have the body (big with long arms), the coordination (great hand - eye coordination) and the athletic ability (run fast, jump high) but if you have that, we can help with the skill set.

Anyway, if your a player that wants to play in College or HS, we are going to put you with our more serious kids (our ALPHA program).  But we are going to ask more of you.  What I mean is, we have had over 60 players come through our program and go on to play in College.  So we know what those guys did to get there.  Along with the body and natural athleticism, they all worked on their game literally every day.  So we have designed a workout book for our players to copy what our most successful players did.  Here is a link to the workout (under the Handouts link to the left) :

//s3.amazonaws.com/my.llfiles.com/00046690/ALPHA-Workout.pdf

We will ask players on this track to do the workout at least 5 days a week (every day if possible) and log it in their workbook.  Then they will bring their books to practice to show us what they have done.  I promise you, any player that does the work will improve dramatically over 8 months.  What I am saying is, for the serious player, we will help them max out their skills set so they can max out what they were born with. 

Note, for the player that just wants to have fun and get a little better, we have a program for them too.  For those kids, they will come to practice twice a week, they will get great instruction, they will learn a ton and they will play games on the weekend.  We will teach and be positive, as we are with all our kids.  But we wont ask for as much in the off time from the player that just wants to have fun and learn.

Anyway, I am as excited about this as anything we have ever done.  We are going to start this program right now but I almost can't wait for next February to start a new year and see how good kids can get over 8 months of this expanded program, basically doing what my son and his best friend (Paul Jr & Javier, the first 2 Bulldogs) did from 2nd grade to 12th.  Thanks and I hope to see you soon,

Coach LeClaire

pgleclaire@comcast.net