Re-Thinking D Mids and LSMs in Lacrosse Drills at Brown
Lars Tiffany is one of my favorites of all time and after this last podcast my head is still spinning. OK, at the time of this article they have dramatically changed the offensive culture at Brown this season to fast and faster. For example at the time of this article after six games in 2015, they were averaging 51 shots a game.
Having a successful coach so willing to look at new ideas could be a great article in and of itself, but in this case it is the practice modifications that have me so impressed. The renewed focus is on transition. After we start with a transition theme, how do we as coaches continue to make the drills directly emulate game scenarios? That certainly rings close to home for me eh? Especially with the game continuing to change, and how we modify ‘personnel’ decisions and substitutions. And with a renewed focus comes some deep thinking about how these changes need to be integrated into lacrosse practice plans and drills.
The concepts and philosophies we discuss below definitely have a higher impact for transition teams that love to get it up and down, however, there is also a logic in the way they run the drills that can help all of us.
In a nutshell, lets start with the observations from Coach Tiffany… “In a recent game (a very close game incidentally) we noticed that our D Mids played over 40 minutes, while our offensive middies played 10-15 minutes.” For many of us this means that what we thought were our better lacrosse players playing offensive Middie, they may not be on the field as much as we would like them to be. And breaking it down it might look like this…”