Game 1: Trial by Fire

The Setup

There wasn’t one. Our first game of the season came before our first training session — no shared language, no drills, nothing taught. Just four players, a ball, and a whistle.

Two of them had played basketball before. For the other two, this was their first real game; their background is netball.

So I made it the plan. If I wasn’t going to coach anything, I could at least watch everything. What does a group of Year 4 girls do with space when nobody has told them anything yet?

What I Saw

They could all track the ball. Every one of them had a good nose for it. That’s a better starting point than it sounds — you can’t read space if you can’t follow the ball, and nobody had to be taught to look.

They stood where the defence was. The natural tendency, without exception: walk to wherever the defenders had set up and stand there. Nobody left space open. There was no concept of keeping a driving lane clear, because there was no concept that a lane was something you could protect.

Dribbling ran the game. At this age that’s normal. It also means there’s a lot sitting untouched — the gap between a team that can pass and a team that can only dribble is enormous, and passing is very coachable.

On defence, everyone went to the ball. It worked, sometimes — it produced a few steals. But it left a huge amount of space behind them, and the other team got clear lanes to the basket. They were defending the ball when they should have been defending the basket and letting the attack come to them.

The Moment

Not a single play. The moment was the arc of the whole game.

They were nervous before it, and it showed. The physicality was new — they weren’t used to the contact, and early on you could see it. But by the end they looked like a different team from the one that started. Nobody had coached them. They just played, noticed, and adjusted.

That’s the best thing I could have asked for from a game with no preparation.

What It Teaches

Every one of these defaults — bunching with the defence, chasing the ball, dribbling because it’s the only thing available — is exactly what you’d expect from beginners, and none of it is a flaw in the kids. It’s what happens when nobody has taught them that where you stand is a decision.

It’s also a clean look at what the starting point is. Spacing is the most undertaught fundamental for this reason: left alone, kids walk toward the ball and the defence, because that’s where the action looks like it is. The bunched picture in Same Game, Bigger Pitch isn’t a hypothetical — I just watched it happen.

And the improvement across the game matters most. These players can learn from what they see. That’s the whole bet this season is built on.

Next Session Focus

One thing: leave the space open. Before any plays, before passing technique, before defensive rotations — get them to feel what it’s like to stand somewhere useful instead of somewhere crowded, and to notice what that opens up.

Passing and defending the basket come next. But the first question for session one is simple: where is the space, and are you standing in it?

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Part of the 2026-27 season. This is the first entry — the baseline everything else will be measured against.