O’Connell teaches advanced methods in hoops camp

Published Jun 17th, 2008

By Mario Sarmento
SPORTS EDITOR

In his first few years as Saint Andrew’s School boys basketball coach, John O’Connell would usually head back to his native New Jersey for the first part of summer to play hoops with his old friends in the Jersey Shore Pro League.

“Then I realized the only way we’re going to get better is to start working at it in the summer, so if I was going to hang around and work with my older guys during the summer I was going to work with my younger guys also,” O’Connell said.

Thus the seed was sown for the Saint Andrew’s School Point Guard and Perimeter Play Basketball Camp, now in its 18th year at the high school.

From 6-9 p.m. this week and again from Monday-Thursday, players ages 10-15 learn the advanced principles of guard play from O’Connell, who was a guard himself at Rutgers University in the late 1970s and early 80s.

O’Connell’s only requirement besides age is that the players have some organized basketball experience.

“A beginner would not enjoy this,” he said.

“It’s just too far over their head. As a matter of fact, the younger kids don’t get it at all. But my point to their parents when they ask, I say ‘look, understand it’s going to be over their heads. A lot of the skills will be advanced. But if they hear it now, they will catch on to it sooner than later.’”
About 60 kids attended O’Connell’s four-day camp last week.

The first hour is spent working on ball-handling and passing skills, with more wrinkles added to those drills each night.

The idea is to give the kids things they can work on at home to improve themselves. The second hour, which O’Connell calls “lecture and lecture application,” involves breaking down the game with short lectures and drills that highlight what O’Connell has discussed.

In the final hour, the kids play games where they are supposed to apply what they covered that day in a five-on-five situation.

Some future Scots attended the camp, both to improve their skills and to get a handle on how O’Connell teaches.

One is 14-year-old Gary Gladden, an incoming freshman who was the starting shooting guard on the Don Estridge High Tech Middle county championships team this past season.

Gladden said he signed up for the camp because “O’Connell is a good coach and I know that he’ll help us go a long way.”

He added that he’s learned how to better handle the ball, improve his court vision and play a sounder game on the perimeter.

Another future Saint Andrew’s player, 13-year-old North Broward transfer Barry Babbitt, participated in the camp after receiving a personal call from O’Connell imploring him to attend.

“I’m starting to break a lot of my bad habits, I’m getting better at my ball-handling drills,” Babbitt said.

One of those habits was a tendency to rock the ball in his hand during a layup attempt, allowing a defender to slap it away. Babbitt also learned how to slap the ball away from offensive players and how to spread his fingertips on the ball when shooting and dribbling.

“I’ve gotten better every day,” he said.

O’Connell has an additional teaching tool in the NBA Finals, and he tells the kids to watch the series when they go home and observe the players’ fundamentals.

Babbitt said he’s learned a lot from watching Kobe Bryant, the League MVP and Los Angeles Lakers star.

“Kobe does it a lot with the fingertips (spread), he’s a very good shooter,” he said.

Babbitt and Gladden plan on returning to the camp next year; Babbitt in fact will be back this week.

“It’s a great camp,” he said.