The New Frontier Of The Offense

Фото: The New Frontier Of The Offense

There’s hardly a college coach who would willingly give up his trademark offense, his personal game system that made him famous and successful. However, there has been an important new innovative change that has yielded remarkable results for some talented coaches, who were willing to break from the ways that they used to coach. Vance Walberg is the person responsible of this change. John Calipari, a successful coach at the University of Massachusetts (one NCAA Final Four semi-final appearance in 1996, which was a loss to his mentor, Rick Pitino), compiled a 189-70 record and Coach of the Year (1996) honors before moving on to the New Jersey Nets of the NBA. Calipari returned to the college coaching, taking over the duties at the University of Memphis in 2001. His teams have racked up a 269-95 record and in 2008, Memphis made it to the NCAA championship game, losing to the University of Kansas in the final.

During a lengthy chat over dinner at a restaurant with coach Walberg in Memphis, and after having watched for a week his practices, coach Calipari was attracted by now famous “Attack-Attack-Skip-Attack-Attack” offense, and wrote his notes about it on a dinner napkin. This high-octane offense he described was developed by coach Walberg when he coached in high school and later at Fresno City College in California. Calipari was impressed by the offense, so much so that he began using it with his Memphis team.

Now known as the DDM attack (DDM stands for Dribble-Drive-Motion), it’s an offense used by hundreds of high school and college teams in the United States, as well as by the 2007-2008 NBA champion Boston Celtics.

Walberg, now an assistant coach at the University of Massachusetts, worked with Calipari to help him understand the nuances of the offense. Once Calipari saw the beauty of the system, and how it opened up the game for talented basketball players, he completely changed his offense at the University of Memphis. Walberg and Calipari now give clinics around the United States to explain the innovative DDM system to other interested coaches.

The DDM system entails getting to the basket under control. With DDM, you will not see screens. Rather, one internal player will take his spot on the weak side of the low post to open the court as much as possible so another player can penetrate with the ball.

The essence of the game is to always keep central lane free of players so that players on the perimeter can play one- on-one and penetrate to the basket. In case of defensive help, they kick the ball out and start all over again.

The good news that I have to report is that coach Vance Walberg has now released a double DVD detailing all you need to know about his popular DDM offense. “Mastering the Dribble Drive Attack Offense,” Walberg’s 256-minute opus includes game films, diagrams and complete explanation of his unique attack. It can be ordered on the Internet at http://www.championship-productions.com/cgi-bin/champ/p/Basketball/Vance-Walberg-Mastering-the-Dribble-Drive-Attack-Offense_BD-03058.html.