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One year, while I was coaching at Fresno State, we were going through a rough patch and needed something to get us going.  We had good personnel, but really had two players who stood out.We had noted several years earlier while watching Virginia Tech win the NIT with Bill Foster as coach, that we really liked the secondary break they ran.  We called Coach Foster, and asked if he would be willing to share it with us, and he obliged.

“Yankee,” as he called it, was designed to get the ball in the hands of your two best players early in the possession on every trip down the court.  It is a very simple set of actions, but with precision execution, can be devastating to a defense.  He took us through the in’s and out’s of Yankee, and we decided to use it.

We had a 5 day break from games, and used that time to install the new secondary.  After the break, we won 11 in a row and came one field goal away from winning the league.  We went on to beat BYU and USC in the NIT, but ended up losing to Kansas State. Installing Yankee to complement our “2-Game” had turned our season around!  We believe Yankee will benefit you in the same way, and have diagrammed its basic initial actions below:

Yankee1

  • Frame 1 – 1 enters the ball to 2 up the sideline.
  • Frame 2 – 2 swings the ball to 4 as 5 screens 3’s defender. 5 looks to seal defender with a foot in the lane.
  • Frame 3 – 1 and 4 set a double on the weakside for 2 as 3 and 5 set up the 2-man game.
  • Frame 4 – If 5 can’t get position, 3 can drive to the basket as 5 slides up the lane.

We used this secondary break with great success the rest of my career, and found that it greatly enhanced our “2-Game” offense.  We will be explaining Yankee in detail next week, broken into two parts.  First, we will discuss the “Boss Man” theory (the Boss Man is designated in the above diagram by the “3”). The last part will take you through options against a Zone and several “Specials” you can add.