Marina's Shift Spreadsheet for the '06-'07 season...

One of the most useful tools we as a coaching staff utilized during the season was our year to date shift spreadsheet. Over the course of our 27 game season, we amassed nearly 900 shifts. Every one of those shifts were logged by minutes played and given a plus/minus based on the scoreboard.

The net benefit of this worksheet was it allowed us the ability to look at shift times per group and compare those to the plus/minus numbers. One of our challenges as a coaching staff was to gauge shift length as it relates to optimum productivity. Converting what Grinnell and Redlands did in terms of shift times was a tough thing to determine. Because we were playing 20% less than the college guys/gals do(on a smaller court no less) we thought it may behoove us to keep shifts in the 1:15-1:20 range.

What we discovered was, the shifts that were closer to a minute in length ended up being our most productive shifts. Certainly, there were some longer shifts that resulted in good plus/minus numbers but on the whole, it was patently clear...the shorter the shift the better off we were.

Without the benefit of tracking the shifts, we as a staff may not have been able to make the necessary adjustments to our shift lengths. If we decided not the track our shifts, we may never have fully understood the relationship between shift length and our optimum productivity. Really, the adjustment only amounted to 10-15 seconds, but it made a HUGE difference.

As you are trying to implement the system and working on your shifts, give some serious thought to developing a method to track your teams shifts in order to maximize your teams productivity. I've attached our '06-'07 Shift Spreadsheet for your review.

06-07 Marina Shift Plus Minus Chart

It might look a little like chinese at first...but it is pretty simple. I tried to include as much info in the spreadsheet as a I could. The headers are pretty straight forward...OB indicates "on the ball", UP indicates "right and left flanks"(note there are 2 UP's...the first UP on the spreadsheet is ALWAYS the PG), INT indicates "interceptor" and DEEP indicates "deep man on the press". The number underneath the position headers is the players #.

Click the comments link at the end of this post if you would like post any questions or discuss this issue further.