http://insider.espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/blog?name=conference_voices&id=5870667Video helps the basketball star
December, 1, 2010Dec 112:32PM ETEmailPrintCommentsBy Jacob Pullen, Kansas State
AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki
Frank Martin has taught Jacob Pullen the importance of many things, including film study.
This season, Insider will feature the writing of six current NCAA basketball players, contributing their thoughts on issues facing their conferences. Kansas State guard Jacob Pullen continues the series with an explanation of how his team uses film study to gain an edge.
I'm not sure that people know how much film studying we do in basketball, they think of it more as a football thing. It's huge in basketball but I think for our team in particular. We watch tape of ourselves -- our sets, what we're doing wrong, what's working, how we're being defended -- pretty much every day before or after practice. That might run anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours depending on our last game and when our next one is. Then we also get personnel DVDs, too. Assistants will give us footage that's already cut to show you who you're going to be defending in the next game and what their tendencies are. Sometimes that's a specific player and sometimes it's the team, just to show you what they like to do against certain offenses or how they might react to what we want to do or what's been an effective way to guard them.
Let's say today is Tuesday and we're going to play on a Friday. We might start practice by watching film just of us, practice, come back and watch an hour of our next opponent's sets. The next day, the coaches might start off with tape of their plays -- what they run on specific possessions and inbounds. The next time we might watch ourselves and then after practice get into tape on individual personnel. There are times when even after I've gone home, Frank [Martin] will call me at midnight to tell me he just saw something on the tape that he thinks I should look at. He knows that I'll want to see it; that's just the relationship that we have. Then on the day of the game, there will usually be film of our opponent playing on TV while we eat our team meal. There's really a lot that we're trying to know about our next game and the coaches do a good job of pointing stuff out.
Take this week, for example. We beat Emporia State by like 20. Frank had us watching one possession over and over for 30 minutes. And when you look back at that possession, everything we did was wrong -- the forwards weren't moving up when they were supposed to, guards didn't set the screens where they should have, we weren't coming to the ball, no one boxed out for the rebound. Nothing went right. Frank kept showing it and we kept finding things we didn't do right.
The DVDs that they give me, I usually upload on my Macbook and my iPad. I always travel with both of them on the road and just watch film on the plane or on the bus or wherever. Gotta have both just in case the battery is running low on one or the other. I've been tempted to watch in class. We do watch a lot of film and I can't say for sure whether everyone on the team does or doesn't get tired of it. But I know I don't. It's so important because it really points out whether you're doing the little things it takes to win games. I didn't really learn the value of watching tape until after my freshman year. It was right after Mike Beasley and Bill Walker declared for the draft and our coaches called me into the office and started playing tape of our last tournament game against Wisconsin. They had it clipped up to show me playing defense; I was bouncing up and down, not moving my feet. There were a couple of times when my man got past me and I was just watching. I think Trevon Hughes had like 30 points on me that game [editor's note: it was 25].
That's when I realized how much you can learn from watching film. And Frank really believes in it too because the thing is, it doesn't lie. I know Texas does this too but we watch footage of our last practice before we go out on the floor for the next one. Sometimes the coaches will tell us that we're not doing something and you can swear that you were. Just pull up the tape and that settles it. If you're wrong the coaches are going to call you out in film session and you're going to have to run sprints. That hasn't happened to me in a while. There was one time during a game two years ago when we had Buchi Awaji on the team. Frank told him he wasn't cutting to the ball, wasn't making a line to the ball. Buchi argued with him during the game that he was. They went back and forth about it. When we got in the locker room at halftime, the staff had the first half already clipped. Frank bet him, he said if the tape showed that Buchi did, he would play in the second half. If it didn't, Buchi was going to be on the bench. Buchi didn't get in the rest of the game and he had to run sprints the next day in practice.
Our team definitely watches a lot of film and talking to Marcus Morris at Kansas I know they do too, but every team is different. I had a friend that went to Florida A&M and he said the only time they watched film was on the bus to their games. I got pretty close to Marcus this summer when we were traveling to different camps. It's funny because once the season starts you don't really get time to talk or stay in touch because you're just focused on your own season. There were times this summer, though, that we'd be working out and Frank would text me or call and Marcus was surprised that I call my coach by his first name or that we have that kind of relationship. Same thing with my cousin Demetri McCamey and oscar Weber, his coach at Illinois. Most times they're surprised by how much me and Frank talk or when they see him joking with us or hanging out. I know a lot of other coaches want that "call me coach or sir" or whatever relationship, but Frank has always told us that he's gonna call us by our first name and we can do the same. I think it's because he didn't come up through the system the same way as other guys. He worked with a Hall of Famer in Bob Huggins but mostly he came up coaching high school and AAU and he had it tough. We respect that a lot and it's why he has such a close relationship with our team.
Jacob Pullen is a senior guard at Kansas State. He contributes every month to the Conference Voices blog
