You may be seeing more sophistication unfolding in the high school basketball games you’ve been watching across Connecticut. Nothing too intricate in these early weeks of the season, perhaps, but some of it might look a bit familiar.
“We actually do have a few sets that are identical to what UConn does,” said Jason Shea, who coached Notre Dame-West Haven to an undefeated season and the CIAC Division I championship in 2024 and a recently had a 32-game winning streak snapped. “You can even see some of our actions we call ‘Husky actions.’ It is nice to have that in-state and be able to adapt it.”
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UConn, winners of back-to-back NCAA championships, has gained international acclaim for the brand of basketball it plays, with its Ivy League precision at pro speed. Coach Dan Hurley and his assistants have borrowed from the NBA, some plays from Europe. Last week, Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla, defending NBA champ, was in Hartford to compare notes with Hurley.
Connecticut’s high school boys coaches are watching and learning, too.
“As a coach, you’re always trying to pick up little things they’re doing,” said Luke Reilly, who coached East Catholic-Manchester to state titles in 2019, ’22 and ’23. “Scouting high school teams, you’ll say, ‘UConn runs that play,’ or they’ll call a play, they’re running ‘Husky,’ and coincidentally it’s their flare-skip play they ran in the national championship game,”
Stephen Bailey, coach at ECC Division II champion Wheeler High in North Stonington, also incorporates some of UConn’s set plays.
“There are a couple in our sets that I saw coach Hurley run and kind of implement it last year,” Bailey said “We were very successful in one of our conference tournament games with his pick-and-roll logo action at the block with one of his players. I’ve been able to implement some of it. He’s been an inspiration to Connecticut, I’ve watched it, tried to implement it. I actually do have two or three of his plays I run now as well.”
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Hurley’s Huskies are making teachable moments, not only in the X’s and O’s of the game, but in the process of learning how to learn complicated concepts, a valuable skill in any walk of life, as is teamwork.
“It’s so difficult to get the modern athlete to focus on learning the game and building IQ and getting everybody involved,” Reilly said. “What’s trending now is, ‘We’re just going to let the guys go … it’s too time-consuming, they’re not grasping it, it’s too taxing.’ The world we live in, in the classroom, everything is iPad, they can’t focus on a video for longer than it is on Instagram, because that’s how they’ve kind of been trained.
“The challenges are real in that respect and UConn is not compromising. In the world of the transfer portal, players are going to leave, you’ve got to let your stars be stars, but they’re not compromising and the results are obvious.”
Team first
The focus on team-oriented basketball, everyone involved on offense, has the Huskies chasing college basketball history. They have won seven in a row, are ranked 11th in the country, as they pursue a “three-peat,” which has not been done in 50 years.
“What I love about him and what he does is all of his guys know exactly what they need to do,” Bailey said. “And what’s great about him is, he has an offense, all five guys are incorporated. Like Gregg Popovich and the Spurs, we have this read, and if this read doesn’t go, we have this read, and then this guy’s got his read and this guy had this read.
“So what he does is implement five-man offensive basketball and that’s hard to beat sometimes. You should be involved in the set and be able to make he reads and understand them.”
Obviously, what UConn does cannot be replicated to a great degree at the high school level, especially at smaller public schools with thinner rosters in size and numbers. In many cases, high school basketball players participate in other sports, so there isn’t the on-court experience or practice time in preseason to implement complex offensive sets. But there are bits and pieces coaches are watching, with some fascination.
“There are always little things,” said Brady Sheffield, coach at Division V champ Old Lyme. “End of game, after a time out, quick set that you see them run, you’re like ‘That’s pretty easy, we can steal that,’ and I’ll rewind and get a note pad, write it down, give it to our assistant coaches, ‘What do you guys think about this?’ You can’t take what Dan Hurley is doing at UConn and try teach it to high school kids who are doing this for fun, but there are certain things, some certain movements, some certain actions, you’re like, ‘I’ve never thought about this.’
“Screening angles, for instance, watching how these guys are screening, how they’re generating drives downhill or if they want to generate a 3-point shot, how they adjust their screening angle. That’s something we’ve talked a lot about this year.”
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Said Reilly: “When you casually watch a game you may not notice the intricacies of what they’re actually doing. They’re way more scripted than people would think. With the internet, if you dive into that stuff and then watch a game, you see they’re getting exactly what they’re looking for.”
The college game, due to name-image-likeness revenue, and soon-to-come revenue sharing and the transfer portal, is trending toward players staying in school longer and more experienced players on the court. For high school players who will be trying to break into that world, building basketball IQ and college-level intensity will become more important.
“The biggest thing we try to teach that they do at UConn is they sprint on offense,” said John Pinone, former Villanova star and three-time time state champion at Cromwell. “They play just as hard on offense as they do on defense. The mindset in high school, ‘I can relax on offense.’ You won’t get away with that on the next level. We’ll say, ‘Did you watch (Jordan) Hawkins play? … Did you watch (Cam Spencer)? How hard he plays? … You see how fast they come on offense, see how fast he curls on that screen? … That’s what you’re going to have to do at the next level.'”
Layered plays
In teaching his offense throughout the spring and summer, Hurley says he makes a conscious effort to challenge the notion that today’s young players have short attention spans. He requires them to watch longer clips of video to grasp the many variables of UConn’s offensive plays, quizzes them on it.
“It’s the layers of their plays,” Shea said. “They run the same plays that everybody in the country runs, but they layer it. You’re doing a UCLA cut, at the same time, a zoom action, and at the same time a Spain action, all in the same play. So the unique part about UConn is the way they layer it.
“With high school kids, you’ve got to be a little careful with that because it’s a lot more challenging to get to the second or third part with high school guys, but our guys do a pretty good job. If you watch us run this stuff in a month, we will get to the second, third and fourth option and beyond that.”
Though UConn plays fast, they have been known for staging long possessions, partly due to offensive rebounding, partly due to ball movement..
“They stack a lot of actions on top of each other,” Reilly said. “What I’m calling it with my team is ‘connective tissue,’ the connective tissue between the actions. At our level, it’s hard to have that connectivity. It’s something to have the kids watch and say, ‘Look, they’re going from one action to another with no break.’ if you can evolve and aspire to some of the stuff they’re doing it’s certainly going to make you better. The way they keep evolving and keep growing, that in itself is something you can emulate as a high school coach.”
Said Bailey: “My biggest takeaway with high school basketball is the whole five out, or four out, one in dribble-drive (is becoming less common). I believe kids need to be able to learn the game, be able to make reads in an offense within a set. You see it more and more in the NCAA, more coaches are running sets, especially now that the talent is wide spread. When you had the Kentuckys under coach (John) Calipari and they had all five-star recruits, you could run dribble-drive and they’d be phenomenal.”
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Said Pinone: “This is a premium on passing: Make the entry pass, set some screens, curl, get some movement so the defense can’t just collapse. It’s absolutely a premium on that. We try to get a lot of screens, pick and rolls, double screens, to get people moving. That’s the attention thing. You can’t do this every time. You’ve got to say, ‘He’s playing me on the other side, I’ve got to do this now.’ That’s the challenge now, the kid will say, ‘But that’s not the play.’ And I’ll say, ‘I know that’s not the play, but if they play on the outside, you’ve got to go inside.’
“We run a lot of sets at Cromwell, but the sets always have some type of continuation.”
A different lens
Before Hurley, who arrived at UConn in 2018, and his staff could fine tune their offense to what it has become, a culture of unselfishness, work ethic, dedication and attention to detail had to be established over his first three or four seasons. Reilly, who was coaching Hurley’s son, Andrew, at East Catholic during those seasons, saw it closer than most.
“(High school players) are all about the dunks, all about the sizzle,” Reilly said. “As a coach, if you can raise their awareness of what they’re watching … you don’t know what you’re seeing until you see it, and then that’s all you see. As a high school coach we’re trying to build those IQs and sell them on, ‘Watch the UConn game’ and it’s my hope that if a kid plays for me, they watch basketball completely differently than they did before they played for me. I’m trying to help them view the game through a different lens. It doesn’t happen innately.
“To share the ball in the modern game when the kids are playing AAU for nine months in the world of YouTube and my mix tape, it’s about you and your exposure, we’re fighting against that as high school coaches every second of every practice of every game. So it’s great to use them as an example and say, ‘Hey, listen, if you want real success and real basketball, look at what they’re doing in Storrs.'”