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Today we hope to bring you a slightly shorter, but just as amazing, description of a wheelchair rugby play you’ve probably never run, and may never run, but you’re reading anyways aren’t you? That’s the bonus for both of us. Or something.
Anyways, a while back I was at a tournament, watching a team try to run a Y zone defense. They weren’t running it traditionally, so I’m not going to go into the details of fundamentals of a Y defense, pretty much just to maintain enough content for another article. To reiterate, this article will not describe a traditional Y defense, it just uses an initial Y defense setup.
No, they were running a Y defense as purely a zone-man-match set up for a double-single-single. Let’s break that down to understand what the hell that means.
The Y defense is set up like the T, with the exception that the 4 man is slightly deeper on the court than the two wing players. This puts the 4 man into what is known as the gate position, which may make more sense later.
This formation makes the Y shape that the play is named for (in case you weren’t sure).
What this modified version is used for will be to set up for a double-single-single man defense on a dominant high point player on the offense. This means the defense will work to put a double team (two defenders) on the opposing team’s best player, and singles (one defender) on each of the other two players on the opposing team. This defense will work best when playing against a very mobile high pointer, when your defense can’t keep up with chasing the high pointer around.
Here’s what happens, depending on where the offensive threat is, the 4 man collapses on them with the closest defender. This means the 4 man will be on the double team with either the defensive 1, 2, or 3 man.
This defense is ran by the 4 man, they make the call, listen to them.
Let’s start by looking at the different options available, ignoring the other offensive players on the court. Brace yourself for a lot of pictures.
All these options are the same play, everything swings the direction the offensive threat goes. Your team will have to come up with ways to quickly call out who goes where, but this can be an effective way to lock down a mobile player, if ran correctly.
Now realize that all of the movement priority goes towards locking down the threat and minimizing how far the 4 man needs to go to get there. This means that the two defenders that are not on the double may have to cover a bit of distance in order to properly get to their man-on-man defensive position. I cannot emphasize this enough: THIS IS OKAY.
I find a lot of players that aren’t dedicated defenders get annoyed when they have to do more work than someone else. Well, the reason is defenses win championships. And with that, you have a job to do, and right now it’s not on the double team.
Stepping off my soap box for a moment, everyone must move quickly and have good communication to make this happen. Here’s the flow: Transition to Y -> 4 man calls the double team -> everyone moves to their double-single-single set.
This can be a contain or deny defense. If you can isolate the offensive players decently away from the baseline, then deny. If you are too close to the baseline, you couldn’t separate the two remaining offensive players, or you had to throw on a second double-team, then if might be better to contain. There are many possibilities.
So as to not have to show a million different outcomes, one fully set up modified Y defense, where everyone is properly set, and the players are sufficiently defensed, so your team is able to deny, going from an initial Y set up to defensive positions looks like:
So, there you go. Now you have a new play to study, talk about, and test out with your team, once we’re allowed to be around other people again: The Modified Y to Double-Single-Single Set. The name is clearly in work. Got a better one?
To finish the story I started the article with, that team ran this play very poorly. I’m not even sure if this play will work successfully. This is an attempt to rationalize the chaos I saw into a possibly functional outcome. Let us know the results if you try this out at your next practice!
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