Defensive Strategy

Our defensive strategies this year will be quite similar to previous years. This means using man defence a lot of the time and incorporating our usual arrowhead zone outdoors and house zone indoors. We will also continue to use standard clamping and flooding in the normal ways indoors.

However, there will be a change to the way we play match defence, which will include an increased emphasis on switching and surrounding. This is a tactical step up that I believe Bears are capable of. Surrounding will not be taught too early to freshers, as it is more effective in single-gendered games and we don't want to scare freshers off with bad match-ups, but in DTS sessions there will be a strong focus on it from the beginning, with the intention being that we are able to use it effectively in BUCS games by the end of term 1. We will also try out a couple of different zone defences outdoors to add more options to our defensive strategy.

I am hopeful that teaching these tactics will not only improve our man defence, but also many other areas of our game due to the increased pitch awareness that we will develop.