Four Questions with Josh Schertz

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The must-see offense this season

Do yourself a favor before the Arizona-Purdue showdown and fire up that Peacock stream a little early to watch some of Indiana State-Ball State. It might be the prettiest basketball you’ll see all day.

Few teams boast a more pleasing offense than the 9-1 Sycamores. Their motion offense never stops through a series of cuts, passes and screens They play fast, lead D-I in effective FG% (61.7), and have their own version of a point-center in sophomore Robbie Avila.

Much of that is due to the system installed by third-year coach Josh Schertz, who turned Lincoln Memorial into a D-II powerhouse, winning 337 games over 13 seasons, and reached two Final Fours since 2017. He spoke to Mike Miller about his jump to Indiana State, why the offense is clicking, and more in Four Questions.

Q: Watching your offense at work is a pleasure, with the ways you attack and solve defenses through passing and spacing. Is this the result of sets, or a continuous offense that reacts according to what the defense presents?

Josh Schertz: We call it organized randomness. Randomness by itself would just be chaos. So you have to have some principles, some structure and concepts. And then we teach how to play instead of teaching them plays. If a team is switching five, we're not gonna necessarily have 20 plays against, or 20 plays against teams that switch off the ball or whatever. We're gonna try to teach them how to attack defenses conceptually.

But counter-intuitively, it's much harder to teach guys how to play, so the summer for us is really vital because it's not patterns, it's rhythm, right? It's like jazz. Guys read the game. If one guy makes the right read, but the other guy (the passer) doesn't, then it negates the play and vice versa.

Q: It sounds like what my kids learn with common core math. They’re teaching concepts rather than specific ways to solve problems. Does this mean you’re looking for players who might fit a certain profile and aren’t only trying to succeed by doing one thing on the court?

Schertz: You gotta recruit guys that are really skilled, really smart and really unselfish that have good feel. But that’s when the work starts. We play a ton, even in the summer. We take those repetitions and bank so many game reps — we’re playing five-on-five all the way — that generally we tend to get better as the season goes on. Like in Arch Madness last year, we scored, I think, 97 the first game, 94 the second game and the offense was still trending upwards. That's because of how much read-based it is.

Part of our deal in recruiting is feel becomes a huge piece of the evaluation tool. For our offense, 1-4 is really pretty much interchangeable. And our 5 (Robbie Avila) is a complete unicorn. Since 2015 we’ve used our 5s as the hubs of the offense, whether they can do what Robbie does or they're just more of a ball screen guy, we try to use them as the trigger man.

So with that as the backdrop, you’re looking for feel. Does somebody know how to play? Do they understand the game? Can they make the right reads? And that would be up there with shooting and explosiveness as three tangible things that you're really looking for. And generally if we're gonna compromise, we compromise on the explosiveness. And obviously with [Isaiah] Swope and Ryan [Conwell] we really feel like we got all three of those things.

Q: Were you surprised at how quickly they were able to mesh with the other guys given Avila, Julian Larry and Jayson Kent all played together last season?

Josh Schertz: I think they would tell you they struggled significantly throughout the summer and even during our two scrimmages. Part that is because of the amount of freedom we give them and they needed to learn to play without the ball more than they ever have. A lot of freedom can be liberating, but in a lot of ways it’s paralyzing.

What’s helped them is they both love film. They both are obsessed with studying and getting those mental reps. We'll clip out a list of things and not what was great, what was poor and then they’ll ask questions. ‘What am I looking for? Where can I attack?’ And ultimately, at the end of the day, it's my job to try to put them in position to do what they do best all the time.

Q: That’s probably a reflection of how you've approached the game. Given your progression through college coaching, I would think that you had an appreciation for these types of skills and development. Because at a certain level, it’s not about talent or athleticism. And I’m sure you felt like that when your teams thrived at Lincoln. It didn’t really matter what NCAA division you were in.

If nothing else, it prepared you for the gauntlet that’s the Missouri Valley every year.

Josh Schertz: At LMU, I had a great opportunity to figure things out without it being under a microscope. I was in a town of 4,000 people, right? A small private school, 1,000 students tucked away in the mountains. Probably 98% of our kids were high school kids and we kept them for five years. That was our secret sauce. The continuity in our system because so much of it is cerebral. The biggest growth, to me, always happens in-between the ears and trying to make players smart players, right?

So we really poured everything into that. When I got here, I honestly didn't know what to expect. I wasn't concerned about if I coach at this level. I was more curious if I could recruit at this level. Would recruiting be different? Would we be able to get the same kinds of players? And then, could our system work? I heard all this stuff like ‘That’s not gonna work from D-II. They're not gonna wanna play without the ball. They're not gonna play in a system with movement. The Valley is too good defensively. You can't play that up tempo.’

And so I was just curious about all that. When I came here, there was definitely an adjustment, but we’ve been able to get same kind of kids who have the intangibles we look for. And that’s helped us to really start to play the way we wanna play, offensively and defensively, which is a credit to the guys like Robbie, Julian and Jayson Kent, and the pieces we added like Isaiah and Ryan.

The Valley is such an underrated league. Is it to tough, from top to bottom. Night in, night out, most games in the Valley with four minutes to go it's a one-possession game or tied. We weren't good enough in those moments last year to be a champion. How we handle that duress will be the difference in 23 wins vs. 28, 29 wins.